At the gate’s unveiling on October 14, during Homecoming weekend, Chancellor Robert Berdahl said the gate was an important first impression for visitors and prospective students, adding that “a first impression becomes a lasting impression and sometimes determines whether students come to Berkeley or not.”

It was the University’s idea that the gate be placed at the southwest entrance to the half-circle drive called the Crescent. With 2,000 people per day entering the campus from the nearby Berkeley BART station, the University wanted an emblem indicating its domain, said Judy Clark, a local landscape architect and chief designer of the gate. The University hopes to have a twin gate—and is encouraging other classes to donate it—for the northwest end of the Crescent.

Decorated with stylized bronze California poppies and scrollwork, the 40-foot wide gate was designed to echo the classical detailing of Sather Gate, down to a green patina to match the older gate’s oxidized look. Two handmade plaques at either side commemorate the University and the Class of ’53, which came up with $250,000 for its gift. “We were really proud that we could contribute such a handsome entrance to the University,” said gift committee member Nancy Baker ’53.

— Mira Schwirtz

Wallerstein, however, noticed a darker strain in the rosy picture. As a consultant at family clinics in the Bay Area, she was seeing children of newly divorced parents and they had symptoms of stress. They couldn’t settle down in school and either withdrew emotionally from the world or became unruly. “We had passed revolutionary family legislation without the slightest knowledge about how it would affect children financially or psychologically,” Wallerstein says. “I went to the library at Cal and there was not a smidgen of information.

“And then I marched in.” Wallerstein initiated a study that became the first and only of its kind: profiling children of divorce from the break-up through adulthood. Her first book, Surviving the Breakup, published in 1979, sparked controversy when it reported that children are the major victims of divorce.

Now her latest findings, 25 years after she began, are causing another uproar in family and marriage circles. The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25 Year Landmark Study, claims that not only are children of divorce affected adversely, they are affected well into maturity.

The biggest source of the furor is Wallerstein’s conclusion that, given the far-reaching and debilitating effects on the child, parents should strongly consider remaining together —no matter how loveless the marriage—in order to keep their children feeling secure.

Wallerstein’s statements have been eagerly seized upon by pro-marriage supporters. Feminist groups, on the other hand, accuse Wallerstein of trying to frighten women back into the home. Some professionals in the field have charged that her study lacked a proper control group and that her sampling was too narrow. In response, she doesn’t mince words. “The scientific community doesn’t know beans,” she says. “They think you can call up the mother and ask her some questions and get knowledge. Numbers are the fashion, but they’re not the way to see the person.”

She personalized her study, getting to know each child and drawing a detailed portrait over time, using interviews with them and their families and her own personal observations as evidence. “No one has told the children’s stories. I have told their stories,” she says. “Each one reads like a novella.” Her most telling response, she maintains, has come from readers who are children of divorce themselves. “People are saying ‘Thank God you broke the silence.’ I have surely hit a chord.” —M.S.