A Student Adviser's Unlovely View of UC Berkeley

I started talking with Catherine Pauling, who has worked at UC Berkeley more than 20 years, because I confused her with someone else. While she was head student adviser in the Math Department, she increased the number of majors from 170 to 600 in 5 years. "Some math professors were afraid this was too many -- it could only occur because we were bringing in inadequate students, they believed," she said. "But the percentage of students having trouble and excelling remained the same."

When advising math majors, she told me, "sometimes I felt there should have been a Red Cross on my door." She learned to preach compassion -- compassion for the professors. She said over and over to the students,

You have to realize it's not you. The professors will say terrible things like 'You know nothing.' But that's because in the process of becoming the best in what they do, they've neglected certain social and communication skills. So we have to appreciate and learn from their gifts and have compassion for their lack of development in these other areas.

Over the years, she was repeatedly shocked by how undergraduates were treated. "If someone has achieved so much, I would have thought it would be easy to be generous. Instead of an interest in mentoring the next generation, I often found impatience and dismissal," she said. "One student explained to me the difference between Stanford and Berkeley. At Stanford, if a student has a problem, they [faculty and administrators] assume that they're approaching it wrong and they try a new approach; at Berkeley, if a student has a problem, the assumption is that we made a mistake in admitting the student."

One recent Dean of the College of Letters and Science (also a professor) began his tenure as dean, she told me, by giving a talk in which he emphasized his belief that students were "gaming the system." He acted on this belief by rigidly enforcing the rules, with few exceptions. (Many Berkeley students suffer serious hardships, including homelessness and major mental disorders.) When he stopped being dean several years later, it was to take a better position at another university. The next dean was less strict.

For whom do colleges exist?