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

Photo by Jane Scherr

Page 6 of 6

Conclusion

One final question. What is your message to students, who are experiencing the great transformations in society and the university, about preparing for the future?

Well, I can tell you the advice that I gave to my kids, and it wasn't necessarily the advice that I got.

My education was shaped, to a large extent, by economic necessity. And I suppose, in some sense, many people's education is affected by that. I think I got a reasonably good education. I think people need to expect to try to get the best education that they can, the most challenging, the most demanding education that they possibly can. I think that people need to recognize that the best education is that which really teaches them how to learn.
There aren't any answers that are permanent in most of what we learn in our educational process, and learning how to learn is what it's really all about, because people are going to have multiple careers and they're going to be doing quite different things.

I think most of our students who come here and say they're going to be an engineer, or they're going to be a doctor or a lawyer or have some particular profession will discover that they'll probably change that goal before they graduate, or even if they don't, that what they will begin their careers doing will be quite different from what they're going to be doing 20 years into that career, and that they need, therefore, to think in terms of how that education will prepare them for the long term as well as for the initial job. And that is a hard thing to teach 18-year-olds, because they're always thinking about four years out. But I think a well-constructed education in a high-quality university will do that.

Chancellor Berdahl, thank you very much for taking the time to be here with us.

My pleasure.

And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with History.

© Copyright 1998, Regents of the University of California

To the Conversations page

See also: Chancellor Berdahl's home page.