| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Robert Berdahl Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Page 5 of 6
A lot of the issues the university confronts these days are related to some of these questions that we've talked about. One which you talked about during the seminar, back to that day of your inauguration, was the impact of globalization on a public university. You pointed out that though there are a lot of positive sides to globalization, that it also contributed to a breakdown of some of the communities that were the basis of support for the university. What do we do about that, the extent to which many of the communities that supply students to the universities are being hurt by the consequences of globalization, the loss of jobs?
Well, I don't know that I have an answer to that. We're in a remarkable transition, I think, in terms of the whole set of institutions that we have taken for granted that developed in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Clearly the nation state, as an entity that came into being in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, and probably reached its apex in the twentieth century, is becoming less and less relevant. It still is very relevant, but much less so than it was. And capital has no longer any national boundaries. We are going through a kind of cyclical shift, and it's very clear that what happens in Russia or in Asia affects the stock market in the United States, affects the prevalence of jobs and interest rates. And the whole globalization of the economy that makes nation states less vital has an impact, as well, upon universities. Our students have to learn to operate in that global world. How we deal with this transition is still, to me, an open question, but it's a very important and interesting historical moment to be living through. I don't know how long it will last, and I don't know what will come out on the other side of this transition, but I really do think that we're witnessing a major change in the authoritative structures of society that is probably as large a change as we've seen since the eighteenth century.
One additional dimension of this which seems to affect universities is that during the period of the Cold War, the state, in many ways, related to the university through national security concerns, and we've lost that value in a sense, since we're no longer worried about the Soviet Union. And now it's markets that affect things for the university. It's a new environment that you're dealing with as the head of a university. You've said that you want to protect the core values of the university, but on the other hand, you do have to acquire the resources to make the university work and succeed, and plan for its future.
I think that the framework of privatization, which has been over the last twenty years in the United States a very powerful thread, has also obviously affected universities. To some extent it has affected Berkeley in very interesting ways. Berkeley has, it seems to me, the most complete and careful system of evaluation on the basis of merit of any university with which I'm familiar. We place a very high premium on academic excellence. We review faculty regularly for any kind of merit adjustment. And the ethos of merit, which is implicit in all universities, is more refined and articulated in Berkeley than any place that I've been.
Then you have, sort of cutting into that, the implications of the market, and the fact that professors can command salaries, not just at other universities, but at biotech companies, or they can develop companies themselves, as many of our faculty here have, in this burgeoning knowledge-based economy. So there is a higher premium upon the kind of talents that our faculty have in the marketplace than there ever has been before.
And the intrusion of that market drive or market pressure -- just as I say that the market began to dissolve a lot of the tendons of community in the early nineteenth century, it certainly is in the university today. So how we redefine or define or maintain the core values of the university in this increasingly market-oriented framework is a big challenge, and it's a bigger challenge for Berkeley than it is to a lot of places that have simply let the market define merit. We have insisted that the market was not synonymous with merit here at Berkeley. And I think that that's a great value for us to cling to. But we somehow have to reconcile that as well with market forces. And it's going to be a very challenging issue for us in the years ahead.
And to the extent that your job involves setting priorities, I mean, push comes to shove on your desk ...
That's right. You can't ignore the market. But it isn't the be-all and end-all, and it does not, in and of itself, define merit.
The other situational issue that you confront is that these forces out there, globalization, privatization, and so on, create great pockets of inequality. And part of the university's mission traditionally has been to educate the future generations and address that inequality. How can we maintain a steady course in continuing to move in that direction while still abiding by whatever the political decisions are at a particular time? I'm not asking you for a policy statement; I want a sense of how you navigate this. In other words, how do you weigh all of these factors and continue moving toward that goal of helping achieve equality in the greater society.
I think universities have been historically the great engines of social mobility in a democratic society when you had large public institutions like this. The closest thing I think the United States has ever had to a real social revolution was the GI Bill, which opened up educational opportunities to millions of GIs who would never have gone to universities without it. And when I talk to alumni from the '50s or late '40s from Berkeley, the sense that their experience at this university transformed their lives and transformed their opportunities is a very, very real thing for them. And that, it seems to me, is one of the values that this university also has to try to maintain.
It is more difficult because the quality of schooling that people in their elementary and secondary schooling have available to them is much more differentiated, I think, than it used to be. There was, in public schools a half century ago, much more equality of quality. And now, for a variety of reasons, that differentiation has grown. We have some excellent public schools, we have some abysmal public schools. We have an increasing number of students of means moving from public schools into private school settings, that avail them a better chance in a meritocracy of being able to gain access to the resources of great universities. And that's a big problem for us and I think that we have to be involved in trying to reestablish an equilibrium in the public schools or we will become an increasingly elite institution that is serving only the students who come from backgrounds of real means and opportunity.
I think at this point, Berkeley still remains a tremendously transformational
opportunity for a lot of students. Twenty-five percent of our student body come
from families with incomes of less than $35,000 a year. And that's largely
because California has a very large immigrant population, heavily from Asia,
and students who have a very strong educational ethic and work ethic, even
though they not come from families of affluence, are able to gain access to
Berkeley.
For them it will be like it was for that postwar GI generation. I
think it will be a tremendously wonderful opportunity.
But we have to make
certain that the growing population in California, in particular, and
throughout the United States, have better access to quality elementary and
secondary education that will provide them with the means of getting into these
very selective universities.
So the two things that we, as a university, can do is take to the bully pulpit (or you can), on the one hand, and the other is some outreach. But there are really broader societal questions here.
Very broad societal questions. It is entirely possible, and some economists, including Robert Reich, have almost predicted this or at least held it out as something to be wary of, that the United States could very well evolve into a society with a differentiation of wealth that is very much like that of a Third World country: a large mass of un- or undereducated, unemployable, marginally productive population, with an elite class, really a small, very affluent class, that has access to the means of the society through education. And that differentiation of wealth would be, I think, ultimately destructive of the democratic process that has made this country great.
I sounds like you're describing a social institution that has a number of challenges to confront. What do you think that these major research universities will look like in 25 or 50 years?
That's a very hard question to answer. I think in some respects they will look very much like they do now. I hope they still are centers of research.
One of the phenomena that worries me in our society is the fact that, if you look at the biological sciences, there are now large private foundations attached to biotechnology companies that are able to establish research centers. They have enormous wealth to put into these, and they are able to attract some of the best minds and to develop a research center outside of the context of the university. I worry that one of the great geniuses of American research has been that it has been linked closely to graduate education. If scientific research begins to gravitate into laboratories that are separate from and separated from the training of graduate students, I don't know where that fresh blood will come from. So it's very vital, it seems to me, that we make certain that people understand the very close link between graduate education and research in a university like Berkeley, and that we foster that understanding. If we are successful in that, then I think Berkeley will remain as it is, a tremendously strong research center, graduate and undergraduate education center.
In addition, from universities like Berkeley, because our faculty is so distinguished, there will be networks of delivery systems, of courses, of material, of lectures, through all of the electronic communication facilities that are at our disposal and becoming more and more sophisticated each day.
There will be a delivery of the education and transmission of the ideas from universities worldwide. So I think there will be some universities that will be hubs for this with a cadre of researchers and students located in a place, because that's still important, and then extensions of that like spokes of a wheel going out to various centers around the world. So I think there will be much more interrelationship between this university and learning centers elsewhere. And at the same time there will be a location. I don't think we're going to go to a virtual university worldwide.
I was just going to ask you that. So we'll always need and have a classroom and a seminar?
When we look at constructing a new building on this campus, the issues that always come to the fore are, how are the faculty in this building going to relate to one another? How are the graduate students going to relate to students in adjacent disciplines? And that demonstrates, it seems to me, the importance of physical proximity in the process of cross-fertilization of ideas. I don't think we'll ever get rid of that need. The chance encounter. The chance conversation that you have at the coffee pot. The kind of offhand question that someone asks you about your work, that doesn't happen on the net because that's a much more calculated and planned conversation than anything that you do over a coffee pot.
When you're on the bully pulpit, I guess the other two things you have to talk about are the two "Bs," buildings and books, because that's important for your agenda.
It's vital. And if I had to identify Berkeley's greatest vulnerability
it is the two "Bs," as it were. It is the fact that we have an aging campus
with a lot of deferred maintenance, a campus that is seismically challenged, as
it were, located astride the Hayward fault, a lot of buildings that are less
functional than they need to be for modern research. More than any other
front-ranked university, I think we've got a big, big challenge in this regard.
I came from the University of Texas. We had and estimated $25 million deferred
maintenance problem there. I assumed that that would be consistent with what
Berkeley faced and I discover that it's probably on the order to ten times that
here.
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