Robert Berdahl Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by Jane Scherr

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The University as a Community

Let's talk about this moral dimension and then go on to some of the problems that you confront. But maybe one way to get at this is to ask you what makes a university distinctive as a community?

I think what makes a university distinctive as a community, and each university has its own flavor of that distinction, but it really ultimately is the pursuit of knowledge that binds us together. The fact that everyone in a university is committed to the learning process, either as researchers and faculty or as students, and that that value of the free and ordered space in which inquiry can follow any direction, I think that's sort of the fundamental core. The notion of free inquiry, but disciplined inquiry, is the core value of a community that we call a university.

In your inaugural address last year, toward the conclusion you quoted Hannah Arendt and then had this phrase, and I'd like you to comment on it because it seems to be an overarching theme in what you were saying, "to inherit and renew the common world." Tell us a little about that, what you meant by that, because the notion of "to inherit" one could say comes from your being a historian and your consciousness of that.

In some sense.

I think I have had, in my administrative life as well as in my life as a historian, a fascination with the nature of community. If you look at the book on the Prussian nobility, one of the themes of that is the transition from paternalist social relations to social relations that are determined by wage labor. The conservatives, and conservatives I think always have a strong belief in community, but the conservatives believed that the introduction of monetary relations in the wage labor system destroyed all of these paternalistic bonds, and I think there's an element of truth in that in what was happening. Those paternalistic bonds were not quite as nurturing as conservatives tended to believe, they were pretty oppressive in many, many ways. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the nature of community is an important theme for my thinking. When Hannah Arendt talks about the common world, it seems to me inheriting and building this common world is what education is about. I don't think there is any collective activity that we engage in as human beings that is more basic, more fundamental, more necessary for the collective interest to prevail, than the education of the next generation to take their place in the world. And that's what she means by "inheriting the common world," and to discover something new in that process. And so that common world, it seems to me, is what binds us together as human beings and the kinds of values that we share.

You also, in the course of your inaugural day, quoted Arthur Miller and spoke about the university being like what he had said about a play. You said, "I would like Berkeley to be a place where our students can learn to create whatever it takes so that they can sense a warmth in the world that was not there before. I would like Berkeley to be a place that will help them to dream of doing more and risking more." The warmth part of that is easier, I guess, at small colleges. Are there particular challenges that occur at a place like Berkeley in making Miller's vision a reality?

I think the challenges are enormous at a place like Berkeley. And to some extent they are greater at a place like Berkeley because of many of the assumptions that we have about the learning process. I think that we have such outstandingly talented students that we sort of believe that all that is necessary in their development is that sort of intellectual challenge that is there. And that is obviously the cornerstone of what a university is about.

But the development of whole and complete human beings involves something a little bit more that just that intellectual stimulation. It involves some kind of moral challenges, I think, and some kind of sense of responsibility to the larger community and not simply to one's self. And that, it seems to me, is one of the things that is harder in large universities because if you look at how the university, like Berkeley, has changed through the years, there's much more of a transactional mode in a contemporary large university. You pay your fees, you take your courses, you get your grades, that's the transaction. And ultimately the transaction results in the accumulation of enough credits to get a diploma. Fifty or eighty years ago it was much less of a transactional relationship. And I think that what we need to do is to minimize some of the characteristics of that institution and hone some of our more collective instincts and communitarian senses.

You spoke of "the arts of uncertainty, the sciences of the spirit," the Geisteswissenschaften, to use the German word. How do you bring some of that back? How do you impact undergraduate education so that would be a reality more and not just an ideal?

Well, obviously the Geisteswissenschaften refer to the humanities, as we call them, and I think that we need to make certain that our students are not just are exposed to those but that somehow the questions that they raise about what it is to be human, what it is to suffer, what it is to die, what it is to love, those are the questions that are, in some sense, implicit in the human sciences as it were. Students leaving the university with simply a set of technical skills are not going to be educated as whole human beings. And so we've got to make certain through our curriculum, through the way in which questions are posed even in the non-humanistic disciplines, that those issues are addressed.

I had a class this week where we talked (it's a history of the university class), and we spent really the entire time, because of contemporary issues on the campus, dealing with [the question of] what is moral responsibility. And is it the place of a university to try to educate students with morality, with sort of acquiring a sense of moral obligation to others? And how do you do that, do you do that with classes? Do you do that with sort of implicit assumptions? Do you do it with an honor code? Can you have an honor code in a university this large? Those are kinds of questions that, it seems to me, ought to factor into that educational process.

So in a way it's a combination of all these things, both in the curriculum, in books, in activities on the campus, but also in outreach.

Most of our moral education comes from our parents, and it probably is shaped in the first few years of our lives. But most all of us are also deeply affected by those faculty members that pose those issues. I've just been reading this book, Tuesdays With Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and the Last Great Lesson, which is conversations between a former student [author Mitch Albom] and his former professor at Brandeis on the professor's last months of life. And it's clear that what this student took away, not just from those classes that he took but what he took away from these Tuesday conversations with a dying man, was much more than the technical skills of the discipline.

Next page: Challenges Confronting the University

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