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By Russell Schoch Before Robert Birgeneau took over as president of the University of Toronto in 2000, his squash partner at MIT handed him a New York Times op-ed piece entitled “Why are university presidents so boring?” and said he hoped Birgeneau would not fit that bill. “I have not been a boring president,” Birgeneau says today with a friendly smile, “and I don’t plan to be so at Berkeley.” The outspoken 62-year-old experimental physicist, who has long been involved in fighting discrimination based on economic standing, race, gender, or sexual orientation, has the opportunity to back up those words after taking over as Berkeley’s ninth chancellor in late September. He succeeds Robert Berdahl, who served in the post for seven years. In his first message to the Cal community, Birgeneau said: “At times I will use my position as chancellor of Berkeley to advocate publicly for societal change or defend against attacks on our principles. At other times I will work quietly among our various communities of influence to assure that Berkeley’s leadership is heard and felt.” One of the new chancellor’s virtues is that “he doesn’t sound anything like a politician,” says longtime friend Steven Chu, Ph.D. ’76, director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “He’s very relaxed, very congenial, very straightforward. You know where he stands.” Adds former MIT colleague Rosalind Williams: “He has core convictions about decency, justice, and inclusiveness. There are no compromises here. Bob is eminently likable, a wonderful friend and mentor, and also, in his innermost layer, very tough.” Birgeneau is a French-Canadian name (pronounced burge-uh-no), and the new chancellor, who was born in Toronto, traces his lineage on his father’s side back two centuries in Canada. His French great-grandfather married a native Canadian woman, and his mother’s forebears were Irish Catholic immigrants. The family’s ethnic mixture was typical in the neighborhoods he grew up in, Birgeneau says. The new chancellor was not born with high educational achievement predicted for his future. The third of four children, he became the first in his family to graduate from high school. Already able to do math problems in his head at age 5, he was lifted onto the counter of a neighborhood drugstore and asked by the pharmacist to add up the prices of various products in competition with adult customers. “I virtually always won,” he recalls, “though I don’t think that the adult customers appreciated it very much.” His mother touted his mathematical skills to get him into a parochial school a year early--she needed to work and couldn’t afford day care--and he quickly skipped a grade to move two years ahead of his age group by the fourth grade. When it came time for high school, he was serving as an altar boy at a local church, and the parish priest told his mother: “I’d like your son to go to St. Michael’s College School. The church will pay his tuition.” This was a break that helped the young Birgeneau out of the track typical in his neighborhood, and it’s a lesson he draws upon today. “There were only a few of us from my neighborhood who finished high school,” he says. “One got his Ph.D. from Harvard, one from Yale, and another is now a distinguished surgeon. This success sounds great, but the message is actually a very negative one. If you have to achieve at such a high level in order to get out of the neighborhood, what about all the rest of the people who get left behind? I have, from a relatively early age, felt that there’s a huge reservoir of talent that is unfairly denied the opportunity that others have.” The summer after 11th grade, Birgeneau was only 15 years old and 5-feet 4-inches tall. Despite being on a full scholarship, he needed to work, and spent the summer months unloading trucks at a factory. The combination of working his body and a growth spurt of six inches in three months changed his physical appearance dramatically. “When I got back to school,” he says, “no one recognized me.” He eventually reached the height of 6-feet 3-inches. The excellent academic program at St. Michael’s enabled the bright (and now tall) Birgeneau to excel in the classics as well as in math and physics. He wound up ranked second in the province in Greek and Latin and earned a classics scholarship to the University of Toronto, Canada’s best public institution of higher learning. At the university, Birgeneau won entry into a rigorous honors program in math, chemistry, and physics, settling on math as a major. For graduate school, Birgeneau was accepted by Berkeley’s high-powered physics department. But Yale offered a more substantial fellowship, so off he went to New Haven. When he arrived in 1963, he was struck by the juxtaposition of the Yale campus, where the elite gathered for an excellent education, and, a few blocks away, the Projects, filled with poorly educated, low-income blacks. Birgeneau remembers only one black family in his Toronto neighborhood, and only one black and one Asian student in his undergraduate class. “I grew up in a neighborhood where few finished high school. But there it was for financial reasons. Here in the United States, it was for racial reasons as well.” Birgeneau decided to mentor at the Dixwell Community Center in the nearby Projects. “The neighborhood I grew up in gave me two skills--basketball and shooting pool--which were very much admired at this center,” he says. He remembers playing one-on-one basketball games, barely holding his own, with 14-year-old John Williamson, who later played professionally in the NBA. In the summer of 1965, Birgeneau joined six fellow students in the Southern Teachers Program at Benedict College in South Carolina to teach and do civil rights work. The group included two veterans of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley who, Birgeneau volunteers, “were much more politically sophisticated than I was. I got a lot of my political education from those FSM people.” Birgeneau saw those efforts as “necessary” ones. “I think I have a very deep-rooted sense of fairness, and what I saw in the black communities, both North and South, was something that was just unfair. It wasn’t right; things had to change.” Birgeneau earned his Ph.D. in physics in three years and joined the Yale faculty at age 24, teaching a course in computer science. After a year as a post-doc at Oxford, Birgeneau moved into basic research at Bell Labs in suburban New Jersey, where he stayed for seven and a half years, and where he worked with fellow Canadian physicist Robert Dynes, now president of the University of California. In 1975, Birgeneau became a professor of physics at MIT, where he was the first in the United States to have a research program in his field of condensed-matter physics involving large national facilities. He became head of the physics department in 1988 and dean of science in 1991. Looking back on his quarter century at MIT, Birgeneau says: “I’ll perhaps be remembered now as president of the University of Toronto and as chancellor at Berkeley. But probably the thing I’ve done best is to train people who have gone on to very distinguished careers in academia. I’ve always had a passion both for education and research--I think they’re symbiotic and always belong together--and I think students have absorbed that from me.” According to Leslie Perelman ’70, director of the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT, “For many of us here, the one incident that best illustrates Bob’s exceptional leadership was his skillful advocacy to improve the status and working conditions of women faculty in the School of Science at MIT.” Responding to a proposal by tenured women to study possible gender discrimination--there were 252 tenured men and only 22 tenured women at the School of Science in 1994--“Bob looked at the numbers, undertook a quick study of his own, and came to the realization that a problem existed. From that point on,” Perelman says, “he became a strong champion of the women’s cause.” By 1999, the number of women with tenure had increased by more than 50 percent. Birgeneau's research uses experimental tools to explore the quantum properties of materials, especially novel materials: “things like liquid crystals, superconductors--metals that have no electrical resistance at low temperatures--and some kinds of interesting magnetic materials,” he explains. “The aim is to understand them at the atomic level and then build up to the macroscopic level.” Condensed-matter physicists like Birgeneau scatter particles and light off solids and liquids to figure out what happens to these unusual materials at various lengths--ranging from the microscopic to the macroscopic--and they study the transition from individual atoms into chains of atoms and more complex groupings. “When these groupings of atoms are built up, their properties change, and that’s what he studies,” says Berkeley physicist and Birgeneau collaborator Frances Hellman. “He is an excellent, prize-winning experimentalist who has helped explain the dramatic changes in materials, depending on their structure and dimensionality,” adds Marvin Cohen, another Berkeley physicist. Birgeneau plans to continue his scientific research at Berkeley, as he did at Toronto. People working in Birgeneau’s field have won their share of Nobel Prizes, and it has been suggested that if Birgeneau had stayed in the lab, and out of the administrator’s office, he might well be in line for such an award. He himself shrugs this off. “A lot of my personal friends have won the Nobel Prize,” he says. “But the vast majority of them did the work early in their careers, even if the Nobel Prize came 20 or 30 years later. So if I or any of my collaborators were ever to get such a prize, it would be for work we’ve already done.” Lawrence Berkeley Lab director Steven Chu, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997, says that Birgeneau is “a brilliant scientist who stays at the cutting edge of the most exciting questions in his field. He’s recently been elected a foreign [Canadian] member of the National Academy of Sciences, which is quite a feat.” But something else about Birgeneau the scientist impresses Chu. “The first experiment I did at Bell Labs was based on a lot of previous work, including Birgeneau’s,” Chu explains. “It turned out that, as we got deeper and deeper into the problem, we saw that some of those earlier conclusions were ill-founded.” Chu told Birgeneau: “‘Look, Bob, I think what you said [in an earlier paper] was wrong.’ He looked at the data, then looked at me, and said: ‘Yup. We were wrong.’ “All scientists make such mistakes, but few will so readily admit it,” says Chu. “I became his friend because of this.” In his work as an experimental physicist, Birgeneau learned to run a wide-ranging enterprise using large facilities and building complex instrumentations. “Frankly, I have limited talent at that--I have limited engineering talent,” Birgeneau says. “But, as an administrator, I think one of my strengths has been my ability to recognize talent in other people and to convince them to take on administrative responsibilities. When I was dean of science at MIT, of the nine people reporting to me, three had Nobel Prizes.” He strongly believes that university administrators should come from the academy. “It is very deep in my philosophy that universities are academic institutions and should be led by academics,” he says. He is also a firm believer in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, and says that universities are the only institutions where this can happen. “It’s not that there’s anything wrong with applied work, which is important and should be done at universities. But it can also be done in industry or in government. It’s our special mission to preserve knowledge and to advance it for its own sake, whether it’s in philosophy or physics, mathematics or the social sciences. We have a fundamental responsibility to humankind.” After 25 years at MIT, Birgeneau returned as president to the University of Toronto. The city of Toronto in 2000 had changed dramatically from the homogeneous place of his youth. He saw his job as one of presiding over a university that would serve as “a conduit into mainstream society of the astounding recent immigration to Canada, people mostly from the Third World.” Many of those immigrant children were candidates for admission to the two suburban campuses of the university. He changed the structure and doubled the size of those campuses, and insisted that they become centers for research as well as teaching. A major thrust of his leadership has been in the area of diversity and equity. “Equity and excellence are concordant, not discordant,” as he puts it. “My views were known in advance of my coming to Toronto, and there were newspaper articles which said that I was going to destroy the university by forcing faculty to hire unqualified women and minorities.” Today, no one thinks that has happened, Birgeneau says. “We led by example,” he explains. “The University of Toronto had never before had a person of color in a leadership position.” As he leaves, there are chancellors, campus heads, and other senior administrators from China, Singapore, and India, and many women in senior positions. “The senior leadership,” he says, “now looks like the student body,” which at Toronto is one of the most diverse in the world. A major goal at Toronto was to move the university into the top academic rank. “That was probably the reason I was hired at Toronto,” he says, “because of my experience at a top-flight school like MIT, and because I understand completely what it takes to be a Berkeley or an MIT.” Why, then, has he decided to leave Toronto, four years into his seven-year contract, and come as chancellor to Berkeley? “Frankly, I have missed being in the sort of very charged, very aggressive culture you have at a school in the top rank,” he says. “At Toronto, I came to understand much better the importance of public universities in society, the very important role that they play. Berkeley is in some ways a paradigm for me: on the one hand, it has the same excellence as Harvard, Stanford, or MIT; on the other hand, it’s a public institution with a public mission, something I benefited from greatly as a student and something I believe in very strongly.” In an interview conducted just before he arrived at Berkeley, the new chancellor talked about the challenges for the campus. “The first is: How do you continue to maintain its excellence, especially in an era of declining resources?” He recalls that when he was at MIT, the school lost a number of faculty members to Berkeley, when faculty salaries here were on par or even above those available elsewhere. He says he therefore fully recognizes the need for private support, “so that we can bridge the gap between what the state is willing to provide and what is needed. It’s clear that public institutions will not be able to compete with the private institutions without very significant private support.” However, he says that it was not his intention at Toronto, and will not be at Berkeley, to privatize the university. “This is effectively happening in some public universities in the United States,” he says. “I decry that trend. Certainly as long as I’m chancellor at Berkeley, an important part of my efforts will be to continue to emphasize the public mission and the public responsibilities of the University, which in turn means that the state government has a responsibility to the system to support it properly.” A second challenge, he says, is how a university in the 21st century can best manage interdisciplinary inquiries. “My view is that Berkeley is one of the few institutions in the world that is poised to solve some of our major problems--in health, in the environment, in society generally. The question here is: How do you most effectively draw on the wealth of talents in many different and excellent departments?” On another front, in advance of Birgeneau’s arrival at Berkeley, there were some snide comments made about the absence of football at MIT and its effective absence at the University of Toronto (where the team’s record was 1–31 over the past four years). But Birgeneau says that he is committed to intercollegiate athletics and points to his success in helping raise $80 million for a new football stadium, his last act before leaving Toronto. “In Berkeley, I face the challenge of a crumbling football stadium located on the Hayward Fault. More broadly, let me say that, as we just saw at the Olympics with the great performance of Natalie Coughlin, high-end intercollegiate athletics plays an important role in the culture of this country.” His first act as chancellor was to interview candidates and then appoint Berkeley’s new--and first woman--athletic director (see page 15.) Bob Birgeneau was lifted out of an educationally and economically deprived neighborhood; educated at his native country’s best public university; flourished as a professor, researcher, and administrator at MIT; and then presided over the University of Toronto, whose diverse population looks very much like Berkeley’s. As he puts it, his life story seems to have prepared him for the top post here. “Berkeley combines the very best of MIT and the very best of the University of Toronto. I greatly look forward to the challenge of leading the best public institution in the world.” Serving the community | Mary Catherine Birgeneau  Late this summer at the University of Toronto’s Simcoe Hall, Mary Catherine Birgeneau was waiting for the movers who would transport to Berkeley the handmade office furniture she and her husband acquired while he was at MIT. Moving vans are not among Mary Catherine’s favorite things, but she has seen a number of them during the 40 years of married life she and Bob Birgeneau have shared. During the past four decades they have moved up and down the East Coast, making stops at notable academic and scientific institutions along the way. Boston was their longest stay, giving them a chance to feel at home, even though it was distant from their native Toronto. While Bob was at MIT, they raised four children and sent them through the local schools. During that time, Mary Catherine headed up countless PTA committees in Weston, the Boston suburb where they still own a home. “I’m really a people person,” says Mary Catherine. “I’m not someone who needs to be in the limelight. To feel grounded, I need good friends, I need to be involved in the community--I need to serve the community. Whereas Bob likes a challenge, he loves solving problems, he sees things in a more scientific way.” Born Mary Catherine Ware in a middle-class Toronto neighborhood, she was the middle child and only daughter in a loving, close-knit family. Her father was assistant director of athletics for the city’s Catholic Youth Organization, and her mother worked part time as a legal secretary. Mary Catherine attended a convent school run by the Loreto order of nuns. She remembers going to a formal dance at St. Michael’s, the Catholic boys’ school where Bob Birgeneau was a student, and seeing him working behind the hat-check counter. It wasn’t love at first sight. “I didn’t really pay much attention to him,” she says with a chuckle. That changed when they met again at a dance on the first night of orientation at the University of Toronto’s St. Michael’s College, where both were incoming freshmen. “I was struck by how positive and outgoing he was,” she says. They were married in 1964. After his graduation in 1963, Bob left for a Ph.D. program in physics at Yale, and Mary Catherine worked in Toronto for a year. An English major who had planned to go into teaching, she decided instead to look for a job at a Catholic children’s aid society. “Back then you didn’t need a license to be a case worker,” she says. “Before long I had a full caseload of foster children. I loved it from the first minute.” In Boston, she traveled from the suburbs to the inner city three afternoons a week to work with disadvantaged families. Mary Catherine has devoted much of her time and energy to teaching mothers how to play and other-wise interact with their children, often by modeling these interactions while the mother observes. In 1990, after nearly a lifetime of social work, some full-time and paid, some part-time and volunteer, she went back to school at Boston College to get a master’s degree in the field. Once she finished, she found herself drawn back into the volunteer sector. “Most of the paying jobs were with teenagers. I’m not that brave,” she says. “I’m happiest working with little ones. I think early intervention is so important.” Her own children and five grandchildren are central to her life, and Mary Catherine notes that in November she’s due in Boston for a week of babysitting for daughter Patricia, a pediatrician. Another daughter, Catherine, is a psychologist, also living in Boston. Michael, the oldest, lives in Ohio, where he manages college endowments, and youngest daughter Michelle is a personal trainer in Washington, D.C. Mary Catherine admits that one of the tough parts about moving away from Toronto is leaving her mother, who remains healthy and independent at 95. “I’m not too worried, because my brothers are there. Even so, I may be doing a fair amount of flying back and forth,” she says. “But I’m excited about the richness of Berkeley, the breadth and depth and excellence of Berkeley. I look forward to making new friends and becoming a part of the Cal community.” --Catherine Maclay
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 November 2004
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