Stresses in the early history of the Joint Graduate Group
As one might gather from these reflections, I was largely a bystander and witness to the development of bioengineering at Berkeley. There was much of its history that I did not observe and to which I have not subsequently been privy. Nonetheless, there is a story that I believe needs to be told and to part of which I was witness. It concerns three Berkeley people, who in my opinion rescued the Graduate Group at a point when it was on the verge of collapse. Those people are Edward Keller, Karl Pister, and C. Judson King. The crisis arose, I believe, owing to the differences in academic cultures of the two campuses-- UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco.
In the College of Engineering at Berkeley, departmental chairmanships rotate frequently, with individual chairs typically being drawn from the departmental faculty, serving for three or four years, then returning to the faculty. In the School of Medicine at UCSF, departmental chairs often are brought in from outside and are expected to serve much more than three or four years. There are, of course, somewhat different roles played by the departmental chairs in these two regimes-- medical schools and engineering colleges. As I already have explained, graduate groups in the UC System are very different from medical-school or engineering departments. Groups are guided by executive committees, and each executive committee has its chair; but that chair clearly does not have responsibilities comparable to those of a departmental chair. In a graduate group there usually are no facilities or payroll budgets to manage, no faculty or staff to recruit and hire, no promotion cases to prepare, and so forth.
When news was received that the Systemwide Administration and the California Commission on Postsecondary Education had approved the Joint Graduate Group, the three members of its founding executive committee sat down with Alan Portis (Associate Dean for Interdisciplinary Studies in Berkeley's College of Engineering) to plan the next steps. Among other things, the three of them agreed informally that chairmanship of the executive committee should revolve between the two campuses, One of the three, Stan Berger (UCB) would serve as chair first, then another of the three, Stan Glantz (UCSF), would take over. After that, there would be new executive committees and new people to lead them. Stan Berger served for one year, then in accordance with his view of the role of chairman, turned the gavel over to Stan Glantz. Stan Glantz saw the role of chairman differently-- more in keeping with the strong-chair approach at UCSF. He would retain the chairmanship for four years.
The three founding executive-committee members also made plans to expand the committee itself and to make the number of members from each campus equal, as required by the newly approved group bylaws. Among the added members (from UCB) was Martin Graham. Given the fact that the Group's growing faculty membership was spread over departments in every school and college on each campus, and the fact that graduate groups usually do not have bi-weekly or monthly faculty meetings, Marty Graham quickly recognized that the most urgent task was to create a sense of unity. To achieve that, out of his own pocket, Marty sponsored a Group retreat at Asilomar. In a sense, the Graduate Group actually was born at that retreat. It was so effective that it was adopted as an annual event, where new students and faculty would be introduced and new research collaborations would be established. And now, more than 30 years later, it still serves those purposes.
At the same time that Stan Glantz became executive-committee chair, Rudi Schmid took over the Deanship of the UCSF School of Medicine. Dean Krevans had become UCSF Chancellor. It was clear that Dean Schmid supported the strong-chair approach, and viewed the concept of graduate group much like that of academic department. A graduate group administered equally by two campuses was new to the University of California System (the Biophysics Group included UCSF faculty, but was administered primarily by the Berkeley campus). A lot of tweeking needed to be done in order to bring the group's degree designations and higher-level administration into balance on the two campuses, to assure that students had a fast, easy way to travel between the campuses, and to assure an adequate allotment of University fellowships and other support for incoming students. By being a more permanent chair, Stan Glantz was able to accomplish these things. In effect, he served as Founding Chairman of the Joint Graduate Group . Under Stan's chairmanship, for example, Raj Bhatnagar obtained a much-needed training grant from NIGMS (I believe that same grant is still in place).
But, as Stan enterred his third year as chair, the Berkeley contingent, unused to the strong-chair concept, began pushing for a formal limit to the chair's tenure. Recognizing the value of having the chair serve more than a single year, at the annual retreat that year they submitted a proposal that would limit the chair to three years, but with Stan serving for one more year (for a total of four). They also proposed a limit on consecutive years served by any individual on the executive committee. The proposals passed with strong support from both campuses.
During that fourth year of Stan's chairmanship, the Group's relationship with Dean Schmid deteriorated. Schmid clearly was unhappy with the prospect of what he considered weak leadership as the chairmanship passed back to Berkeley. As the relationship with Schmid weakened, the UCSF administrative support of the Group also deteriorated-- so much so that Stan and his vice chair, Ed Keller, both resigned. One major point of contention involved the Group's intense need of a small administrative budget and a small designated administrative office. Ed Keller had written an eloquent letter explaining these needs. At UCSF it evidently had been ignored. At Berkeley, on the other hand, it was not. On the Berkeley campus, the Joint Graduate Group was administered by the office of the College of Engineering Associate Dean for Interdisciplinary Studies. That Associate Dean was about to become Dean of Engineering at Rice University, so the Berkeley Dean of Engineering, Karl Pister, replaced him with the new chair of the Joint Graduate Group executive committee. That gave the Group assured access to administrative services on the Berkeley side. Soon thereafter, the Berkeley Provost for Professional Schools, Jud King allocated a substantial administrative budget to the Group. The Group would survive and thrive.
Still thinking in terms of the strong-chairman model, Dean Schmid had openly promoted his choice for the executive-committee chair to follow Stan Glantz. Unfortunately, a few years later, when it would have been that person's turn to become chair, he already was on the executive committee and had served his quota of consecutive time. Eager to protect the term limits they had fought for, the Berkeley members of the Group resisted the choice. This further alienated Schmid. I believe the heart of the matter was the fundamental difference between a graduate group and a department. Not used to the notion of graduate groups and thinking in terms of departments, Schmid and the Whitaker Foundation Governing Committee both had the same reservations about the Joint Graduate Group and its governance. The situation would be resolved when a bioengineering department was established on each campus-- in 1998 and 2009. The Berkeley department now can have a Berkeley style chair; the San Francisco department can have a San Francisco style chair; and the chair of the Group's executive committee can operate in the manner of a vice chair for graduate matters for both departments and for the large community of Group members outside the two departments.