Oral History Center University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

Karl Pister

Karl Pister: Oral Histories on the Management of Intercollegiate Athletics at UC Berkeley: 1960 - 2014

Interviews conducted by John Cummins in 2011

Copyright © 2017 by The Regents of the University of California Since 1954 the Oral History Center has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well- informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.

*********************************

All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and Karl Pister dated February 13, 2013. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Excerpts up to 1000 words from this interview may be quoted for publication without seeking permission as long as the use is non-commercial and properly cited.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to The Bancroft Library, Head of Public Services, Mail Code 6000, University of California, Berkeley, 94720-6000, and should follow instructions available online at http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/collections/cite.html

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Karl Pister “Karl Pister: Oral Histories on the Management of Intercollegiate Athletics at UC Berkeley: 1960 – 2014” conducted by John Cummins in 2011 the Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2017.

iii

Table of Contents—Karl Pister

Interview 1: March 28, 2011

Audio File 1 1

Sports in Pister’s youth in Sacramento — The 1941 Big Game, Stanford-Cal— Running on track team in high school and at Cal — Athletics at Cal, then and now — Returning to Cal in 1946 — Veterans on campus — Participating in a destructive student revolt — 2004, revisiting that episode as university administrator — Remembering the 1940s, 50s, 60s at Cal and University of Illinois — Big Game after Big Game — Bob Steidel — Pappy Waldorf — The Pacific Coast Conference — Pister’s relationship with Dave Maggard — Establishing a protocol for campus fundraising — Pister as chair of task force to deal with seismic retrofit — Plans for a new stadium — The Speiker plan — Members of the committee — A confidential draft report for SCIP [Southeast Campus Integrated Projects] — The process — Donors and UCB Capital Projects — Ned Speiker — “Responsibility with no authority” — The Haas Pavilion — Chancellor Ed [Edward] Denton — Bechdel — URS and the Regents meeting — Theatrics and lawsuits — Tree-sitting protests, 2006 — Sylvia McLaughlin climbs a tree — Save the Bay, Save the Oaks — Nathan Brostrom — Policing at Cal — Mayor Tim Bates, the City of Berkeley, and protests against the construction of the new stadium and the Student Athlete High Performance Center — Architects HNTB and Studios — Running Wolf — Former Berkeley Mayor Shirley Dean — A history of social protest and appeasement in Berkeley — Pister’s relevant experience at UCSC in 1991, dealing with construction, protests, and policing — Vicky [Victoria] Hanson, UCB Chief of Police, removes the last tree sitters — Law school-business school project: “plug pulled” — Constructive approaches to conflict management — Billie Greene, Pister’s executive assistant — Pister’s radicalization in the 1960s, Vatican II, participation in a group of Catholic faculty at Berkeley — His assignment to the Campus Rules Committee — Speaking out, and compromising — Capital Projects — more about Ed Denton — “The Dick [Richard C.] Blum Affair” — Stadium risk analysis — Dianne Feinstein, Candlestick Park, and the Loma Prieta earthquake — Structural engineering and seismic design — Inadequacy of alternative sites for Cal games — The Alquist-Priolo [Earthquake Fault] Zoning Act — Assistance from Nancy Skinner and Loni Hancock — Negotiations with the Panoramic Hill Association — The LRDP [Long Range Development Plan] for the Berkeley campus — A lawsuit

Interview 2: April 21, 2011

Audio File 2 35

Fundraising for the Student Athlete High Performance Center — Negotiating with opponents and dealing with the threat of lawsuits — Morgan Stanley and the stadium seat licensing program — Athletic Director Sandy Barbour’s lack of a iv development officer — Curt Simic’s fundraising for Cal and other universities — The Principals Committee and the Chancellor’s decision to cut five sports — Aftermath: Title IX implications — The Cal development office and the donor community — An intimate anecdote, and the history of intercollegiate athletics at Cal — Donors’ contributions to both athletics and academics — Comparison of various institutions and cultures — UCSC and UCLA — Athletic foundation at Cal — More about UCLA — The future of intercollegiate athletics at the national level— The Pac-12 and Big 10 — Sports television and money — “An athletics arms race” — The “unsavory” relation of the NFL to student athletes — Professional sports as national religion — The brutality of football — The NCAA and college football deaths, 1909 — Football equipment — Youth sports

[End of Interview] 1

Interview 1: March 28, 2011 Audio File 1

01-00:00:02 Cummins: This is an interview with Karl Pister on intercollegiate athletics. This is the first interview, and it is March 28, 2011. So Karl, I know that you have done both an oral history at Berkeley and one at Santa Cruz—

01-00:00:20 Pister: Right.

01-00:00:21 Cummins: You didn’t devote a lot of time to intercollegiate athletics as far as I could tell—

01-00:00:26 Pister: No.

01-00:00:27 Cummins: —in those interviews, in those oral histories. You did talk about sports, but I thought to begin it would be interesting to know how sports affected your own life, really from an early age on, and what you’ve learned as a result.

01-00:00:46 Pister: Sure. Well, I have, from the time I was a young boy, really participated, informally and formally, in sports. I loved sports from the time I was six years old. To give some examples, we lived east of Stockton on a farm and we had a lot of space, so my brother and I would set up broad jumping pits and high jumping standards.

My father was a teacher at Stockton High School, and would bring items— actually a pole vaulting pole, a bamboo one, once so I could do pole vaulting. We laid out the distances, and my biggest desire at one point was to get a stopwatch; that was a huge thing! So I finally—I think this would have been in the thirties—got some fairly crude thing that measured to the nearest second, so I had a stopwatch. My brother and I used to stage our own version of Olympics, and we’d participate—and we were handicapped because he was three and a half years younger.

So that was a beginning, and that went on up through, certainly through grammar school. When I was in the seventh or eight grade I joined the YMCA and played in the—I think we called it the church league in the YMCA that played different church groups, and we won some contest up in Sacramento, I remember. I still have a little bronze medal we got for playing, so sports were a huge part of my growing up.

When I went to high school I attended all the high school football games; you played then at the College of the Pacific stadium, now called Stagg Field. Of course they have no football team anymore, but it’s still Stagg Field. And that

2

was a big deal when Amos Alonzo Stagg came to Pacific after Chicago dropped football, so that was fun to watch those games.

I guess the other thing at that point in my life would have been to mention that when I was a senior in high school a friend of mine who played on the high school football team and I were given tickets by a friend of his father to go to the 1941 Big Game, which was at Stanford. At that time I was a great Stanford fan.

01-00:03:48 Cummins: I read that! [laughter]

01-00:03:49 Pister: Yeah.

01-00:03:51 Cummins: The Hildebrand thing! [See pp. 18-19, Pister’s 2002-2003 oral history with interviewer Germain LaBerge at http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/collections/subjectarea/univ_hist/fac_adm _reg.html]

01-00:03:52 Pister: We sat in the end zone in the Stanford Stadium and watched Cal upset the favored Stanford. Frankie Albert was quarterback and Norm Standlee was playing for them, and it was quite an interesting experience. I was disheartened by that—of course, the following year I came to Berkeley.

The other thing I should mention, in high school I was on the track team and I ran cross-country. We’d go to Lodi and Modesto and Turlock and places like that and run through the fields. I was never very successful. And then I ran the half mile and the mile. Maybe on one occasion I broke six minutes in the mile, but I was never very good. So that was my early life.

When I came to Berkeley in 1942, the ’42-43 academic year, I was on the freshman track team and I ran the mile, again, very unsuccessfully. I had shin splints a lot of the season and had to get my legs warmed; I don’t know why. I certainly exercised a lot, and as a result, in July 1943 when I went in the Navy program here, the V-12 [Navy College Training Program], I was in great shape, and I passed all the physical fitness tests, so I didn’t have to do the basic physical fitness stuff.

Where do we go from here?

01-00:05:46 Cummins: Say a little bit about what it was like to be a student athlete at Cal then, in those years.

3

01-00:05:54 Pister: [chuckling] Well, you know, I was really on the fringe as a freshman trackman. I think perhaps for me personally the biggest challenge, the biggest plus, was that I knew by sight and had some interaction with a couple of the really greats of that time—Grover Klemmer, who at one point I think had near a world record in the quarter mile, and Hal Davis who was a sprinter, had certainly the Pacific Coast Conference record, people like that, that I ran on the track with. So there was a certain amount of camaraderie. But for me it was just kind of a peripheral activity. You just went down and worked out, the coach was there, told you what to do. Al Ragan was the coach at that time. Brutus Hamilton was off probably doing something else during that time, maybe in the—

01-00:07:09 Cummins: Yeah, that was right during the—

01-00:07:12 Pister: The war.

01-00:07:25 Cummins: So how much time, for example, would you spend as a student athlete then?

01-00:07:29 Pister: You know, John, it’s too long ago. I just don’t remember. It was not a—

01-00:07:36 Cummins: Not a big burden?

01-00:07:37 Pister: No, I was a freshman engineering student, so I was working up to my nose in stuff, so that—it surely was no burden, but I can’t generalize that to other athletes who might have been putting a lot more time in. As a student, of course I attended all of the football games and the basketball games at that time. I think I even saw some of the baseball games.

01-00:08:16 Cummins: So then talk about after you’re back, you’re a professor here, your involvement then with athletics.

01-00:08:24 Pister: Sure. The next involvement with athletics is an amusing one. When I came back—I came back in fall of ’46. I had graduated in ’45 and spent a year on active duty on Okinawa. I came back, and we went through the infamous 1946 football season. Stub Allison had retired, and the coach in ’46 was a guy named Frank Wickhorst, and Frank had come from the Naval Academy, I believe, to coach Cal. Well, Cal had a fairly disastrous season, and the Big Game was played at Cal that year—you may have read this in my oral history—and we got trounced by Stanford. A group of us—at that point Berkeley was basically a returning veterans’ campus. A bunch of us who were

4

veterans, were so frustrated with the loss that we got together and ripped up seats in the rooting section.

01-00:09:44 Cummins: Were they that bad then that you could rip them up? [laughter]

01-00:09:46 Pister: Oh yeah, if you got enough people along the bench you could put a lot of force on it. So we tore up these seats, and I remember nobody apprehended us at the time, and I remember at the time reading that we had caused $1,700 worth of damage to replace the seats. So let me jump ahead to finish this, because in October 2004 when the Chancellor [Robert Birgeneau] and Paul Gray, the Provost, asked me to chair the Southeast Campus Integrated Projects Study Committee, with a task force of people that I’d have to chair—at the first meeting, with the Chancellor—I had only met the Chancellor, he didn’t know me at all, and I didn’t know him at that point.

01-00:10:41 Cummins: That was his first month here?

01-00:10:42 Pister: This is, yeah, his first month. I started out the meeting by saying that no good deed goes unpunished, and I recounted that story of my being a participant in the illegal act of tearing up the seats in the rooting section. So that was his introduction to me.

Then, as you know from my oral history, I stayed at Berkeley until 1949. I finished a master’s degree, and I was a lecturer, and then I became an instructor for a year. Then I left and went to the University of Illinois for three years, had season tickets there, and they gave students a much better deal. I was a half-time instructor so I got some faculty deal. We had great seats and went to all the Illini games.

I came back to Berkeley, and my wife and I then—I married when I was a grad student—so we came back. She went to the games with me, most of them. There was one memorable one. This would have been a Big Game at Stanford. It would have been the Big Game in 1953. She was pregnant with our oldest daughter and we were on the Dumbarton Bridge, and she started to get false labor, so I had to stop. We got into Menlo Park and I bought some soda crackers for her to eat. [laughing] I still remember this. So we arrived at the Big Game late, and I was furious because it was already the second quarter—my poor wife struggling up the steps. [laughter] And our daughter was—this would have been late in November. Our daughter was born December 7, 1953, so it was pretty close timing. So that I think shows a perhaps unwise dedication to sports, one of the low points. At one point my wife, after we sat through a Big Game at Berkeley one year—it would have been the sixties— we got absolutely drenched, and my wife said, “That’s it.”

5

01-00:13:24 Cummins: No more.

01-00:13:24 Pister: So she dropped out. I kind of lost track where I was. But in ’79 I was chair of the Academic Council that year and I remember, for some reason I got involved with Bob Steidel—you remember Bob?

01-00:13:57 Cummins: Yes, absolutely.

01-00:13:58 Pister: And he was the NCAA rep for a while.

01-00:14:02 Cummins: Faculty athletic rep. A long time.

01-00:14:03 Pister: Faculty rep, yeah. I complained about not getting good season tickets, and so he got me some good season tickets, which I’ve had now all the way through this last season, for thirty-some years.

01-00:14:21 Cummins: What section?

01-00:14:23 Pister: FF. Yeah, right next to—we were right on the aisle to G, so they’re really good seats.

01-00:14:29 Cummins: Nice.

01-00:14:31 Pister: So that’s been—

01-00:14:32 Cummins: And then you lost those now with the—?

01-00:14:35 Pister: Yeah, I’ve lost those. But, by virtue of the work I’ve been doing for the Chancellor I’ve been supporting athletics here, and so I got pretty good seating in the seat selection for AT&T Park, so I’ve got good seats there too. I’m trying to think, there was something that—oh I know, yeah, the other thing I really should mention is that following the ’46 season, in ’47 Pappy Waldorf came on board. I enjoyed four seasons where we won thirty-nine out of forty games. In his first season he went nine out of ten, losing only to USC, and we lost the Rose Bowl against Northwestern. But the next three seasons he was undefeated, so that was really a wonderful period.

6

01-00:15:42 Cummins: Do you have any recollection of all the turmoil that led to the demise of the Pacific Coast Conference, which was in late fifties? Clark Kerr was Chancellor; Glenn Seaborg was the faculty athletic rep. One of the interesting things I’ve learned was that Clark Kerr—and by this time, let’s see, he was either—he may have been president by this time, would that be right? Fifty- two, well, maybe not. But as a result of all of that turmoil which Pappy Waldorf was involved in—it had to do with getting money to pay football players basically, who were playing at Cal, which was again, in the long history it was quite a common practice.

01-00:16:46 Pister: Really?

01-00:16:46 Cummins: Yes, in fact it was not uncommon for—maybe a little bit uncommon—for players to play for two different colleges at the same time. Or to recruit—this was going back now to the late 1800s/early 1900s. But the recruiting was a big deal, winning was a big deal, athletics—it always has been. So the students, who were pretty much running athletics, were always looking for good players. They would go out and identify someone but then they’d have to come back to the faculty and say, “Can’t you get this person admitted?” They would even put ads in newspapers. “We’re looking for a quarterback,” et cetera. That was the point I was going to make here—one of the ways that they got the students admitted was that law schools were fairly new at that point in time, so they didn’t have very high admissions standards, so anybody could get admitted to the law school. So they would get a person that had—he would be a star player and then he would leave, but law school was a way to get students in. So anyways not—

01-00:18:04 Pister: I don’t have any recollection of that.

01-00:18:08 Cummins: Of the Pappy Waldorf—

01-00:18:09 Pister: The demise of the PCC.

Cummins: Okay, so what happened was that Pappy was—the amount of money that was involved with paying Berkeley athletes was quite small compared to what UCLA, USC, and Washington were paying. Those were the four that were identified. It was something like, as I recall, $400,000, something like that, and Pappy Waldorf said that that money only went to students who were in great need financially and that he was directly involved in it. So Kerr felt obliged to write a public letter of reprimand to Pappy Waldorf, for which Kerr got incredible negative publicity because he made it public, and people were just outraged that he had done this. So it’s just a little interesting footnote to this.

7

01-00:19:07 Pister: That’s really important. I have totally forgotten that if I ever knew it. I must have known it.

01-00:19:13 Cummins: At that time. Anyway, go ahead. So then you became dean.

01-00:19:21 Pister: Right.

01-00:19:22 Cummins: In, what was that, 1980 I think?

01-00:19:24 Pister: Nineteen eighty, right.

01-00:19:26 Cummins: And fundraising, as you talk about in your oral history, was a very important part. Was Athletics a part of that?

01-00:19:34 Pister: Well, I had a really good relationship with Dave Maggard at that time. On several occasions I remember him saying. “Karl, you really have run a great program.” But we were not in competition at all. Perhaps I had an unfounded, at that point, sense that Athletics and Engineering were not competitive really.

01-00:20:09 Cummins: Did you use Athletics to help your fundraising?

01-00:20:11 Pister: No. Well, but I have to qualify that. Yeah, from time to time I brought, in connection, I can’t remember—let’s see, who was the vice chancellor then for development?

01-00:20:31 Cummins: Curt Simic?

01-00:20:33 Pister: Yeah, it probably would have been Curt. He and I didn’t get along.

01-00:20:36 Cummins: Oh you didn’t? Because of the independence issue? Or—oh, that’s okay.

01-00:20:42 Pister: We can talk about that, but it’s perhaps not relevant here. I used to get— whether it came from the Chancellor or someone else—I used to get tickets for the boxes you know, and bring prominent donors to Engineering to games. Yeah, that did happen.

01-00:21:11 Cummins: Okay, because at that time, when you speak about Athletics and Engineering, Dave Maggard created the Cal Sports 80s effort for capital projects, for

8

Athletics, and the committee was co-chaired by Wally Haas and Roger Heyns. So in his oral history—and I’ve confirmed this with Mike Heyman—Dave said that he put together this group. Both of them were reluctant to do it, so he said to one, if I can get the other one to do it would you do it? And so that’s how he did it.

01-00:21:51 Pister: I see.

01-00:21:51 Cummins: And it was successful. They really did a good job, so Mike Heyman—this was when we were moving into fundraising in a major way, knew what was going on in Athletics, called Dave Maggard over and said, “This is impressive, what you’re doing. We’re going to adopt your model. The only difference is that you now have to come to me for approval before you go to see these major donors.” And Dave, in the oral history, says he accepted that with great equanimity, but that’s hard to believe. But Mike, when I talked to him to confirm this said that, he said, “Yes, that’s right.” And that his recollection was that apart from Engineering, Athletics was raising more money than anybody else on the campus.

Now I think that’s interesting because of this question about what is the connection between Athletics and fundraising. Certainly historically, here, I think it’s very clear, because a lot of those key donors who were involved first with Athletics, and these are significant donors, moved over into what was called the Keeping the Promise Campaign.

01-00:23:08 Pister: Absolutely, I think it’s a—what’s the right word—a symbiosis, in a sense. They’re not competitive, they’re complementary, and I’ve never had a problem with that. During that period we had lots of other problems in fundraising, trying to get organized. The need to develop a more centralized approach to fundraising so that you’d reduce some of the conflicts that were inevitably going to occur. This is—it’s related but not right in the middle of what we’re talking about—I remember Mike had, I think they were Friday afternoon cocktail sessions with the deans. I remember Jesse Choper, Sandy Kadish and I, and Ray Miles—and earlier Budd Cheit—would get together to talk about hammering out a protocol for fundraising for the campus that ultimately I think really served the campus very well.

01-00:24:29 Cummins: Did he talk about Athletics in that context, that you remember?

01-00:24:33 Pister: We must have, but you know at the moment I can’t really remember.

01-00:24:40 Cummins: Do you want to say anything else then, before we get into the southeast quadrant? Anything relevant to Athletics that comes to mind?

9

01-00:24:54 Pister: I think we’ve covered pretty much—

01-00:24:58 Cummins: Okay, because I want to come back to Santa Cruz too.

01-00:25:02 Pister: Sure. No, I think that’s really important. I want to say something about that.

01-00:25:05 Cummins: So let’s do your role then, chairing the committee that you already referenced, all the issues associated with that. That would be, I think the—

01-00:25:23 Pister: Well, this is one of those things that when you start it you have absolutely no sense of where it’s going to go. As I said, I was asked to serve as chair of the task force to, I don’t remember the exact wording, but it was essentially to look at this issue to recommend an approach for the Memorial Stadium that decreased the seismic risk to people on game day and during the week when the people that worked inside the stadium—to reduce that risk and at the same time upgrade facilities that we use for athletics. That was a two-pronged request.

There had been a significant amount of work done already on looking at alternatives for doing this. I think there were things called Plans A, B, and C. One of them was a Spieker plan.

01-00:27:04 Cummins: Right.

01-00:27:05 Pister: Which essentially—

01-00:27:07 Cummins: That’s Ned Spieker?

01-00:27:08 Pister: Yeah. It invaded the west wall, took parts of the west wall down and built a building that connected to the stadium. And since I brought that up, that plan was rejected out of hand right away when the—it was about a thirty-person task force by the way, and I’ll say some more about that.

01-00:27:31 Cummins: It’s huge, yes, right.

01-00:27:34 Pister: There was a sense that the historic west wall was a sine qua non. We can’t touch that west wall, it was just too important historically and architecturally. When my task force met in the fall of 2004, there were three proposals for dealing with seismic correction and program upgrade for athletic and stadium users. They had been prepared by Studios Architects in San Francisco. Two of

10

the proposals were rejected because of lack of necessary space to accommodate programmatic needs. The Spieker proposal was rejected because it seriously destroyed the historic west wall of the stadium. There was unanimous agreement of my task force on this matter. I am not aware of how Bob Berdahl viewed the matter. He was gone when I assumed this job. Bob Birgeneau obviously had no position; that is why the task force was formed.

01-00:27:48 Cummins: Now that building that Ned Spieker proposed also had some academic— wasn’t the business school tied into that?

01-00:27:55 Pister: Yeah, it was a multi-use concept. To try to generate revenue in addition to Athletics. But let me say something more about the task force. Of course it had people from Athletics. The chairman of the Academic Senate was on it, Sandy [Barbour] was there as a fairly new AD, and a fairly new dean of the law school, Chris Edley, was a member.

01-00:28:28 Cummins: And was Tom Campbell on there as well? I don’t remember, because the business school was tied into that.

01-00:28:35 Pister: Yeah, it was either Tom or Tom’s predecessor, and I’m not sure who that would have been. We’ll have to go back. Anyway, well, it was an interesting exercise to try to keep that group focused. The first big thing that happened that kind of put the whole process off on a different track was there was an insistence by Chris Edley, that had, effectively, support from the Academic Senate chair, who was a classicist—I can’t remember his name.

01-00:29:24 Cummins: Bob Knapp? Was it Robert—?

01-00:29:27 Pister: Yeah.

01-00:29:27 Cummins: Robert Knapp, yeah, okay.

01-00:29:30 Pister: Yeah. You can’t do this Athletics job without some academic balance to it. So that was exactly what Edley needed to say, we need a building for law. I don’t remember exactly how the business side got in to create this building that would be joint between law and business.

01-00:29:57 Cummins: Academic Commons.

11

01-00:29:58 Pister: Yeah, in the Boalt parking lot. And so that whole issue then had to be developed in parallel to the issue of the stadium upgrade. We prepared a report that was finished by December and we were very careful to label it a draft so that it wouldn’t be accessible.

01-00:30:31 Cummins: Discoverable.

01-00:30:32 Pister: Discoverable, right. I had a co-chairman of that task force. Didion, he’s the sister of Joan. Jim Didion, brother of Joan Didion, he was a member of that committee and later became co-chair—

01-00:31:03 Cummins: He was with Ellis and Company right?

01-00:31:07 Pister: He was a real estate guy.

01-00:31:08 Cummins: He did a lot of real estate, big, major real estate, working for Ed Denton.

01-00:31:10 Pister: Yeah, sorry.

01-00:31:12 Pister: I’m getting Jim Didion mixed up with Walt Dieden.

01-00:31:16 Cummins: From your previous oral history, that’s where I remembered that name! Yes, okay, good. [laughter]

01-00:31:21 Pister: Who was a confrere of my chair’s namesake. So anyway, we prepared this draft report and gave it to the Chancellor. The main thrust of the report, with respect to the stadium, was that it was important to look at the upgraded facility in a way that integrated it more with the campus, to try to create the sense that—probably it was much more obvious early on before all the trees and stuff grew up there—it was part of the campus. By the way, there were very few trees there when that stadium was built.

01-00:32:14 Cummins: Yes, we’ll get into that. [laughter]

01-00:32:16 Pister: It wasn’t a grove of ancient oak trees. So to integrate athletics, not only the building, but the operation, the daily operation more with the campus. So the Chancellor, after he received the report—the consequence was to create what became known as the SCIP Committee. I was the chair of that, and Jim was the co-chair—

12

01-00:32:55 Cummins: You’d better say what SCIP is.

01-00:32:57 Pister: Yeah, Southeast Campus Integrated Projects. There were actually seven projects, and these seven projects ultimately became the basis for an environmental impact report. The Regents approved that, and we’ll want to say more about that whole process, but there were seven projects it approved: the stadium, the Maxwell Field parking structure, renovation of houses along Piedmont, the law/business building.

01-00:33:38 Cummins: Was Underhill part of that?

01-00:33:39 Pister: No Underhill was separate. I don’t remember the other projects at this time, but they’re not nearly as important as the stadium and the law/business connection building. So that committee met, I think initially, weekly.

01-00:34:00 Cummins: And there was a press conference announcing this, as I recall, right?

01-00:34:03 Pister: Yes, it’s possible. I don’t remember. I don’t think I was a part of it, but there probably was. We met on a very regular basis. On the law/business side there was an architectural firm from Los Angeles that was engaged to look at the design of that building, and we went through the process of selecting architects for the stadium project. Since STUDIOS Architecture in San Francisco had done a lot of earlier work, they were retained along with HNTB, which is a national firm that has done a lot of stadium work, as the architects. That pair of firms had some pluses and some minuses because of the division of responsibility that resulted.

But let me step back and say a little bit more about the process here. There’s another interesting aspect to this that I shouldn’t overlook. This whole operation was evolving in the context of the misfortune of the Haas Pavilion upgrading and construction, which you probably know more about than I do. So there was a sense among some key donors that the campus couldn’t manage capital projects very well. And as a consequence of this, one of the requirements of the project for which our SCIP Committee had the oversight responsibility was that the project should be managed by an outside firm, so that Ed Denton, the vice chancellor that normally would have responsibility with capital project people, was kind of pushed to the side. That was a very awkward thing for Ed. I did not know Ed well at that point, so at first he wasn’t even invited to be on the committee but I added him to the committee. It would have been an outrage not to have him there.

13

01-00:37:00 Cummins: Sure, sure. Now, well I should say that one of the—this goes back to the Ned Spieker situation, because he was very offended that his design, or project, was not approved.

01-00:37:16 Pister: Exactly.

01-00:37:18 Cummins: Part of that effort, of his effort, was that he believed he should be given carte blanche to come in and develop. He’s a developer and he could do it, and almost along the lines of Arrillaga, the donor at Stanford who was also a developer and comes in and builds buildings, so, okay. So the politics, from your point of view, were very difficult.

01-00:37:48 Pister: Very complicated, yeah.

01-00:37:51 Cummins: And were you put in a position—I imagine you were, which is fairly typical at Berkeley—not atypical I should say—where you’re a chairman of a committee and then you end up being in a position where you’re forced to adjudicate between units on the campus over which you really don’t have any direct control yourself. You’re not the chancellor, in other words.

01-00:38:17 Pister: Oh yeah. No, it’s not an uncommon thing.

01-00:38:21 Cummins: No, it’s a bit difficult, exactly. [laughter]

01-00:38:23 Pister: Responsibility with no authority.

01-00:38:25 Cummins: That’s right; that’s exactly right.

01-00:38:30 Pister: Yeah, there was the internal issue. There was kind of a tension between the law school/business school people and the athletics people on the one hand, competing for attention and for resources. And then externally the problem of—oh, the other internal tension that I mentioned already was that here we were, we were going to go with an outside program manager when Ed Denton was relatively new to the campus then. He was not responsible for the Haas problem. But he inherited the Haas problem, and it put his whole operation in a shadow.

So, and what I was going to say was—which is to emphasize this—was that we went out on the street to find a program manager for the stadium project, and the top firm that emerged from that competition was Bechtel National,

14

and the number two choice was URS, which is an international firm as well. Bechtel National is part of the Bechtel Group, and they focus on projects in the United States. So we started to work with Bechtel National, no contract yet, but getting acquainted with their people, getting all set to do that, and at the last minute we got a call saying, “Golly, I hate to tell you this. We’re withdrawing.”

01-00:40:43 Cummins: What was their reason?

01-00:40:45 Pister: I have never yet found—apparently it was a decision made by the current Bechtel CEO, who is the grandson of the old Mr. Bechtel that we knew. And one of their senior officers was an engineering grad, Jim van Hoften, who was an astronaut and went to work for Bechtel. I tried to hire him when he left NASA. Bechtel made him a better offer. I was one of the deans. But anyway, Jim van Hoften once told me, he said, “Someday I’ll tell you why we turned that job down.” [laughing]

01-00:41:35 Cummins: But he hasn’t yet. Oh that’s interesting.

01-00:41:36 Pister: No, I’ve got to—maybe I can find that out and put that in the history. It was a shock.

01-00:41:39 Cummins: Yeah, that would be good.

01-00:41:41 Pister: So then, all right, we had to go to URS as a program manager, and the first program manager that they gave us was a very knowledgeable guy, easy to work with and things were moving smoothly, but just to emphasize the awkwardness of this, I remember at the first Regents meeting, where we presented this project to Buildings and Grounds. I was the lead presenter, the URS guy made the presentation, and Ed Denton just sat there. So it was a very awkward—very awkward for Ed.

01-00:42:28 Cummins: Well, you also had the fundraising as a background issue. Where is the money going to come from, at that same time?

01-00:42:36 Pister: Yeah well, we haven’t even come to that.

01-00:42:38 Cummins: Okay, okay, good. I didn’t want to forget that.

15

01-00:42:41 Pister: No, we won’t forget the fundraising. That would have been probably in the early fall of 2005, I guess that would have been. Then the EIR went out on the street and then on December 6 at the Mission Bay campus of UCSF there was a Buildings and Grounds meeting which Ed and I attended, at which the committee certified the EIR for the SCIP projects. I still remember some of the people that came and protested the certification. I can’t remember his name now—Buckland or some—

01-00:43:54 Cummins: One of the neighbors? Doug Buchwald

01-00:43:55 Pister: Yeah, one of the neighbors. A guy that’s been a constant complainant about the University. He came and had some kind of a prayer ceremony, where he put something on the ground. It was a ridiculous thing, but that was part of the theatrics of this whole thing.

Well then, of course, as you well know, what happened—the Panoramic Hill Association, the City of Berkeley, and the Save the Oaks group filed lawsuits which were consolidated. And there were two attorneys, a guy named Stephen Volker for Save the Oaks, and the City of Berkeley of course had their own attorney, and the third was Mike Lozeau for Panoramic Hill Association. I don’t remember when the lawsuits were filed.

01-00:45:17 Cummins: I can get that.

01-00:45:17 Pister: You can get that? But as you know, the judge granted them an injunction, so that the whole project effectively was put on hold. I don’t know if you want to talk more about that whole issue?

01-00:45:44 Cummins: Yes, go ahead, sure.

01-00:45:55 Pister: Not only was the project put on hold, but as you know, the tree-sitting episode began then. I don’t remember exactly when the first tree sitters appeared.

01-00:46:12 Cummins: It was right before the football game.

01-00:46:15 Pister: The football game, but would that have been in 2006?

01-00:46:19 Cummins: I think it had to be 2006.

16

01-00:46:21 Pister: Yeah, yeah. And I remember telling the Chancellor [Birgeneau] at the time, I said, “Bob, from my experience at Santa Cruz you ought to stop this right now.” Well, it wasn’t done, and as you know the whole thing ballooned then. I don’t remember at one time the maximum number, but there were lots of people in the trees.

01-00:46:50 Cummins: Tree houses.

01-00:46:51 Pister: Yeah, there were tree-houses.

01-00:46:53 Cummins: Rappelling lines between the trees.

01-00:46:54 Pister: And there’s the famous incident when Sylvia McLaughlin and Shirley Dean—

01-00:47:01 Cummins: Shirley Dean.

01-00:47:02 Pister: —and I don’t remember the third woman—climbed up and sat in the platform.

01-00:47:07 Cummins: Now you should say who Sylvia McLaughlin is, please.

01-00:47:13 Pister: Sylvia McLaughlin is the widow of Don McLaughlin, who had a long time affiliation with the University. McLaughlin Hall is named after Don. He was, for a very short period of time, the Dean of Engineering at Berkeley. He has an endowed chair named after him that Mike Heyman basically signed off, and I remember carrying the letter that Mike wrote because Don was in his deathbed at the time, and I took Mike’s letter saying that the chair had been created. [a knock on the door interrupts briefly] Anyway, it was an awkwardness born of that earlier association, because I knew Sylvia and Don very well.

So when Sylvia sat in the trees, I remember we were both going to, after she had done this, some months later, we were both going to the same memorial service down at the Congregational Church in Berkeley, and I bumped into her, and I said to her, “Sylvia, it’s nice to see you out of the trees.” [laughter] At the same time, at that time I think I was president of the Faculty Club, and at the Christmas dinner she sat at my table, so we were good friends.

01-00:48:58 Cummins: And Sylvia was—and Kay Kerr, Clark Kerr’s wife, were instrumental in the Save the Bay.

17

01-00:49:05 Pister: Oh yeah.

01-00:49:05 Cummins: So it goes back a long way.

01-00:49:07 Pister: Sylvia’s whole issue was associated with Save the Oaks. She was a tree person. She brought me a book about California oaks and all, but that was a very misplaced characterization of the oak trees there.

01-00:49:25 Cummins: So say a little more about the trees, and try to describe it, because it was quite a scene with the cyclone fence and the—

01-00:49:34 Pister: It was very bad, and for weeks I remember—this would have been in the second year by now—

01-00:49:47 Cummins: Yes, of this committee, right?

01-00:49:49 Pister: Yeah.

01-00:49:49 Cummins: And Nathan Brostrom was here by now.

01-00:49:51 Pister: Yeah, Nathan had come on board. For weeks we had an eight o’clock meeting in his office every morning with Nathan, the Chief of Police,—

01-00:50:04 Cummins: Vicky [Victoria L.] Harrison.

01-00:50:05 Pister: —Vicky Harrison, Dan Mogulof, Linda Williams, who—and Nathan and I, and Ed Denton. We had to strategize about what was happening. And you remember the neighbors, the City of Berkeley—when we put a police line around the place we got clobbered for starving these people, so we had to send up protein bars and—oh, there was—and at one time the police went to try to pull some people down, they dumped waste, excrement and waste and stuff all on the police. So it was a nasty scene, a very nasty scene.

01-00:51:01 Cummins: That’s when the city, we had asked the city—just as an aside—to help us with parking there, that it would have made it easier to control things if they didn’t park on that section of Gayley Road. They would not grant that kind of thing.

18

01-00:51:15 Pister: Sure. No, that’s right. And when people started to camp out along Piedmont Avenue we asked the city again, for the police to remove these people. They were illegally occupying that area. They refused to do it. It was a very awkward time, and parenthetically Tom Bates, who was after all a Bear Backer, a Rose Bowl player for Cal, the mayor, he was put in a very tough spot. Politically he had to be a hard-liner against Cal.

01-00:51:55 Cummins: Yes, I interviewed him as well.

01-00:51:57 Pister: But he wasn’t very helpful in this period. For, I guess, reasons that were pretty obvious.

01-00:52:07 Cummins: There was also a cost involved.

01-00:52:10 Pister: Oh, there was a huge cost involved in all of this and the—

01-00:52:17 Cummins: And we should say why this was the case. There was a—do you want to say a word about the [Student Athlete] High Performance Center and what that would have done, or did, in terms of taking the trees out? That whole issue?

01-00:52:33 Pister: Let’s see, well—

01-00:52:37 Cummins: Just the design issue and the—

01-00:52:40 Pister: Right, the thing that precipitated all of the furor over the area was that the architects, HNTB and Studios, came up with really an outstanding solution to provide sufficient space for the new facility that was needed to replace the offices and training facilities underneath the old stadium, which were under capacity, really. There was no way to find space under a new stadium, of sufficient square footage, to accommodate the programmatic needs of the project. So they came up with I think a splendid solution, to build into the hill a building that wrapped around the stadium, the west wall of the stadium.

At a certain point this evolved into what became known as the Student Athlete High Performance Center, because Sandy [Barbour] discovered some group that provided an integrated view of performance, that integrated performance over the academic and physical, nutritional, the whole spectrum of factors that affect a student athlete. So, it took on kind of a new direction when the high performance idea entered into the equation.

19

So that building, in order to accommodate the building in the hillside, required the removal of a significant number of the existing trees. I think one large redwood tree was saved that had to be removed. There’s a distinction between specimen trees and non-specimen trees; I think only one or two specimen trees actually had to be removed. The rest were essentially just volunteer stuff that had either grown up, or some had been planted, after the stadium was constructed.

If you look at the early pictures of the stadium, in the early part of the last century, there are virtually no trees around. So, it was a false sense of what that area was. It wasn’t just the trees. [laughing] There was a significant amount of effort in the area that focused on all the Native American remains that are in that area. And this was essentially the doctrine of one Running Wolf. Running Wolf was an unsuccessful candidate for mayor of Berkeley, and he loved publicity more than anything else. Running Wolf was certain that his ancestors were buried in that ground. And by the way, subsequently, in all of the excavation that was done, there was one bone uncovered that shut the whole place down for three hours until anthropologists came and affirmed that it was a goat bone. [laughter]

01-00:56:38 Cummins: This is amazing, isn’t it? It’s hard to—but this is Berkeley, so, no question, no question.

01-00:56:44 Pister: So no Native American—

01-00:56:45 Cummins: You should say, by the way, that Shirley Dean was the former mayor. You’ll have to make that point.

01-00:56:49 Pister: Yeah, I forgot to do that. And Shirley and I, by the way, found ourselves in a very unlikely—

01-00:57:04 Cummins: Opposition?

01-00:57:06 Pister: No, actually just the opposite. We found ourselves on the same side of an issue. When I discovered—I think I discovered this during one of the hearings in the first lawsuit, when I learned that she and her husband have a National Forest cabin site in the same tract that we have on the Carson Pass at Caples Lake.

01-00:57:33 Cummins: Amazing.

20

01-00:57:34 Pister: [laughing] And ironically John, the group of cabin owners there were fighting an EIR of the El Dorado Irrigation District, which wanted to do some stuff at Caples Lake that we countered, so Shirley and her husband came and sat at a group meeting at our cabin site one summer up there, after we were fighting on this other issue! So, anyway.

01-00:58:02 Cummins: She’s my neighbor.

01-00:58:03 Pister: Oh she is?

01-00:58:03 Cummins: She lives just behind me. When she ran against Tom Bates, my wife made a donation to Tom Bates, and I was at a Regents meeting over in the city, and I get this urgent call. And it was Shirley, chewing me out, that I—and I said, “I think it was my wife.” And she said, “Yeah, I know it was your wife.” [laughter]

01-00:58:29 Pister: Well, that’s marvelous, that’s marvelous.

01-00:58:31 Cummins: And this isn’t the first tree issue, I was just thinking. When we built Foothill Student Housing there was an issue up there, and my distinct recollection— this would have been early eighties, was that Tom Bates and Loni Hancock, his wife, who is now in the state senate, chained themselves to a tree up there.

01-00:58:53 Pister: They did. I remember that very well. I thought they chained themselves to a bulldozer.

01-00:58:59 Cummins: Or a bulldozer, or something, yeah, tied into—and then we had the tree issue related to the Northwest Animal Facility, when Mike [Heyman] was Chancellor, and he immediately put in these big redwood trees. That was how we appeased those people.

01-00:59:16 Pister: I don’t know, that was when Mac Laetsch said if the people don’t come out of the crane you ought to sacrifice a rabbit every hour.

01-00:59:26 Cummins: [laughing] That’s right, exactly. Okay, we got off the topic here a little bit, but that’s okay.

01-00:59:31 Pister: Yeah, okay back—and this whole tree issue was nothing new to me, because at Santa Cruz—I’d only been Chancellor for three months when my Capital Projects people said, “We have to clear a site for Colleges Nine and Ten.”

21

Colleges Nine and Ten covered an area which had acquired the name Elf Land, and Elf Land was a kind of a code name for a sacred area where people smoked dope and generally carried on strange religious rites in the Santa Cruz Hills, on the campus. [laughter]

01-01:00:24 Cummins: What year, Karl?

01-01:00:25 Pister: This would have been 1991. December of 1991. I think it was Christmas vacation that we started the logging. I had to remove 150 trees to clear the sites. The day that the loggers came I had to have forty-four people arrested for interfering with the logging operation, including an attorney for one of the kids. The afternoon that she’d been arrested the attorney came out. She pushed a police officer that arrested her.

And the connection to Berkeley—we had to get mutual aid from other campuses, and Berkeley sent a contingent of officers down. One of the Berkeley officers pushed a TV cameraman, and he lost his camera. It cost me, the Chancellor, $10,000 to replace the camera. So I never let—who was it, Vicky Harrison—I never let Vicky forget that when I worked with her on this issue, the Berkeley police—so I had a lot of experience with trees already.

Two things just to close the tree issue perhaps. The first is the, I think the ingenious way that Vicky came up with the manner in which she removed the last tree sitter. She, as you probably remember, brought in a scaffolding company, and the scaffolding company—there were, I don’t remember, three people left maybe—I don’t remember exactly now—in one redwood tree. The scaffold people surrounded the tree with scaffolding and quickly erected scaffolding up the tree and got up high enough so Vicky climbed the scaffold with her police people and told them, “You either come down with us or we’re going to handcuff you and drag you down.” And they came down. It cost us $40,000 to do that.

01-01:03:05 Cummins: To do that, that part alone?

01-01:03:06 Pister: That part alone.

01-01:03:07 Cummins: I have no idea what that total cost was for the police. And of course there was a lot of criticism about the fact that, from a lot of people, why did we allow this to go on so long? So that was, of course, the other side of it. And Vicky’s concern there was that the police weren’t trained to, as I recall, to go up into trees and bring people down. And you’ve got all the liability issues.

22

01-01:03:38 Pister: And several times we gave serious consideration to bringing in some professional extractors. There were several people that marketed themselves as professional extractors. But that was never done. I think probably it was a good idea not to, because ultimately, after twenty-one months when the judge’s decision was finally rendered and the people were removed from the trees and we did the project, the bids came in significantly below our estimates, because in the meantime the construction market had tanked. So in a sense the delay, almost two-year delay, really was in our favor because it reduced the cost of the project dramatically.

01-01:04:37 Cummins: Yes, exactly. Okay. Do we want to say anything—

01-01:04:44 Pister: Well, the only other thing I guess that we might say is that—and I don’t remember, again, the year that this happened, but we were still dealing with the stadium project and the law/business connection, and we had regular presentations by the architects on both sides. The law/business connection— the building was evolving beautifully, the estimated cost continued to go up and at a certain point Chris Edley I think came to the realization that he could never raise the money for this. At that time Tom, the dean of—

01-01:05:30 Cummins: Campbell, you mean.

01-01:05:31 Pister: Tom Campbell really wasn’t terribly interested in the building. He had other ideas about what he wanted to do for the business school, so he was never a great supporter. And there was a significant amount of ambiguity as to exactly what was going to be in the building. But Chris basically pulled the plug, as far as I’m concerned, and said we can’t go ahead with this. He subsequently, as you know, as Dean, in-filled the patio of Boalt rather than build a building. So that effectively dissolved one of the major projects, removed one of the major projects of the SCIP. The housing on Piedmont was never done. The removal of—

01-01:06:37 Cummins: The building there?

01-01:06:38 Pister: —the building there. The chemist, Melvin Calvin, Calvin Hall. That was all part of it. That was put on hold because the LBL needed the building. So—

01-01:06:56 Cummins: Can you talk a little bit about when you’re chairing something as large as this and you’ve got so many issues that you’re thinking about and trying—just talk about how you manage that situation, because it’s a very complicated—if you want. I mean you must—were you in this office at that point in time?

23

01-01:07:20 Pister: Yeah. I had no staff, of course. I worked out of this office, sure.

01-01:07:29 Cummins: Yeah, and this is a very small office, just for the record. And you’re trying— I’m just trying to envision you sitting here and you’re—and again it’s this issue. You don’t really have control, so if you could say something about that.

01-01:07:47 Pister: It’s hard to characterize, I think. I’ve found that in managing these kinds of issues it’s best to be absolutely open and forthright, and to look for ways to remove confrontation and look for a solution in which everyone feels that they got some part of the deal. I think I learned this when I was a dean, that when someone did something that you didn’t like or you felt that you had to intervene, a confrontational approach was rarely the most productive. So you had to find a way that—one way to say it is to preserve the dignity of the person that offended you but still find a way to change the behavior or change the mode of activity, whatever it was that was going on. And I call that finding a—you remember my executive assistant, Billie Greene?

01-01:09:31 Cummins: Yes.

01-01:09:33 Pister: She was a huge help to me in things like this, both at Berkeley when I was dean, and when I was Chancellor she was my executive assistant. She always kept me in check, said, “We have to find a constructive solution to this problem. So you have to try to work with people to get them to see another perspective on the issue.” I don’t know how else to talk about it, that’s really—it’s not like I did a lot of active intervention. In meetings I’d try to be sure everyone was heard. I think one of the things that I’ve learned is that you have to be a good listener, and often just to listen to a person’s concern is almost enough. They just wanted to be heard, whether or not you actually are able to completely remedy their position or not.

01-01:10:40 Cummins: And of course you’re in a position again, without the authority, but when you say something it has a big impact.

01-01:10:47 Pister: Yeah.

01-01:10:48 Cummins: And sometimes you’re not even aware that it has that kind of impact.

01-01:10:50 Pister: Yeah, the thing—I think people then and even now—because certainly I have no more authority now than I did at the beginning—people respect what I have to say, and the thing that probably gives me the greatest opportunity to help is that people are absolutely convinced that I’m neutral, that I don’t

24

have—because for the last couple of years I’ve asked all of the principals, I’ve asked Sandy [Barbour], I’ve asked Ed [Denton], and Nathan [Brostrom] when he was still here—do you still need me? Why do I have to be here? They said, “We want you to stay because you’re not on anyone’s side on this.” And there’s been a constant tension between Athletics and Capital Projects.

01-01:11:53 Cummins: Yes, right.

01-01:11:55 Pister: A natural one. All projects have that. So I think by virtue of my experience at Berkeley and at Santa Cruz, and my neutrality, that that’s been the major thing that’s given me an opportunity to really help them.

01-01:12:17 Cummins: You know it’s also interesting in your oral history, when you talk about the fact that you were viewed as the rebel, the renegade faculty member, remember? And the meeting that—I guess it was the dean/department chair, I can’t remember which, when you went in and said, “I move that we adjourn.” Because you didn’t want this on the—and then you talk about how you learned from that. And that’s of course, it’s a very—I could really relate to that. So I don’t know if you want to say anything more about that?

01-01:12:56 Pister: No, well it’s, you—

01-01:12:58 Cummins: Because you learn from those experiences when very young—

01-01:13:59 Pister: [laughing] Yeah, I think you grow up. I really—I was radicalized in the sixties. Up until the sixties I voted Republican; my father was a Republican. I voted Republican straight, and then the Vietnam War, the turmoil of the sixties, really had a huge impact on me. I was—

01-01:13:38 Cummins: Vatican II.

01-01:13:39 Pister: Vatican II. I was part of a group of Catholic faculty on the campus that met every month. We called ourselves the Irish Mafia, and, boy, that wonderful professor of history, the best, you know who I’m—he’s gone now, but he was a very prominent Catholic layman. He was part of the group, Steve Diliberto in Mathematics, Dave Louisell in Law.

01-01:14:20 Cummins: Was Jack Coons on there?

25

01-01:14:21 Pister: No, for some reason Jack didn’t come to those, and your namesake, John [S.] Cummins used to come. Frank Maurovich, who was editor of the old Monitor in San Francisco, then the Catholic Voice, came and we had wonderful meetings. Anyway, that ferment was going on, and that was kind of radicalizing me as well. Then I got put on the Campus Rules Committee by Roger Heyns, and Budd Cheit was the Executive Vice Chancellor then. The Campus Rules Committee—this would have been mid-sixties, just to show the tenor of the day, had two co-chairs: a student and a faculty member. Can you imagine that? And the co-chair, the student co-chair was a guy named Robin [G.W.] Room. Do you remember that name, Robin Room?

01-01:15:22 Cummins: No.

01-01:15:24 Pister: He was a flaming radical. I sent an e-mail to Robin Room this last year. He’s a professor in Australia, and I said, “Robin, I hadn’t seen you since the sixties. Remember we were on the Campus Rules Committee together?” He wrote back and said—I can’t remember what he said now, but anyway.

01-01:15:49 Cummins: That, and then the Angus Taylor comment.

01-01:15:53 Pister: Oh yeah.

01-01:15:54 Cummins: That you’re the most suspicious—

01-01:15:56 Pister: I’m the most suspicious faculty member that he ever met.

01-01:15:58 Cummins: Yeah, that’s right. Now that’s interesting too.

01-01:16:02 Pister: But to show—people do grow up, I think. And I realized that confrontation is not necessarily the best thing to do. And just to complete that thought, when I was at Santa Cruz one of my students was the chair of the statewide student organization, and the president of that organization of associated students had the privilege of addressing the Regents. I was Chancellor of course at the time, and she came once or twice and made remarks. So one day—she met with me in my office on a regular basis—I said to her—I can’t remember her name now—“You know, if you want the Regents to hear what you have to say, don’t insult them in your opening paragraph,” which is what students typically do. [laughter] And she heard that. I don’t know if that affected her there, but later on I recommended her for an internship in the White House, which she got. She was a brilliant young woman. And she was once wrote a

26

letter to me saying, “You know, the advice you gave me there—I’ve seen now how important it was, because nothing gets done here without compromise.”

01-01:17:36 Cummins: Yes. So it’s a combination—because you respect, and I think people respected you. You were willing to speak out, as you say in the oral history, you do speak your mind. But at the same time there’s this leavening kind of influence.

01-01:17:51 Pister: Yeah, you learn that I think. I hope it’s an indication that you can get wiser as you get older. During the time I was Dean, the first letter that I wrote I remember it was a criticism of something that happened in Mathematics, and I never wrote a letter like that again the whole time I was dean. Although I did make a terrible mistake with Chang-Lin Tien. He was department chairman when I was first dean, and there was some personnel issue in his department involving a female faculty member, and I sent a critical letter to Chang-Lin, and he really jumped down my throat saying, “You don’t have all the facts.” So I learned that—I apologized to him, and that taught me another lesson that I’m sure you have long since learned, that there are always at least two sides to every issue, if not more. And if you only hear one side you’d better be very careful. And that’s true all the way through here. There’s something I didn’t mention—that was very important in the stadium project.

As I said, because of the disfavor of Capital Projects we brought in URS, and the first program manager they gave us was a good guy. Then subsequently— he left URS. The subsequent program managers turned out to be absolutely duds. The people that they had working for them over here were incompetent, and in about a year we dropped URS.

01-01:19:53 Cummins: And then did Ed Denton—?

01-01:19:54 Pister: Ed Denton—well, reassumed his rightful position. And just for the record, I’ve worked with Ed now for almost seven years, this fall it’ll be seven years, and I really respect him and his organization. I think they’ve run a very fine organization. You know Mike [Heyman] chaired a committee to review Capital Projects.

01-01:20:25 Cummins: Yes he did.

01-01:20:27 Pister: And I think they came off reasonably well in that report. Interestingly enough, since I thought about—[telephone interruption]

01-01:20:47 Cummins: So we were talking about Ed Denton.

27

01-01:20:48 Pister: Well, his people are competent, they’re professional, and I’ve been very impressed with Ed. And I think that whole issue now of their ability to bring in projects on budget has basically been solved. Stanley Hall I think came in very well, and they have a huge amount under construction right now.

01-01:21:18 Cummins: Yes. Well, it’s an interesting—and my experience there, because Bob Berdahl hired Ed, and the feeling was we need to have somebody, because we didn’t have a vice chancellor for capital projects until he was hired, and he was actually on a review committee that Bob had set up to look—he was at Kaiser and then Bob ended up hiring him. But there was, as you mentioned earlier with the Haas Pavilion and some other projects, a lot of negativity vis-à-vis donors and how the money was spent, which was really too bad. But then he got the brunt of it. And I can remember Bob Berdahl often being in the position of saying to these donors, “No, actually he does know what he’s doing,” et cetera. And then that, in the context of the Spieker Plan for the stadium, made things very tense, that’s for sure. And we haven’t talked about the fundraising yet and the donor involvement.

01-01:22:32 Pister: We can do that. As I said, we got rid of URS and Ed took control. Then his person was a guy who since left, Tom—

01-01:22:52 Cummins: I’m blocking his name.

01-01:22:52 Pister: [laughing] Tom L. Okay, he’s Associate Vice Chancellor at UC Merced now

01-01:23:00 Cummins: Oh, Lollini. Tom Lollini.

01-01:23:01 Pister: Tom Lollini, good for you, Tom Lollini. So I worked fairly closely with Tom until he left, and then we brought in another person. There was something— no, I guess this escaped me. I’ll think, later on, on the—

01-01:23:40 Cummins: Do you want to go to the fundraising and talk about that connection? I was curious to know, because of your own engineering background how—you must have had your own opinions about various design elements that you would see. How did that work?

01-01:24:03 Pister: The only time I felt that I had competency to really speak out, it was on a totally different aspect of this whole issue. It’s the—what I’ll call the Dick [Richard C.] Blum affair.

28

01-01:24:27 Cummins: Well good, talk about that.

01-01:24:35 Pister: I can’t figure out the year. It would have been probably 2008 or 2009. When Dick was chair of the board I guess, he at some point communicated to the campus that he didn’t want us to play football in the stadium any longer because of the seismic risk. And so we, Ed and I and our structural engineer, David Friedman, Forell/Elsesser [Engineers], who’s a Berkeley grad, and Craig Comartin, who’s a consulting engineer in Stockton, also a Berkeley grad—he’s a consultant in the area of geotechnical engineering—we put together a presentation to explain to Dick Blum that it was not really a great risk to play football in the stadium.

And then I had these people develop a risk analysis that showed that the probability of a spectator in the stadium being injured or losing his life was the same order as a round-trip flight on a commercial airliner, or a daily commuter across the Bay Bridge. We put this together in a presentation for Dick, and Nathan and I and Ed visited Dick in Blum Capital in San Francisco and made a presentation. But when you meet with Dick Blum you listen primarily, and you don’t say much. So we said very little and we listened, and he absolutely ignored what we had to say. He said, “You’re not going to play football in the, when was it again, the 2009-2010 season.”

So then we—the cost of not playing football there was huge. It was I think about $5 million a year to go over to AT&T Park, and it was really a bad scene. We presented that all to him. So what we did—we got our structural engineers, David Friedman and a peer reviewer, Loring Wyllie, was president of Degenkolb and Associates, Degenkolb Engineers, another outstanding structural engineering firm in the city. They devised a plan to put up a series of steel braces all the way around the west side, the ends and the west side, and to line the two tunnels with a mesh, in case anyone was in the tunnel when there was an earthquake. We had David Friedman make a presentation to the Board, I sat at the table with him and with Ed, and presented what we were going to do to the Board. Dick was satisfied. So we went ahead with the project, but it cost us about $3 million to do that.

01-01:28:58 Cummins: I was just going to say—and are there unanticipated costs?

01-01:29:02 Pister: Yeah right, and that went on for—I think more than a year before we resolved that issue. It put the whole project at great risk at one point.

01-01:29:18 Cummins: Right. And I guess his rationale, from what I’ve heard, was that he was in— what would it have been at that point in time? During the World Series.

29

01-01:29:31 Pister: Oh—here was a connection. He kept telling us when Dianne [Feinstein] was mayor she fixed Candlestick Park.

01-01:29:44 Cummins: Candlestick Park, correct.

01-01:29:45 Pister: So that it survived the Loma Prieta earthquake with no damage to anyone, and he kept throwing that in our face, so that’s why we fixed the stadium so—

01-01:29:59 Cummins: So that it—

01-01:30:00 Pister: —so that there wouldn’t be any loss of life in case of an earthquake.

But anyway, you were getting back to my speaking out—that was an area because I spent about the last twenty years of my faculty career here working in earthquake engineering, so I knew a fair amount about seismic design and risk. And I worked closely with Friedman and Comartin to understand it, and then I had a colleague here, who’s an expert in this area, even provide an additional bit of information for me, because everyone’s worried about the stadium being on the Hayward Fault. Well, there are two kinds of things that can happen. There can be strong ground-shaking that causes structural collapse of the stadium—that’s always going to be present—or there’s a possibility that there can be a fault rupture right at the stadium. But the probability—it’s one thing to come up with a probability of a strong motion earthquake that will shake the stadium, but it’s a much lower probability that an earthquake will produce a ground rupture right at the stadium. Our current design provides for that possibility, that there can be a fault rupture, a significant fault rupture of several feet, right at the stadium, so that the structure will be separated, so that the two pieces can slide and move relative to one another. That’s how our structural engineers developed the design. So that’s something I understood very well and tried to reinforce and communicate when the Regents had to be convinced, and Blum had to be convinced that we knew how to do this. But that’s the only place where I felt that I had a special knowledge that I ought to speak out on.

01-01:32:25 Cummins: It’s interesting, because that is a good example of the connection between science and policy, and a glaring example of something that seems counterintuitive, right? I mean how could anything stand up to something like that?

01-01:32:44 Pister: Our structural engineer pointed out that he’d done work for the City of Berkeley, and that the design of this stadium was as good as or better than the

30

designs of downtown Berkeley that they’d done. There was no reason why the city should be critical of what we were doing here. Physician, heal thyself.

01-01:33:14 Cummins: So just a couple thoughts. One is whether you want to say anything more about the alternatives. That just reminded me—in other words there were various alternatives—permanently moving to the Oakland Coliseum, that was one. Edwards Field was another one, move it down closer to the city.

01-01:33:36 Pister: Well, of course. The alternatives were not feasible for different reasons. Edwards Field simply didn’t have the site capacity. There aren’t enough square feet in Edwards Field to do this kind of thing. And if you pushed it to the absolute margins, you’d have an enormous structure there right out to the sidewalk. It would have been a very unsightly kind of thing, so that didn’t work.

We did a fairly detailed alternative—not us but our consultants—did an alternative down in Albany, what it would cost. And the costs were simply prohibitive to build a new stadium, not to mention the parking facilities, the access and egress to roads and all. I don’t remember how many hundred millions it was, but it—

01-01:34:40 Cummins: Could you do it even, with liquefaction?

01-01:34:43 Pister: Well, that was another issue, sure, another issue.

01-01:34:43 Cummins: That was another factor. Yeah, because a lot of that is fill, right?

01-01:34:47 Pister: Yeah, that’s right. It would have building in a very unstable area. And the existing fields just aren’t feasible. The conflicts with other scheduled activities—the coliseum has football and baseball. And that’s why, by the way, we’re not there.

01-01:35:07 Cummins: Now.

01-01:35:08 Pister: We’re over at AT&T because they had very little interest in accommodating us at the Coliseum.

There were some other things in the proceedings that we went through that affected our strategy—that took a lot of energy but ultimately didn’t affect us. The Panoramic Hill people found a person who said the stadium had no value. Under Alquist-Priolo [Earthquake Fault] Zoning Act you can only put up to 50 percent of the value of the structure in any remodeling that you do. And so

31

if the stadium has no value you can’t do anything to it. That was kind of an absurd position, it seemed to me, actually counter to the intent of Alquist- Priolo, which was to try to improve seismic risk of facilities. Since I mentioned Alquist-Priolo, there was an interesting side issue here.

Last year, thanks to Nancy Skinner and Loni [Hancock]—both very supportive—we resolved the issue. By this time the City of Berkeley had dropped out; they didn’t participate in the appeal of Judge Miller’s decision, so the City of Berkeley was now, effectively, officially neutral on anything going on. So with their support we were able to get legislation passed that exempted the stadium from Alquist-Priolo. And I’m paraphrasing it. There’s is a more technical way to say this. The way it was done was to attach it to a kind of omnibus bill. Understandably, the plaintiff’s attorney caught this and said, “You can’t do that, it’s illegal.” But it’s done all the time in Sacramento. Attaching stuff to bills that had a different intent. “You can’t do this.” So we went back, and last year had a new piece of legislation put together that straightened all this out, so now the stadium is exempted from Alquist-Priolo. There were other reasons for its exemption; in fact it’s a historic structure. It’s a type of reinforced concrete frame that is also exempt from Alquist-Priolo; that is, the valuation part of Alquist-Priolo. But that’s all clarified now.

I should also talk here about our negotiations with the Panoramic Hill Association. Last year we went through, I think for almost a year, negotiations to try to address some of their concerns and get them out of the appellate proceedings that the Save the Oaks people were still involved in. And we had countless meetings with their leadership, a guy named Michael Kelly who’s the president of the association. We finally hammered out a set of terms for a settlement that had to do with how many events were in the stadium. It goes back to the Bowker—

01-01:39:25 Cummins: To the covenants, yes.

01-01:39:26 Pister: And you know the subsequent chancellors have all continued to respect it—

01-01:39:30 Cummins: Oh yes, I’m actually going to—

01-01:39:32 Pister: [laughing] You’ve been through all of that.

01-01:39:34 Cummins: Yeah.

01-01:39:36 Pister: And there was a lot of discussion, so we finally hammered out terms of settlement, and it ultimately required the campus to pay some attorney’s fees for their counsel, Mike Lozeau. And the Chancellor of course was very

32

reluctant to do that. Ed Denton and I, one morning, had to go and sit with him and say, “Bob, I know it’s counter to your feeling on this, but it’s much better to give them $75,000 and get them out of our hair than to deal with the possibility that we’ll have to fight in the appellate court.” In the meantime— well, he agreed, he did it reluctantly. The court of appeals gave us a clean bill; they didn’t hear the case, so that’s water under the bridge now. Anyway, each one of these was, at the time, a monumental issue.

01-01:40:51 Cummins: Now, you said there’s still—at the Berkeley Fellows dinner—some kind of a suit?

01-01:41:02 Pister: Oh yeah.

01-01:41:03 Cummins: If you want, talk about that one too.

01-01:41:05 Pister: Sure. The stadium project and the high performance center were, I think the technical term is, tiered off of the LRDP [Long Range Development Plan] EIR.

01-01:41:34 Cummins: For the southeast quadrant?

01-01:41:35 Pister: No, the campus. The 2020 LRDP, which remember had a legal settlement as a consequence of that one. And that left—that was the bad taste for some of the council members that that settlement, and Tom Bates bore the brunt of that. That very significantly colored their views of the stadium project.

01-01:42:05 Cummins: The connection, yes. Whether it was or was not a part of the larger LRDP itself, and what did—

01-01:42:13 Pister: Yeah, they were very upset. Some of—I guess if not a majority a near majority of the council were very anti-campus because of that settlement. They didn’t like the settlement. I don’t know whether I can get back on that track.

01-01:42:32 Cummins: So this current lawsuit.

01-01:42:34 Pister: Yeah, the current lawsuit is a consequence of our having to go into—we have the option of either filing an addendum to the EIR that we did, we just certified the project, the stadium and the building, because we made some changes. We decided not to go ahead with the Maxwell Field parking

33

structure. There was an athletic service center attached to the parking structure, so we had to modify that. We modified very slightly the press box, and then we had to talk about the use of Witter Field for practice for the football team. We had the choice between doing a supplemental EIR or an addendum. The addendum didn’t require the formal forty-five day hearing window for comments, the public hearing and comments. We publicized the addendum. We didn’t hold a formal hearing. There were criticisms of the addendum, but we responded to them. The Regents approved the addendum, and it was the certification of the addendum that most recently, that engendered the new lawsuit last November.

01-01:44:17 Cummins: And who’s the plaintiff in that?

01-01:44:20 Pister: The plaintiff is Stephan Volker, the attorney for the Save the Oaks people. It’s now Stand Up for Berkeley and Berkeley Neighborhoods, whoever they are.

01-01:44:29 Cummins: I see, I see. And so the basis of the case is?

01-01:44:34 Pister: Is the inadequacy of the addendum process. The judge has already ruled on this. Understandably the plaintiff’s motion said you’ve got to stop everything until you go back and get a proper EIR, a supplemental EIR, go through the process. In the meantime, as soon as he filed his complaint last fall we started with a supplemental EIR process to be ready, and that process finished March 14, 2011. And so we’re answering—we’re preparing comments now to go back and have the Regents certify the supplemental EIR. But in the meantime the judge’s ruling was the Regents have to perform a—I think it’s called a rescission of the earlier certification, in other words remove it. And there were three issues that he said we had to fix. He exempted the press box process, said we can go ahead with it. The deal on the press box was it’s longer and two feet higher than in the earlier EIR. But he didn’t see that as a problem, so we were allowed to go ahead with the press box. So it’s the service center, explain the Maxwell parking issue, and explain how you’re going to mitigate noise at Witter Field. Those are the three things that we have to deal with in the supplemental EIR.

01-01:46:24 Cummins: So I would think on the Maxwell Field, that that would be a no-brainer, I mean that’s a—geez.

01-01:46:31 Pister: We don’t know why he’s hung up on that. And the athletic service center—— the plaintiffs say, “You didn’t do a proper geotechnical study for that,” but that’s absurd. We’re not worried about that. The only other, there’s another— see there was a supplemental power station that has to go in, and they were complaining about that, that that wasn’t properly noticed in any EIR actually.

34

01-01:47:07 Cummins: Well, if you don’t mind maybe we can stop now

01-01:47:10 Pister: Okay, sure.

01-01:47:12 Cummins: I knew this would take longer than one interview. I’ll send you an e-mail and we’ll set another time to finish.

01-01:47:19 Pister: Okay, fine.

01-01:47:20 Cummins: Because this is very, very helpful, that’s for sure.

01-01:47:22 Pister: I think we’ve pretty much gone through the stadium stuff now.

01-01:47:28 Cummins: Well, let’s see, in my mind anyway, we should talk about how the fundraising and all of the thinking that parallels that, and then the seat-licensing component of this.

01-01:47:43 Pister: And then the contrast between campuses. We do want to do that.

01-01:47:46 Cummins: Oh exactly, that’s on my notes too, those three. And then the fourth one is just now that you’ve been so heavily involved with Athletics and seen all of this and seen—the other thing we have to talk about is the faculty resolution, your letter, and what all this means basically for Athletics. I’ll summarize that in the e-mail that I send you.

01-01:48:09 Cummins: So, thank you very much.

[End Audio File 1]

35

Interview #2: April 21, 2011 Begin Audio File 2

02-00:00:01 Cummins: This is a continuation of an interview with Karl Pister on intercollegiate athletics. It’s April 21, 2011. So we were going to continue by talking about the various fundraising strategies, both for the Student Athlete High Performance Center and the stadium.

02-00:00:26 Pister: Right. Well initially—of course the emphasis was on raising money for the Student Athlete High Performance Center, and the early gift by the Simpsons, Barc Simpson and his wife, was kind of a naming opportunity that got that part of it going. The fundraising, I think at the beginning, went reasonably well. I can’t remember now, exactly, the timing, but at some point I think it was really Nathan Brostrom that introduced the idea of an FFE [Fund Functioning as Endowment]. He said, “You know, we really ought to take advantage of what private universities have done for years, and not use the money we get for the center to build the place, but to leverage that money through an issuance of tax-free bonds and using that money.” But then suddenly—I don’t know where this came from—but somebody discovered that there’s an internal revenue problem. You can’t use tax-free bonds to fund a facility like this. So the money—we had to change the way we were thinking about it and say that the money we were raising and putting in this FFE would go into the budget of the Athletic Department, and then the Athletic Department would use funds for its different needs, and that seemed to be a satisfactory legal resolution of the issue. So that was a kind of a breakthrough.

Then the whole issue of the lawsuits and the delay in the construction—that kind of put a damper on the fundraising at some point, I remember. But the planning went on for the second project. We had originally called it phase one, two, and three. The facility would be phase one, the upgrade of the stadium phase two—or the west side and the end zones—and then phase three would have been the east side, which was always a long shot and never expected to be built in this project timeframe. Although the existence of phase three was the cause for the Friends of Tightwad Hill, whatever they call themselves, filing a lawsuit claiming some historical, cultural basis for allowing them to sit up there and watch games free.

02-00:03:47 Cummins: Their views would be possibly at stake, right?

02-00:03:51 Pister: Yeah, it was an absurd thing, yet it was a legal complication we had to deal with. Actually, let’s see, I’ve forgotten—what is the technical term? We came to some agreement with them so that the lawsuit was terminated, but they have some right in the future under the terms of the

36

agreement. To reintroduce their concerns—I don’t remember what it was. The Chancellor and I certainly over and over again said this is not going to happen in our lifetime! [laughter] So, that’s really all I can remember about the early days. We built up the money; we never had enough to build the high performance center.

02-00:04:53 Cummins: I think I remember Don McQuade and Scott Biddy saying that they felt—this was in a cabinet meeting—that the most money they could raise would be about $125 million.

02-00:05:09 Pister: That’s the number I remember too.

02-00:05:10 Cummins: Yeah, and then when I left, which was 2008, they were around maybe $85- $90 million.

02-00:05:21 Pister: Yeah.

02-00:05:22 Cummins: I’m not quite sure of that, but then when I got back and I had a conversation with Frank Yeary, he said that’s where they were, right about $90 [million], and they were confident they would raise whatever the rest was, another $10 [million] or $15 million to cover that. But I guess the bonds for both the high performance center and the stadium were combined at some point in time, so you might want to—

02-00:05:56 Pister: So no, that’s essentially what happened. There was just a—what’s the word— an elision of the two projects. We stopped talking about fundraising for the center, and it was just—and then of course the seat program idea came in. Want to talk a little bit about that?

02-00:06:22 Cummins: Right, yes, yes.

02-00:06:25 Pister: And that really changed the whole picture of fundraising and support for the project. I don’t remember what year that was, but the stadium capital group from—was it, Morgan Stanley I think, came in with an idea that they had used I think in professional venues but never in a university yet. We had several meetings with them and they made a proposal which was worked out, a contractual agreement was made. And then subsequently at some point it was modified, and their role was reduced, and their fee was significantly reduced as well. So that we kind of developed our version of their program, and we changed it from a seat program to an endowment for Athletics program. So it’s now an endowment seat program and not a—I don’t remember what it was beyond—

37

02-00:07:45 Cummins: Straight.

02-00:07:47 Pister: —what we originally called it. So that was an evolutionary process working with them.

02-00:07:58 Cummins: And then I guess—so what Frank told me was, there was—the money that had already been raised that I assume—and I’ll check all this later with the budget person, Laura Hazlett, I think her name is—so there was that money. It was invested. There was the seat-licensing program. There was an additional $50 million he said that had to be raised—this I got from Dave Rosselli, the fundraiser at Cal Athletics before he left—and a ticket surcharge.

02-00:08:39 Pister: Yes, so the debt service consists of income from the investment of the money up front, and will come in under the seat program and seat surcharge, and as you mentioned an additional $50 million that’s supposed to come from naming rights.

02-00:09:10 Cummins: Once the stadium is finished and people see what they are getting—

02-00:09:12 Pister: Right, that’s right. And that’s kind of in neutral right now as far as I can determine. And it’s complicated by the fact that Sandy has no development officer. I just went bananas on that. In fact a couple weeks ago in my meeting with Bob I said, “You know this is really not good. We’re eighteen months out from opening the stadium, and there’s no leadership in fundraising right now.” So that afternoon he called a meeting. We brought all the principals together. Sandy was there, but I don’t think anything has happened. I just don’t get it. [Campanile tolling in background]

02-00:09:59 Cummins: Well, I had a little bit of involvement here because Foti Mellis—I don’t know if you know that name—but he’s in charge of athletics compliance for Sandy.

02-00:10:13 Pister: I see.

02-00:10:13 Cummins: And he came from Indiana and is a good friend of Curt Simic’s son, so Curt knew him, Foti, before he ever came to Cal, and he’s been here a long time. So Foti came up with this idea because Curt Simic is now retired—and you remember Curt?

02-00:10:31 Pister: Oh, very well. [laughing]

38

02-00:10:31 Cummins: Very well, yes. But besides starting major fundraising for Berkeley in the eighties, then he left, went to Indiana and he raised I think—and they only count money in hand—they raised over $3 billion in the time that was he there. So quite successful. So anyway, Foti had an idea of bringing Curt out here temporarily, in this gap, to try and help. And Curt knew a lot of the actors from having been here earlier. He certainly knows Athletics. When he was at Oregon, before coming here, Athletics reported to him, so he knows the landscape. And Steve Desimone, the golf coach, also knew Curt very well, and I did, so we did get Curt to come out. He had a meeting with Sandy, and then nothing happened. Everybody was puzzled about that too, that well, at least somebody that knows the landscape that could get going on this, but yes, it’s been a source of frustration, that’s for sure.

02-00:11:46 Pister: Okay, so now where the thing is, we monitor—I just reported earlier this week to the Chancellor on the status of the endowment program, which is really an absolutely critical issue.

02-00:12:02 Cummins: Yes, exactly, how does that—do you feel—?

02-00:12:04 Pister: The third quarter for this current year, third quarter targets were within 6 percent, or at 6 or 7 percent.

02-00:12:15 Cummins: Good.

02-00:12:16 Pister: Yeah, there’s a significant—the percentage of seats sold, or committed rather, or sold really because there has to be a legal commitment to count it, the percentage of seats is on the order of 55 percent, something like that, and the amount of, the value of those seats is the order of, I think about $160 million, something like that. So we’re doing okay.

02-00:12:51 Cummins: Coming along.

02-00:12:52 Pister: Although there was, essentially, as I said, an elision of the funding for the two projects, of course there had been still a very careful separation of the budgets, because we have to stick with the Regents’ budget that was approved. The building is doing fine, the stadium project is a constant source of nightmares, keeping the budget within the Regents budget. The early bids were fine, but as time went on the bids began to exceed the estimates, and so we’ve had overruns on awarding the bids, a lot of trouble. So right now we’re right on the cusp of letting about $40-some million worth of subcontracts—we had a meeting on Monday of our principals committee to try to cut back in some of the allocations for what we call bid alternatives that have been in and out, and

39

it’s just touch and go right now. And Frank [Yeary] has been a bear on this. Thank God we’ve got him, because he won’t let it go unless he can see it in black and white.

02-00:14:28 Cummins: Absolutely. All these projects are so difficult and then that one is so complicated.

02-00:14:38 Pister: Yeah, yeah. So that’s about where we are. Right now there’s just a lot of uncertainty. I can’t remember, a fair—I don’t know the number, $20-or-so million worth of contracts, bids to be put out yet that haven’t been awarded. So we don’t know when that will be. We haven’t played with the contingency fee in the project, so that’s been protected. And we still have, of course, legal issues to deal with and we’re dealing with that.

02-00:15:28 Cummins: Right. So the number that I’ve seen seems to be fairly consistent, about the payments in the first twenty years, is $19 million. Is that right?

02-00:15:44 Pister: I don’t remember off the top of my head.

02-00:15:45 Cummins: Okay. Cal Moore and Frank Yeary have talked about that, and then of course there’s a big jump the twenty-first year of the amortization. So the $19 million—and of course that came in because of the low interest rates which caused all of this confusion with one of your colleagues, Professor [Brian] Barsky, about how much money was being used et cetera, et cetera. So I think the $19 million is the amount that is owed on the two bonds in total, which doesn’t seem to be outrageous by any means. You would think you would be able to have that $19 million pretty much in hand, just based on what you’re saying, even with 50 percent seat-licensing. It’s further down the road, I guess, when the big payments come. But anyway, that’s interesting too. So your role in this, again, is quite important. The Chancellor really relies on you.

02-00:17:01 Pister: I think he looks at me as a kind of a peer reviewer in a sense, an independent person that doesn’t have a vested interest in either the pressure from Athletics to maintain scope or enlarge scope, and the pressure from Capital Projects to keep the project within bounds. That’s been a back and forth all the way through. But I think people have behaved very civilly, and we’ve had very constructive discussions. I’ve been very impressed by the professionalism that people have shown all the way through this.

02-00:17:52 Cummins: You refer to the principals committee. Is that a large committee? Small?

40

02-00:18:00 Pister: It’s an evolution of the Southeast Campus Integrated Projects Committee what was established early on, and I was asked to chair that committee.

02-00:18:17 Cummins: Yes, and we’ve talked about that.

02-00:18:18 Pister: It’s basically Athletics, Capital Projects, and staff people in both of those— Laura Hazlett comes. In Capital Projects we have Jennifer Lawrence, who— Jennifer McDougall, I guess, now—who does the legal stuff, the EIR, works with our outside counsel. And then people from Frank’s office come in and out, and Erin Gore has come from time to time. And then the campus counsel, at times when there are legal issues, comes in. So it’s an interesting—and from the Chancellor’s Office Cathy Koshland sits because of her role in campus planning.

02-00:19:31 Cummins: Is Development involved on the committee? Do they have a representative?

02-00:19:35 Pister: No, there’s nobody. Early on, in the early years, we had people. I think Scott [Biddy] came several times, and in the beginning Don McQuade was a member of this committee. It was much larger, because Law and Business were involved earlier on, and just to show how things have evolved though, it’s really been interesting—I don’t think I mentioned this. I think it’s very important. You remember this whole—the direction of this project from the beginning was very much influenced by the aftermath of the Haas Pavilion, so that there was an overt attempt to minimize the role of capital projects.

02-00:20:25 Cummins: Yes, you did mention that.

02-00:20:26 Pister: Yeah, and that has evolved, as I said, in the beginning, to the extent that in my letter of appointment when this committee formed, it was established that the decisions about this project—that I had responsibility for making decisions about the integrated projects but I didn’t have the budget authority, because that was vested in the Vice Chancellor for Facilities. But he was not even given a role at the beginning. And as soon as the project got really going I saw the futility of that arrangement. Ed wasn’t even a member of that committee at the beginning, and I brought him on board. And then I think by virtue of performance as much as anything, Capital Projects—and the total screwup of having URS manage the project, Capital Projects has kind of become—is in a state of grace again, to use an old-fashioned term. And so they have the major role, as they should in my view.

02-00:21:53 Cummins: Yeah, great. Well, let’s talk about, just for a minute, the current situation, because it’s related obviously to the fundraising component. By current

41

situation I mean the decision of the Chancellor in September to cut five sports and then the aftermath of that.

02-00:22:17 Pister: Yeah. Well, certainly whether or not the Berkeley Division did what it did and passed a resolution, whether that happened or not, the Chancellor really—that was certainly additional impetus, but the Chancellor had to deal with the budget problem in Athletics. It simply was not under control. And I think his decision to cut the sports that he did was essentially the only thing that could have been done. He did the right thing. I would have done exactly the same thing had I been in his position. The way in which the whole thing was done and all, I thought, was not good.

02-00:23:13 Cummins: Say a little bit about that.

02-00:23:15 Pister: I just don’t understand how Intercollegiate Athletics could have overlooked the Title IX implications of the original proposal. I mean, who—?

02-00:23:34 Cummins: I couldn’t believe it!

02-00:23:37 Pister: I don’t know who made the decision, what group of people did, but it’s a great mystery to me because they obviously knew that they had a constraint, and someone just didn’t do the homework right. I don’t understand. Whether Sandy was preoccupied with something else or what, I don’t understand it, but—

02-00:24:04 Cummins: Well, when Athletics reported to me, up until Nathan arrived—it was about a two-and-half-year period—we went through a similar effort as a result of the budget. There was a very comprehensive Title IX analysis done that—I don’t know if you ever saw it?

02-00:24:27 Pister: No, I never did.

02-00:24:28 Cummins: I don’t know if Frank Yeary ever saw it, interestingly. I just never asked him. But there was a major push on my part to say, “We have to do this analysis and we have to be communicating with the donor community about this issue.” There was a great reluctance on the part of the Development Office to deal with the donor community. They said it just gets in the way, it’s not worth it, et cetera. The amount of savings that we would have made, if certain sports had been cut, was about $4 million, the same as what the Chancellor has proposed in September. But the decision was made because the financial situation was not anywhere near like it became, that it is not worth it, it’s going to cause too much—and I said okay, fine.

42

On the Title IX however, we spent a fair amount of money having an outside person with great expertise come in. They did a study that was attorney-client privileged sent directly to [campus counsel] Mike Smith so we didn’t have to divulge it. So that was sitting right there. And then I had a conversation with the Chancellor in December, the December preceding—so that had to be December of 2009, preceding his decision to cut sports that was made the following September—but he said, “Yes, we’re going to cut sports.” And I said, “I assume they are all men’s sports?” And he said, “No, there will be some women’s sports that will be cut too.” And I thought, well—so again; very puzzling when you look at the aftermath, how that ever could have happened.

02-00:26:30 Pister: Anyway, but all’s well that ends well, I guess.

02-00:26:35 Cummins: Yes, exactly, as it turned out. So when you look at that, because you have been a Chancellor, and you certainly know all the pressures associated with that, and you said you would make that same decision, what do you make of all this? In other words there’s been a lot of research—not a lot but there’s been some fairly definitive research talking about the connection, or lack thereof, between a successful athletics program and ability to fundraise, et cetera. How do you see all of that in this context now, having been so close to this and watched it? What would your own take be on it?

02-00:27:28 Pister: Well, my sense of this is that Intercollegiate Athletics is and has been an integral part of what defines the Berkeley campus. You can go back to the beginning, and it’s always been there. My mother was engaged to a rugby player. She had a Big C, gold Big C that he gave her.

02-00:28:00 Cummins: Amazing. [laughter]

02-00:28:01 Pister: Yeah, so and that was 1910. She didn’t marry that rugby player however. Maybe I told you this story?

02-00:28:14 Cummins: No.

Pister: I don’t know if that’s in there. It turned out—I remembered his name, it was Jack Abrams. In reading Don McLaughlin’s oral history—Don was in the class of ’14, that was my mother’s class—in reading his oral history I ran across the name, a Jack Abrams. He was a fraternity brother of Don McLaughlin. Isn’t that an amazing coincidence? And I had never heard that name except from my mother. So you know this was seventy years later, seventy-five years later, that I discovered it, long after my mother died.

43

Anyway, so I see Intercollegiate Athletics as having a place at the resource table at Berkeley. It just makes total sense, and I think there are many people that feel the same way, many people on campus and among our alumni and friends, there’s no question about that. How to resource it and what’s the role of Intercollegiate Athletics in the grand scheme of things, I think they should be and I think have been treated just like all other units, whether they’re academic units or administrative units. In the years that I was Dean here I never had any concerns about conflicts with Intercollegiate Athletics. Many of my alumni were avid sports fans, and they gave money to Athletics, and they gave money to me. I didn’t see any conflict at all there. And you probably know better than I the data; there seems to be a very positive symbiosis. People that give to Athletics also give to the academic programs. Certainly many of the larger donors do.

02-00:30:36 Cummins: Oh yeah, there’s no question and the history—and I think I did say that earlier the origin of the Bear Backers, and then the Cal Sports ‘80s fundraising that Dave Maggard got started that was co-chaired by Wally Haas and Roger Heyns, and then Mike Heyman saying that’s really the model that we need to adopt. Well, a lot of those people who were directly involved moved right over into the major fundraising effort on the campus. So I think historically here, I don’t think there is much question about that at all.

02-00:31:14 Pister: No.

02-00:31:16 Cummins: And I think there isn’t any way you can run a program like Intercollegiate Athletics without some university contribution. That’s also very clear, in my mind anyway, when you look at the history over the past twenty-or-so years. So I think the difficulty arises at a time of financial crisis, when everybody’s under the gun, and those subsidies, or whatever you want to call them, the deficits that were allowed to continue year after year for that program without clarifying it. That was what was amazing to me. If you look at UCLA for example, they have a standing committee of the Academic Senate that reviews their budget every year, the Intercollegiate Athletics budget, et cetera. They don’t have final authority but they are certainly clear—

02-00:32:20 Pister: Advisory.

02-00:32:21 Cummins: Advisory. They’re clearly involved, and we never had that. We still don’t have it.

02-00:32:25 Pister: Well, there is some kind of Senate committee isn’t there?

44

02-00:32:28 Cummins: Well they’re—

02-00:32:29 Pister: Or is it an administrative committee?

02-00:32:30 Cummins: It’s the University Athletics Board, which we set up when I had Athletics.

02-00:32:37 Pister: Okay.

02-00:32:39 Cummins: There was essentially a compromise where Robert Knapp was the chair of the Senate and Alice Agogino I think was the vice chair, and so they were concerned. Then what I basically said to Bob Berdahl was, “If you’re going to try and get this under control, the budget, you have to be open about it.”

02-00:33:04 Pister: Yeah.

02-00:33:05 Cummins: Because up until that point, for years, it was always made by a very small group of people, those decisions. And so that’s when it opened up. And there was a question: should the Senate—because that’s what Bob Knapp was thinking about—should we have our own committee? That led to this compromise, a joint faculty-administrative committee. Anyway, that’s what happened there. But it’s interesting, whether it takes an absolute crisis like we’re certainly right in, still in, in order for those changes to occur in a unit like Athletics, versus other units that just go along. So could you talk a little bit about the Santa Cruz campus and your views about Athletics there versus a place like Berkeley.

02-00:34:16 Pister: The culture of Santa Cruz is markedly different from Berkeley. The campus evolved from a different model, and it has no history comparable to Berkeley in terms of Athletics. So I think that there are differences. I think the way Santa Cruz handles Athletics is completely appropriate and consistent with what Santa Cruz is as a community, the campus community, and I say the same thing for Berkeley. But they are different. They are a Division III school, and they have a limited number of sports. I don’t think that they do particularly well in any one of them, but the kids have a good time and that’s—I think their tennis is probably one of their best; men’s tennis has been quite good.

I don’t know if I mentioned this before. The really significant and dramatic difference between Berkeley and Santa Cruz is the fact that at Santa Cruz there’s no place for students to identify as UC Santa Cruz as a group. There’s no venue that’s large enough to accommodate all or a significant number of the students at one time. And in that sense the Memorial Stadium, and to a

45

lesser extent the Haas Pavilion, provides an opportunity to really intensify the students’ identity with the campus, you know? I am a Cal person, right? And I think actually there’s—the cultural anthropologists call it a rite of intensification, that you do things like this to intensify your commitment to an institution or an idea. And I found that to be significant; its absence was very compelling to me at Santa Cruz. I don’t know if you remember at Santa Cruz there’s a quarry?

02-00:37:12 Cummins: Yes.

02-00:37:13 Pister: And that’s the place where campus functions are held, but it’s a very small place; only a few hundred people is all you can have there. That’s where I was inaugurated, in the quarry, but it’s just not adequate.

So I see the stadium to be a hugely important place to celebrate the oneness, the unity, or identity, or membership in the Berkeley community. And it brings alumni back, it brings friends to participate, it just continues to build bonds which I think are very important. So that’s a real difference. I expect UCLA has a similar problem; they have to go clear over to the Rose Bowl for their games. So you have to adapt; you have to make that the place where you celebrate together. It’s just a little different but it accomplishes the same purpose. Anyway, is that—?

02-00:38:32 Cummins: Yeah, that’s good, exactly. I think so much of this is the history and the culture that has built up over such a long period of time.

02-00:38:42 Pister: Absolutely.

02-00:38:44 Cummins: And then the challenge is containing it. For example, just to go back to this fundraising issue for a second. One thought that occurred to me is that— would it be wise, in your view, to make Athletics, to have kind of an outside board that actually takes responsibility for Athletics? It’s advisory, it reports to the Chancellor ultimately, but it is essentially run by this outside foundation. Virginia Tech has that, University of Florida does that. When I interviewed Chuck Young he talked about the differences in doing that, and he said of course that works as long as they’re making money. In other words, as long as this is all breaking even. But do you have a view?

02-00:39:48 Pister: You know, I’d never thought about that. So it’s a nonprofit foundation whose purpose is clearly focused on intercollegiate athletics, and it has to—in our system it would be a support group under regental policy.

46

02-00:40:14 Cummins: Yeah, and exactly how much authority that those kinds of groups have I don’t know, but what I plan to do at some point is, and Chuck Young said he’d help with this, is actually talk to the person at the University of Florida that runs their system. It’s highly successful. They bring in a substantial amount of money to the University. They’ve recently, just in the past few months, the President and the AD issued a statement saying that their goal was to be excellent at every sport in which they participated. I think their total budget, the total number of sports is less—they have twenty-one sports, I think, at Florida. But in that article it also quoted the President as saying, “Of course this would be a different story if they weren’t bringing money into the University.” So you still have to deal with it, but I just wonder what the advantages and disadvantages would be.

02-00:41:26 Pister: Well John, the thing that occurs to me first about trying to do this at Berkeley is that it’s a foundation that sits beside the Berkeley Foundation.

02-00:41:41 Cummins: True.

02-00:41:42 Pister: And I see right away a territorial tug of war starting to happen. If you have an independent foundation—

02-00:41:59 Cummins: That’s true.

02-00:42:02 Pister: I think the professional schools, certainly Engineering—I had a Berkeley engineering fund, but that fund was a part of the campus. And it didn’t function independently so to speak. I really worry about—[loud conversation in the background] It reminds me—[interruption in recording]

Anyway, we were talking about an athletic foundation. I was going to say, back in the nineties—you probably remember this John—there was a lot of trouble, university-wide, Berkeley, the medical schools, with faculty members that were raising money and doing stuff pretty much independent of the University.

02-00:43:21 Cummins: Yes, exactly.

02-00:43:25 Pister: And so the Regents went through a process of—I think it was more bringing up to date, revising the policies on support groups. And particularly the medical schools, where they had—there were multiple foundations of this type. So, thinking about that I’m just wondering—[laughing]

47

02-00:43:49 Cummins: How that would work, yeah, exactly.

02-00:43:51 Pister: It raises the issue of the conflicting priorities and people moving in directions that are nonproductive. It would be interesting to learn more about how Florida does it.

02-00:44:06 Cummins: Well, one of the things they have, for example, at their disposal is three jets. [laughter].That’s for the University as a whole I guess, but the AD has access to them.

02-00:44:23 Pister: That would make—remember Chuck Young’s Air Bruin?

02-00:44:27 Cummins: Yes I do, exactly. Woody was the pilot. I remember that very well, yes.

02-00:44:38 Pister: You know when Chuck was President I made a couple of visits there at his request. The first one was to help him break the faculty union, to talk to his administration and the Senate there. I talked to the Senate leaders there and all, and they had a terrible system there. I went back for a conference on shared governance and explained the UC system. But the reason I mention this is while there I stayed in their Hilton conference center and facility right on the campus that Hilton runs for them, and the presence of athletics in that hotel! The gift shop was just one mass of Florida Gator stuff, like massive photos of the stadium that sold for $1,500, framed things. It just shows that—

02-00:45:56 Cummins: Well see, and Chuck said in the interview I did, he said, “It is so different.” Again, it’s this history, culture. Where he said it’s hard to believe. And he made the point, contrasting Berkeley and UCLA, he said actually he thinks that Berkeley has much more involvement of the donor community than UCLA does. He said, “Really, there wasn’t a whole lot of pressure put on me by donors to do things.” The one—

02-00:46:28 Pister: Interesting.

02-00:46:29 Cummins: Yeah, it is interesting. And he said, I guess when they hired, it would have been Berdahl and—who was the UCLA Chancellor, [Albert] Carnesale. They did those at the same time, and there was a presidential committee that went around and they meet on the campus, they get feedback. And I heard this on two different occasions, two different people telling me, the committee was here first, at Berkeley, and then they went to UCLA. They just want to hear what’s going on on the campus. And so they were well into their discussion at UCLA, and somebody on the committee said, “You know, I’m really puzzled.

48

You haven’t once mentioned athletics here, and at Berkeley that was kind of the first thing.” I thought, “Now that is interesting, okay again, as a—”

02-00:47:28 Pister: That’s crazy, you know?

02-00:47:29 Cummins: Yeah, who knows, who knows, but anyway, interesting. Do you want to say anything else then about just where you think all of this, just on a national level, intercollegiate athletics, where it’s heading now?

02-00:47:46 Pister: Oh, okay, that’s an important thing. I had this conversation just this week again with Bob Birgeneau. It came up in connection with the most recent negotiation of whatever the Big 10 is now.

02-00:48:10 Cummins: Oh, the Pac-12.

02-00:48:11 Pister: No the, the Big 10—they’re Big 12 or something now?

02-00:48:17 Cummins: You mean for us?

02-00:48:17 Pister: No, the Midwest, the Midwest.

02-00:48:20 Cummins: Oh, okay, the Big 10, yes.

02-00:48:21 Pister: Yeah, the Big 10. They just negotiated a new television contract I think. It’s multibillions of dollars. And of course the new guy out here for the Pac-12 is—our contract is up next year. For the Pac-12, and he’s going to be busy escalating that. And Berkeley is very anxious because it will mean a bigger cut for Berkeley, to help them.

So that was the genesis of it. How many billions of dollars are involved? And just having gone through March Madness with seeing all that and realizing the amount of money that comes in, it’s scary to me, because if you look around the country at the major institutions from an athletics point of view, and the aspiring ones, which broadens this group, the incentive to perform and to win is so strong that I think it really borders on being destructive to the institution. For example here, for all the stuff we’re doing, as much as I think it’s good— it’ll give the student athletes a much better experience, better for the crowd and all—we have to be very careful that it’s not brought to an exaggerated level of importance, it seems to me.

49

02-00:50:13 Cummins: Exactly. And it’s very hard to get that under control. Again, in the interview with Chuck Young—he has served on the Knight Commission from the beginning, in 1989. He said at their recent meeting he made a statement to the group that in looking back over all those years he’s not so sure that they’ve accomplished much of anything. That’s maybe a little bit of an exaggeration, but essentially what he was saying—it’s almost that it’s just on a track that is going to continue and it’s very, very hard to get your heads around. I don’t know what any individual chancellor could do. I know that was a recommendation of the committee, that the Chancellor and whoever the Vice Chancellor is, take an active role in the NCAA and the Pac-10. But if you’re a chancellor here, you know—you don’t have time to do that! My God, it’s— and it wouldn’t make any difference anyway. I think that’s absolutely clear.

02-00:51:36 Pister: That’s the point.

02-00:51:38 Cummins: It wouldn’t make any difference, you just—

02-00:51:40 Pister: No it’s—I don’t know, it’s—you know we live pretty much, in my view, in a society where significant change occurs only when there’s a catastrophic event of some kind. And I don’t know what kind of catastrophic event would bring people back to a new sense of reality here, but it’s often likened to an arms race. It is, isn’t it? An athletic arms race.

02-00:52:16 Cummins: It is, it is.

02-00:52:17 Pister: When you see the salaries that are paid and the compensation packages, not just salaries, for coaches now, it’s absurd.

02-00:52:25 Cummins: It is. It makes no sense. Do you think, for example—this was a suggestion somebody recently made who’s very involved here, that if Berkeley, for example, said we’re just not going to pay coaches more than x number of dollars—it would be substantial, maybe $1 million, something—we’re just not going to exceed that. It just doesn’t make any sense anymore. If that means, there are many young good coaches out there that can be successful—if you look at Butler in the NCAA, and yeah they’ll be recruited away but that’s okay, we’re still providing the opportunity to compete at the highest level, et cetera. Do you think that would be a possible—how do you get out of this arms race, basically?

02-00:53:21 Pister: It’s not only the coach though John, it’s the team that the coach has to put together to go out and bring in the raw material. That’s a huge, huge part of it. And then you don’t even have to mention what I think is another very

50

unsavory and—well, I don’t know what’s a better word—the way in which the National Football League sits above all this and sucks the talent out of institutions without giving anything back.

02-00:54:12 Cummins: Exactly, absolutely. So, we function like a minor league that’s free.

02-00:54:18 Pister: Yeah, it’s a free minor league for professional football. And that really leads me to another concern that I have, or another—it’s not a concern, it’s an observation. That I think—and it may really be important at a very primitive level that influences the whole discussion we’ve been having, and that is I believe you can make the case that the professional sports are a national religion. People worship, they pay their—wondering what the right word is— their dues on Sunday for football and at other times for other professional sports, and it’s really a substitute, it’s a belief system, it’s a commitment that’s really amazing. And maybe underneath all of this this is a cultural quality that we’re dealing with here is that if you try to tinker with this at some point there will be trouble.

02-00:55:41 Cummins: Yeah, I think that’s correct.

02-00:55:43 Pister: And we are, as a nation I think, absolutely unique in the way we have intercollegiate sports.

02-00:55:52 Cummins: Yes we are, exactly. So that’s one question, who would possibly take this over? How would you run it? And you can’t come up with any answer there either. It’s just so interwoven historically that it’s hard to—

02-00:56:09 Pister: Well, you know the—I guess an exaggerated model would be that you just turn over intercollegiate athletics on the campus to an outside business, and they buy the players and put them in the school, and you give up the pretense that these people are students. They are people that play for Cal and identify with Cal, but that’s it. Just their athletic ability that you’re using, the student part of it just disappears. [loud noises, interruption in recording]

02-00:56:51 Cummins: Okay, so, any last thoughts or anything you would like to add?

02-00:57:06 Pister: I don’t think I have any—that just about emptied the bin. If it’s, as I think we—I don’t think you have to say if. Since intercollegiate athletics, and athletics more broadly, is so ingrained in our culture, that in itself makes it an extraordinarily difficult problem to solve. Because cultural change in any institution, at any level, is probably the most difficult thing to modify.

51

02-00:57:53 Cummins: And even there it’s interesting. If you look at the Barry Bonds situation, or the concept of athletes as role models at all levels, and the kind of opportunity maybe to cheat, to cut corners—that’s been there too for a very long time. It doesn’t seem to affect anybody. The public doesn’t really care, I think, as long as whatever that need is is being fulfilled.

02-00:58:27 Pister: Well, then there’s another thing. I don’t know if the people that you’ve talked to have talked about this at all. But football, particularly among all the sports, is really a very brutal sport and people get seriously hurt from football.

02-00:58:51 Cummins: Yes.

02-00:58:53 Pister: All you have to look at is what happens to many of the NFL players. Their whole lives are—physically they’re really screwed up, or mentally from concussions or whatever. So in thinking about this I’ve often compared—it’s our form of gladiatorial combat basically, and when some poor guy is trying to catch a pass and gets totally wiped out people, “Oh man, what a hit.” Or people relish the brutality of a hit that they place on a guy. It’s just the way that they attack a quarterback typically. So there’s something really—again, I think it’s a very primitive thing that we as people have ingrained in us.

02-00:59:58 Cummins: Exactly. Well, that was the origin of the NCAA, the brutality in football.

02-01:00:04 Pister: Really?

02-01:00:05 Cummins: Yeah, football players were getting killed on the field.

02-01:00:08 Pister: Oh my God. I had no idea of that. Wow.

02-01:00:09 Cummins: At the college level, yes. Teddy Roosevelt in 1905 convened Harvard, Yale, Princeton presidents and said, “You’ve got to get his under control. We just cannot allow this.” And there was a big uproar at that time because literally people were being killed on the football field. They didn’t have the protection, the equipment that we have today. And there was a move—Charles Eliot at Harvard wanted football abolished and no more playing of football but could not succeed at getting it. So the NCAA was then created in 1909, and that’s the origin of it; you’ve got to get this situation under control. So that’s been there for a very long time, and it’s—yeah, I think it’s something that is just deeply ingrained in the psyche that seems to make this all permissible. They had something—one of the football moves was called the flying wedge.

52

02-01:01:26 Pister: Oh, I remember reading about that.

02-01:01:27 Cummins: You would not want to be on that part of a line that was being targeted by the flying wedge. Good Lord, yeah, so—

02-01:01:40 Pister: Well John, you mentioned equipment. I wonder if there have been the right kind of studies made to see to what extent the equipment today is more responsible for creating injuries than avoiding in juries. The helmet, the hard helmet, the hard shoulder pads. You know the earlier, when they were leather, I just wonder if—

02-01:02:17 Cummins: That’s a good question.

02-01:02:18 Pister: —who really has ever studied that carefully enough to draw any meaningful conclusions? I don’t know.

02-01:02:26 Cummins: Well, you don’t hear about the same seriousness of injuries in rugby as you do in football, which is a good indicator. They certainly have injuries, but you don’t—it’s just not that prevalent. One of your faculty members is doing research on the helmet.

02-01:02:46 Pister: Oh, is that right?

02-01:02:48 Cummins: Nick, is it Panop—

02-01:02:51 Pister: Panos?

02-01:02:53 Cummins: Oh, I’m blocking on his name.

02-01:02:55 Pister: Papadakis?

02-01:02:56 Cummins: Yes, I think that’s who it is, I think that’s who it is. But part of the difficulty is no matter what you do you can’t stop the brain from moving inside the head. You can cushion it but you can’t stop it. Anyway, really perplexing issues.

02-01:03:18 Pister: Really, yeah. I’m glad none of my kids ever played football. I have two grandsons that played in the Pop Warner football, complete with uniforms. I’m surprised my daughter let them do it because—they’ve been lucky they

53

haven’t been injured. They’re only eleven- and twelve-year-old kids. I just think that’s a terrible thing, to suit them up with helmet and shoulder pads. Their bones are so—so they’re not ready for this.

02-01:03:47 Cummins: Oh no question. There is more and more research being done on that in various sports too, baseball, overthrowing. Now they have a limit on the number of pitches per week and things like that that these kids can throw. But it is, it’s really strange. There’s a website—it’s not a website it’s a listserv that’s put together by a professor at the University of Missouri named [Douglas] Abrams, in the law school, and you can subscribe to it, it’s free, and he’ll send you news articles every day on youth sports.

02-01:04:28 Pister: Oh boy.

02-01:04:30 Cummins: And you just can’t believe it, Karl. There was one recently about a sports writer who said that he was receiving complaints from parents that they weren’t putting their kids’ names in the paper frequently enough so that the college football coaches and other coaches could see the names, that was one. Another one was a letter from a parent of a young person who was entering kindergarten, and they had looked at various kindergartens, and they were asking for advice on the sports program in the kindergartens because they were trying to prepare their kids, honestly. And the reporter said, “I don’t know whether I should laugh or cry.” I mean honestly, is this the state that we have arrived in? [laughter] Okay, thank you, thank you very much for doing this.

02-01:05:35 Pister: Well, it’s been a pleasure. I’ll look forward to reading it one day.

02-01:05:38 Cummins: Yeah, and getting the transcript.

02-01:05:40 Pister: Hope I live long enough to get it.

02-01:05:42 Cummins: Well, you know how long these take, but we’re moving along. Okay, thanks very much.

[End Interview]