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By Elizabeth Bernays Speeding across the Bay Bridge to Berkeley I feel separated from the girl who is driving me, as if we are in some dense medium that prevents contact. Our minds are engaged with other things. Mine is expanded tight with jet lag and the startling sight of San Francisco, experienced two hours earlier as the plane circled before landing. My first view of the United States, and there it was--the city on the southern peninsula, white in the late sun of a November Saturday, the dark green hills and valleys to the north, and the red Golden Gate Bridge stretching its elegance across a narrow strip of blue.
The girl is distracted and turns on the radio apologetically. She is a graduate student who has kindly volunteered to pick me up at the airport, but she has missed the end of what was apparently a very special annual event--the Berkeley vs. Stanford football game. In their excitement, commentators interrupt one another, laughing and falling over their own words. Something amazing seems to have happened. The girl turns to me with some football talk, and I smile. I know nothing about football or anything else American and am simply astonished to be in the United States at 4 a.m. London time, with the carefree California sun setting over a world-famous scene. Skies had been gray in London for over a week, with autumn leaves blowing and settling in street corners in preparation for months of lifeless damp. The nine-hour lift through white atmosphere to this world of blue was as unreal to me as a journey to the moon. I sit back and close my eyes as the voices beat the air with their rapid-fire details of what happened to the ball in the last four seconds of play. They become more and more distant as I drift into a dream of everlasting sunsets. And then the girl deposits me at the Women’s Faculty Club on the University of California, Berkeley campus. Here I will stay for the next week and, as I thankfully get into bed, I have a few last thoughts of bridges, vast expanses of water, and the mad idea of applying for a job in Berkeley. When I woke the next morning, I had my first-ever breakfast of blueberry muffins. It was Sunday--I was being allowed a day to recover, with just a lunch appointment with Rex, a nutritionist who had come here from England 30 years earlier. I took the morning to walk around the campus. Groves of redwoods and eucalyptus, shady streams, courtyards and gardens, and interesting, diverse architecture--all, it seemed, designed to attract me. The air was fresh, the sky was blue; a feeling of new vigor surged through my 40-year-old body, tempting me to race up the hills and roll down the grassy slopes. The “job interview” was to be an extraordinary five whole days--not the one hour typical in Britain. There were to be discussions with over half of the 35 entomology professors, and interviews with not one but two chairs. I was to have lunches with various students, professors in the zoology department, and research staff, and dinner with several professors in entomology. A visit to something called the “Gill Tract” was also on the schedule. My seminar, a key point of the week, would be on one of the afternoons. The process had begun nearly six months earlier. After 12 years at the Centre for Overseas Pest Research in London, I was ready for a move. Not that it hadn’t been a great job--a British government scientist, well paid, with excellent facilities, ample money, and field work around the world--but there was something missing. Perhaps it was the need for more interaction with inquiring minds and theoretical approaches to biology...an academic environment. There were few university jobs in England, so my husband Reg and I decided to look further afield. One day, while looking through the classifieds of the journal Science, Reg suddenly called out to me: “Hey, Lizzie. This job is perfect for you!” It was true: “Physiology and behavior of insects with emphasis onchemical ecology/insect-plant interactions and an interest in biological control of weeds.” It was a position in the Department of Entomology at Berkeley. “But it’s America!” I shrieked. “We have always been against going there.” “Might be an adventure,” he replied. “But, but...I mean, all our friends who have worked in the States say they wouldn’t want to live there.” Everyone knew that life was dreadful in the U.S.--violence rampant and a homicide rate at least ten times that of anywhere in Europe. Would we really want to live in a throw-away society filled with MacDonald’s hamburgers, gas stations, and shopping malls? Would we find friends among people who seemed so different, who could vote in Ronald Reagan as President? Moreover, we had been told the research environment was uneven, competitive, egotistical. Did anyone work in a team the way we did? The closing date for applications was past, and I was busy preparing for three months of work in India, but Reg suggested I send my c.v. to Rex, the one person he vaguely knew at Berkeley. So I sent it along, and Reg and I went off to work on sorghum pests at an international research institute near Hyderabad. How I loved India--the work, the people, the culture; I all but forgot about Berkeley. Until, that is, I received a letter sent on from England, asking for reprints and transcripts. I had no reprints with me and had no idea what transcripts were, so I decided to just ignore the letter. More than three months later, while on holiday in Australia, I got a message to call a certain Rod in Berkeley, California. I had been selected for an interview, Rod said. Could I be there in three weeks? Back in London, I had just ten days to look up the University of California, Berkeley and to prepare a seminar. I bought a return plane ticket to San Francisco. All my friends said I was quite mad: “The United States, for goodness sake!” I had no idea what the immigration official at San Francisco meant when he said, “Visiting the Republic of Berzerkeley, eh?” But Berkeley was fascinating. Every other building along the main streets seemed to house a restaurant, cafe, or specialty food or wine shop. Every nationality I could think of was represented in the food, and all that I tried was incomparably good. There were many strange notices, like “Self Storage” (for storing oneself?), “The Bread Garden” (plants made of bread?), and “Breakfast served all day” (for people on the night shift?). The atmosphere was informal, folksy, and campus-oriented, with even more variety of dress than one saw in London. There were men holding hands, girls with bare feet, couples sitting on the pavement drinking coffee--and everyone looked relaxed. There seemed to be diverse cultural events, interesting seminars, concerts, and plays on offer. And everywhere, even during the interviews, people kept talking about that football game. “Oh, you missed the game!” they all said. “You really should have seen those last seconds!” I met with the dean of the College of Natural Resources, all the time wondering what the College of Natural Resources might be. (Colleges in England are altogether different entities.) But I carefully kept my ignorance to myself. When the dean remarked, “Of course, we are a land-grant university,” I replied, “That’s very nice,” conjuring up in my mind rich Californians donating parcels of land to their famous institution. “And we have the Experiment Station,” he continued. I was thrilled at this! There must be some big farm for doing field experiments. (Later, when I realized that the Experiment Station was simply a means of obtaining federal funds for agricultural research, I was somewhat disenchanted.) The chair of entomological sciences, Ted, with his clean-cut look, seemed to me the quintessential American. He made it clear that I would be fortunate to be selected for his exceptional department. But my seminar turned out to be an unexpected success--As luck would have it, I had been working in a thoroughly fashionable field of research, plant and insect coevolution. Then came my visit to the Gill Tract, a ten-acre site, two miles from campus, which contained the labs of nine biological control faculty--including my own, if I came to Berkeley. I was struck immediately by the run-down nature of the place--the poor facilities and broken greenhouses were reminiscent of certain Third World places I had visited. But I imagined improvements and a renovated place for me (though I didn’t like to be so rude as to question my hosts on it). Everyone I met at the Gill Tract was friendly, offering me cups of strong black coffee until I was quite shaky. “Did you hear about the game?” asked Rod, who was giving me the tour. “Geez, what a day to arrive!” “This is a wonderful place, you know, with a tradition built by the greats in biological control,” said Ken. “This is a land-grant university,” said Andy. And all of them joked about the lovely weather, saying it must be a contrast to London with its fog. (Little did they know that the Bay Area has more foggy days than London does.) I was surprised, too, by the human variety. There were faculty and research staff from South America, Africa, and Asia with names like Junji, Cheng, and Miguel (which I found was not pronounced Migyouwell). A fashionably dressed black woman was head of the office staff. There was no talk of what research I might do, nor was there any mention of salary. I had to think the salary from such a reputable institution would be appropriate, and certainly it seemed impolite to ask. Then there was the issue of my husband Reg. I inquired about his being able to play some part in the department. He was, after all, a far more respected entomologist in Britain than I was. (In fact, he had accomplished more than many of the entomology professors in Berkeley.) “No problem!” they all pronounced. “Oh yes, you can write grants together,” “He could get a salary from soft money,” “He could teach a course here.” It all seemed reasonable to me at the time. Later on, I discovered that they were thrilled with the idea of getting two for one, but most of their promises never materialized. I was unclear about many things and too embarrassed to ask. Apart from the land grants and Experiment Station, salary and facilities, there was tenure. I was used to tenure being automatic unless one embezzled money or attacked a student; but a colleague from the East Coast had written to me saying how wonderful it would be if I got a job in Berkeley, and the only thing that really mattered was that it come with tenure. So my only comment to Rod and Ted about conditions of possible appointment was: “It’s all wonderful. But, of course, I could only come with tenure.” I returned to London feeling quite pleased with myself. I really felt that Reg and I would be able to live and work happily in Berkeley. I had discovered that the worst things one heard about America didn’t seem to apply in the San Francisco Bay Area. (Indeed, London was a throw-away society compared with Berkeley.) The food was wonderfully good, the campus was beautiful, the people international and friendly and, as I had been ceaselessly informed, the University was “the best.” I heard nothing from Berkeley for months (apart from muddled reimbursement communications and self-addressed envelopes from the department with U.S. stamps on them). Then, one evening, I got a phone call from Rod. They would like to have me! Later, Ted called to ask if I would teach Entomology 440--as if all the world knew what course numbers in Berkeley were--and I replied, “Of course,” having no idea what I might have let myself in for. A year after my initial interview, I received a letter offering me a full professorship--with tenure--in the Department of Entomology, division of biocontrol. Reg and I emigrated from England to California, arriving at San Francisco airport one November evening with three suitcases and our beloved cat. It was the beginning of a new life--the sought-after intellectual stimulation, aesthetic and hedonistic pleasures, and great social freedom (though we never did get our heads around American football!). These were also years of discovery and fun and total absence of a million class-related prejudices we were used to but hadn’t realized would be so gloriously absent in California. We loved the international feeling of the Bay Area and the chance to enjoy a culture that celebrated diversity. The radical days were gone, of course, but there was a pleasant sense of personal independence and freedoms won--a touch of idealism in the air. Reg said: “We should have come here 20 years ago.” And we often laughed about that sign in Berkeley announcing “Breakfast served all day,” and how it symbolized what we like best about our adopted land--the way personal freedoms extend into every detail of people’s lives--even breakfast. Elizabeth Bernays was a professor at Berkeley from 1983 to 1989. She is currently Regents’ Professor Emeritus at the University of Arizona, where she continues her research on insects. |
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