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New York Times

Where I Learned the Power of Looking at Everything

People who earned their bachelor's degree from an Ivy tend to let you know, even decades after graduating. It's in their author bio, or on their X handle. My degree from U.C. Berkeley never seemed like a detail worth mentioning, unless someone explicitly asks me where I went to college, in which case my instinct is to explain that it was easier to get in when I attended. That I share this alma mater with, say, Joan Didion, never seemed to raise me up. In 1953, when she began her studies, as in 1985, when I began mine, a Californian with good grades matriculated to Berkeley the way you'd 'decide' to use a public utility: there weren't any competitors of Berkeley's caliber offering a virtually free in-state college education (my first-year tuition was about $500 a semester; I wrote my own check for it from a summer job in retail). But when I was asked to return for the occasion of giving a commencement speech this May, a new kind of pride came whooshing in. The invitation was proof of having become someone in the 35 years since graduating. That I was asked by Rhetoric, the most intellectual of literature departments at Cal, seemed especially perfect, and perfectly ironic. As a freshman, I'd enrolled in a standard English class and gotten a B and never took another. Rhetoric was English classes for sophisticates, literature within a rigorous context of classics, theory, theology and law. I had chosen as my major political economy, in no small part because its interdisciplinary coursework in history, political science and economics required only that I absorb and synthesize information, which I was good at, and did not require maturity or insight, which, as a 16-year-old freshman, I apparently lacked. I had remained mute while my older peers spoke confidently in that English class where I earned my B. Rhetoric would be sharing its graduation with Film and Media Studies. For many years now, I've been telling others and myself that the most consequential class I took at Berkeley was Seymour Chatman's seminar on Michelangelo Antonioni, whose movies have given me continual sustenance. I still go back to them, write about them and teach them. I lucked into this Antonioni class, an inessential elective, and have no idea what grade I got. In my required classes, I remember that I got A's and almost nothing else, except that the historian Stephen Ambrose chain-smoked at every lecture, and you had to be at Economics 100A early if you wanted a seat, since enrollment was double the capacity of the auditorium in Wheeler Hall, which holds only 700 people. An academic theory I did manage to pick up, from a political science class taught by Harold Wilensky, was that a lack of involvement in labor unions, churches and volunteer associations has broad social implications. What Wilensky referred to as 'atomization' still produces in my mind an image not from his textbook, but of the little boy playing quietly with his toy robot in Antonioni's 'Red Desert,' in which the denizens of a company town where chemicals are manufactured are each alone with their dreams and disaffection. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.