Oral History Center University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California Jack Citrin Jack Citrin: Oral Histories on the Management of Intercollegiate Athletics at UC Berkeley: 1960 - 2014 Interviews conducted by John Cummins in 2010 Copyright © 2017 by The Regents of the University of California ii Since 1954 the Oral History Center of the Bancroft Library, formerly the Regional Oral History Office, 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 Jack Citrin dated September 17, 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. 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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: Jack Citrin “Jack Citrin: Oral Histories on the Management of Intercollegiate Athletics at UC Berkeley: 1960 – 2014” conducted by John Cummins in 2010, Oral History Center of the Bancroft Library, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2017. iii Table of Contents—Jack Citrin Interview 1: July 26, 2010 Audio File 1 1 Childhood in Asia—Running in graduate school—Ken Jowitt— Faculty mentorship of freshmen—Chancellor Ira Michael [Mike] Heyman—Appointment as faculty athletic representative—Rec Sports—Merger of departments— Relationship with Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien—University deficit—Game schedule conflicts with exams—Bruce Snyder contract—Bob Bockrath—John Kasser—More on Chang-Lin Tien—Chancellor Robert [Bob] Berdahl—Filing class action lawsuit against the university—Berdahl leaves campus—Conflicting values surrounding sports culture Interview 2: November 4, 2010 Audio File 2 27 Role of faculty athletic representative—Compliance with academic eligibility rules—Controversy with Alex Saragoza—Attitudes of coaches towards academics—Graduation rates of student athletes—Jason Kidd—Steve Gladstone—Sandy Barbour—Mark Stephens—Attitudes of donor community towards sports cut decisions—Risks of seat licensing—“Golden years of the Pac- 10 for academic issues”—American sports becoming increasingly commercialized [End of Interview] 1 Interview 1: July 26, 2010 Begin Audio File 1 01-00:00:01 Cummins: Okay, this is an interview with Professor Jack Citrin. Today is July 26, [2010], and this is part of the oral history project on Intercollegiate Athletics. So Jack, would you begin just by describing your background, when you came to Berkeley, and then how you became involved in athletics and then we’ll get started? 01-00:00:26 Citrin: Okay. I came to Berkeley first as a graduate student in the middle sixties. My first year here was 1963 to ‘64, and I came here from my undergraduate—I came here from McGill University, Montreal, but I grew up in Asia. My parents were refugees from Russia who settled first in China, where I was born, and then in Japan where I went to high school. And for some reason or other, I myself, although not an athlete of any kind at all, became a fan of sports, first in Hong Kong where the main sport was soccer—and my mother was actually pretty interested in athletics, not my dad, I don’t know why—and then in Japan, where the main sport that we followed was baseball. Just as a fan. McGill University, being in Canada, had intercollegiate sports, but certainly not at the American level or system, and the main spectator sport and the main focus for someone who wanted to be fanatical was hockey. Anyway, I followed sports as a fan and when I came to Cal in the sixties, with some graduate students friends and so forth, we’d go mainly to football games. I think I saw a couple of basketball games in my graduate student career. But when I came back and was hired on the faculty— 01-00:03:00 Cummins: And what year was that? 01-00:03:02 Citrin: Nineteen seventy. 01-00:03:03 Cummins: Seventy, okay. 01-00:03:03 Citrin: I was hired while I was still finishing my dissertation, which is kind of an arduous activity. And at that point somehow I met another young professor in our department who was a good athlete and who was going to the track, Edwards Stadium, at lunch one day to run. Well, I had never run more than four hundred yards in my entire life, but I thought this would help me finish my thesis. So I start to run with Bob Ayres, and I will tell you that after the first two days, my toes were stiff. When you start, it was just a horrendous experience. I couldn’t run with him on the track, which at that time was a little bumpy in the center, so I started running on what’s now called Evans Diamond. But at that time they didn’t stop you —the football team practiced there and you could run around the edge. And when I was running around the 2 edge there was a guy running in front of me who was a bald-headed individual, and I figured he’s ten or fifteen or whatever years older than I, I should be able to keep up to him, which I couldn’t. But eventually I could. And he was Bob [Robert F.] Steidel, who was a mechanical engineering professor, and among other things was the faculty athletic rep, and from running I knew him a little bit. But also running around that same sphere at the same time was the then athletic director, Dave Maggard. So, as you know, he was a young guy at the time, and we got to talk. And I was a young guy at the time, actually. And because of that I became a little more interested in Cal Athletics, a little more a kind of a fan, but not a big one—I didn’t know anything, really, about it. Bob told me he was the faculty athletic rep. I didn’t know exactly what that meant. But then in 1982, I think it was then, or ‘83, a number of things happened simultaneously. One was my colleague and good friend Ken Jowitt was appointed to be the dean of Undergraduate and Interdisciplinary Studies. And Ken was, as you know, John, an extremely creative guy, a real idea man, the antithesis of a bureaucrat. His chances of being dean for any length of time were the same as my chance of getting the Nobel Prize in physics. But while he was there he said, “I want to do something.” And for someone who knew nothing, really very, very little about athletics—I mean, I knew the stuff in terms of the sport, you know? He didn’t know what the center was on a football [team]. Really, “What does a center do?” [Cummins laughs] That was the level of knowledge he had. But he decided that athletes in football and basketball were being brought here and dropped into the ocean and [someone] said, “Okay, your job is to swim to Hawaii,” academically. And so Ken spurred two things. One was to upgrade the academic counseling and tutoring dimension of sports, which had gone through a very corrupt period, frankly, under one of the previous football coaches about five or six years earlier, and also to give these freshman students a faculty mentor, so he started that program. And he said, “Would you be willing to participate?” And I said yes. And he said, “Do you have any preference?” I said, “Really, I don’t have any preference. You just assign me something and I’ll do my best.” And so just by a quirk of fate my student mentee was Kevin Johnson, who’s now the mayor of Sacramento, in whom I take a lot of pride. But at that time he was just another freshman kid, it could have been anyone. But through that you met the coach and you understood the pressures that everyone in that world was under. 01-00:08:52 Cummins: That was [Dick] Kuchen, the coach. 01-00:08:54 Citrin: Kuchen was the coach. And you know, you understood how someone like Kevin, who has proved that he has the IQ and the ability to have been in Berkeley, is just under so much pressure and living in a world that’s a little bit 3 removed from the regular world, you try and do whatever you can to—And a bunch of us, I’m not alone in this, you’ve probably interviewed a bunch of people, it was pretty active at that time.