UC’s New Chancellors a Study in High Ideals, Personable Style

Bob Berdahl’s office is in an ivory tower. Not just any ivory tower, either, but the landmark 307-foot University of Texas tower. The one that served as a perch for the crazed gunman who killed 16 people and injured 31 others during a random shooting spree in 1966.

If that’s a daunting image--the sort of architectural barrier that could symbolize an administrator’s distant relationship with his school--don’t tell Berdahl. As he prepares to assume the top post at UC Berkeley, the president of the Austin school was applauded here Thursday as a man who broke down walls and united a vast campus, generating a sense of community that many colleagues consider the greatest legacy of his four-year tenure.

“In the past, that position had been kind of an ‘imperial presidency,’ an elevated office, distant from the students,” said Bill Bard, 52, a computer and telecommunications technician who has worked on campus for nearly three decades. “This guy has none of that. He’s human. He really knows what a university’s supposed to be like.”

It is a testimony to Berdahl’s disarming spirit that a man so non-Texan would eventually become one of the University of Texas’ most revered presidents.

Just as he will be an outsider at Berkeley, the 59-year-old South Dakota native was the first president here to be recruited from outside the University of Texas system in nearly two decades. He was also the first one during that time to hail from a liberal arts background--his specialty, 19th-century Prussian history, not exactly being in the mold of his business- and science-minded predecessors.

In a state that treats football as religion, he is not known as a rabid fan, preferring to slip quietly into a women’s volleyball or basketball game with Peg, his wife of 28 years. Once, while on his way to Hawaii with a group of alumni and donors to see a Longhorn football game, Berdahl found himself stranded at a small California airport. Instead of eyeing an opportunity for glad-handing and back-slapping the alumni, he spent the time playing cribbage with his wife.

“There are some people who are college presidents and who are always on display,” said Reuben McDaniel, a University of Texas business professor who accompanied Berdahl on that trip--suggesting that Berdahl isn’t one of them.

“When you first meet him, he doesn’t make a charismatic impression that some people do,” said McDaniel, but “he is thoughtful and when he is finished speaking you realize he said something that you probably didn’t really expect and that you now have to stop and think about.”

In an emotional press conference Thursday, Berdahl choked up as he described his time at Austin as “the greatest privilege and highest honor of my life.” But he added that Berkeley “is such a marvelous institution that one could not help but be interested in the possibility.”

A gentle, soft-spoken man with a receding hairline and a dimpled chin, he spoke mostly in lofty terms, in keeping with his onetime desire--when he himself was in college--to become a Methodist minister. He said his proudest accomplishment at the Austin campus was having “enlarged the confidence we have in ourselves and each other.” And he leaves for Berkeley, he said, having learned of “the awesome capacity of people to do the right thing.”

To the extent that any chinks were apparent in Berdahl’s armor, it was precisely those attributes--that his subtle, reflective, consensus-building approach might get steamrollered by Berkeley’s boisterous, passionate, often racially charged politics.

On the Berkeley campus Thursday, some students seemed surprised and a little dismayed by his appointment to the $222,700-a-year post. Many had hoped the job would go to one of two women in-house contenders: Berkeley economics professor Laura D’Andrea Tyson, who chaired President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors, or Carol Christ, a vice chancellor and provost.

When Andrea Clark, 20, a junior, first heard about Berdahl, she said she thought, “Gosh, he doesn’t know Berkeley. Berkeley is a very, very unique place.”

Ji Sung Kim, 22, a senior who wore five rings in her nose and an eyebrow, wondered whether Berdahl would be comfortable with the campus’ eclectic flavor. “Berkeley is crazy,” she said. “People look different here--different hair colors, different styles--and nobody blinks. The abnormal has become the normal in Berkeley.”

Berdahl almost certainly would have been out of place there in earlier days, when his heroes were reported to be Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton. But he later became a strong admirer of former Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern. And his wife, who recently underwent a publicized battle with breast cancer, now works for the Urban League.

Still, his shy, thoughtful demeanor has caused some to question whether he’s tough enough to take on the fierce political interplay at Berkeley.

“If he does have a flaw, it might be that he listens too much,” said Michael Crissey, a reporter at The Daily Texan, the student newspaper. With a nod to the back-room, cutthroat politics at Texas’ domed capital a short stroll from the oak-lined campus, Crissey said: “I don’t know if Berdahl’s that Machiavellian.”

But in many ways, the challenges of running the massive Austin campus--one of the nation’s largest with 48,000 students--are not unlike the ones he will face when he arrives at Berkeley about July 1.

Government support has dropped off precipitously, forcing Berdahl to launch an ambitious fund-raising campaign. When a federal appellate court last year struck down the university’s affirmative action program, some students criticized Berdahl for not defending it strongly enough, while others complained that he was too sympathetic to minority concerns. Recently, he found himself having to stand by a Board of Regents’ decision to name a science building after a wealthy donor whose international mining practices had raised environmental concerns.

Yet even with such contentious issues, Berdahl has been anything but a lightning rod for dissent.

“Under President Berdahl, we’ve had kind of a moratorium on conflict,” said Jeff Tsi, 21, the student body president. He recalled his own proposal to launch an Asian American studies program two years ago, a notion initially greeted with skepticism by Berdahl. But after forming a committee of students and faculty to study the matter, Tsi said, Berdahl heartily endorsed his plan.

“I joked with him that I was so happy that we didn’t have to protest and take over his office,” Tsi said. “With President Berdahl, it would never have even gotten to that point.”

In a telephone news conference with California reporters on Thursday, Berdahl said financial troubles in the UC system “did not give me any pause at all,” adding that he believes the university has already emerged from those difficulties and is “still very well-positioned in terms of its resources.”

He also said he is not worried about the affirmative action controversy at UC, explaining that he has been trying to develop an admissions policy that gives applicants credit for drive and determination in overcoming “adversity.” That could give an edge to low-income students and minorities without specifically making race a factor.

That way, Berdahl said, “We can achieve the goal of diversity without relying necessarily on some of the practices we have relied on for the past couple of decades.”

The reserved Berdahl said he will not try to imitate the outgoing and popular Chang-Lin Tien, the current Berkeley chancellor, who has established a high profile on the campus.

“I think the best thing I can do as chancellor and as a leader is to be myself and to stand for the things that I believe are important,” Berdahl said.

But he said he will continue efforts to bring in more private money to the campus, one of Tien’s major accomplishments at Berkeley, and to make the university part of the “agents of change” that “help transform the lives of people in California.”

At the University of Texas’ flagship campus, Berdahl has been credited with increasing private donations by 33%. But his most noted contributions have been described as intangible--his shaping and nurturing of the cultural climate. Shortly after taking office, he volunteered to help new students move, and continued that practice every fall, rolling up his sleeves and hauling suitcases into the dorms. He started serving free cookies and coffee during finals week, dispensed after midnight by faculty members to harried students in the library.

For the first time at the campus, he initiated a master plan, structuring new development so that it helped foster a communal flavor, with more pedestrian walkways and gathering spots. He scrapped the boring and often pretentious pomp of the commencement ceremony in favor of a livelier, all-day, family event complete with fireworks. He even proposed that top administrators, including himself, return to the classroom and teach at least one course.

“What you see is what you get with Bob Berdahl,” said Susan Kessler, associate director of the alumni association Texas Exes. “He is a man of great intellect and great heart. This campus is a different place because of him.”

But for now, Berdahl said, the most important item on his agenda is the Saturday wedding of his daughter, Barbara. Explaining that he would not be doing any more interviews until after the marriage, he said, “It’s her weekend, not mine.”

Katz reported from Austin and Dolan reported from Berkeley.

ROBERT BERDAHL

“I believe that universities are the major agents of change in society. We’re in the business of transforming people’s lives, both through the students we teach and the research that we do.”

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Key goals and plans

* To trust his instincts as a leader, “be, myself,” and not try to imitate Chang-Lin Tien, the popular chancellor he is replacing.

* To support outreach programs to attract minority students in the post-affirmative action era.

* To modify admissions criteria to reward drive in overcoming adversity.

* To support fund-raising in the private sector as he did at the University of Texas.

* To first worry about his daughter’s wedding.