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By Linda Schmidt Berkeley’s large undergraduate classes are notorious for creating an impersonal atmosphere, but history professor Robert Brentano can make a room crammed with hundreds of students feel like an intimate gathering. With a ready smile and a conversational lecture style, he often calls on students by name, asking for their thoughts. He’s been doing it for a remarkably long time-half a century this year-and his enthusiasm is as genuine now as it was when he first came to the campus in 1952. “I’m almost completely relaxed in an undergraduate classroom,” Brentano says, “and that makes teaching easy.” Now 76 and with no immediate plans to retire, the renowned medievalist has taught introductory history classes, the freshman survey course on Western civilization, and upper-division courses in British history to generations of Cal students. He claims that students today are much like those he taught 50 years ago. “They don’t seem very different at all,” he says. “The time of life they’re going through is perhaps more important than the part of the century. I’ve spent a whole life teaching undergraduates. I know the shapes of their minds much better than I know my own contemporaries’.” Fortunately for these young minds, Brentano pursued a career in teaching despite the discouraging assessment he received while a graduate student at Oxford University. “I was told that I was a research scholar, that it was very unlikely I’d be a successful teacher-especially in America, though I was an American,” he recalls. He taught anyway, and the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education named Brentano California Professor of the Year in 1986. In 1991 he received the Clark Kerr Medal, and this spring his work as teacher, mentor, and scholar was honored at the International Congress on Medieval Studies. It’s the richness of the materials he studies and teaches, Brentano says, that makes him look forward to each new term. He has written six books and numerous articles on various aspects of medieval history. “Right now I’m writing about a text I’ve been teaching since I first came here, and it’s surprised me every year,” he says. “That’s what keeps me interested-every time I read a source, it seems slightly different to me.” In the classroom, Brentano-the-Researcher and Brentano-the-Teacher work in perfect harmony. Relying heavily on actual historical documents rather than secondary sources, he encourages students to share in his own enthusiastic sense of discovery. “I like it best when people read primary sources. Everybody in the classroom is at the same level with the source, everybody’s interpretation is equally valid,” he says. He also draws freely from literature, art, and architecture in helping his students understand a different time and place. It is not unusual for Brentano to invite a guest lecturer to discuss the African saga Sundiata in relation to the Old English poem Beowulf, for example, to provide insights on cultural ideas of what it means to be a hero. Brentano has found that students live up to a teacher’s expectations of them, and so he uses a democratic approach in which every student’s point of view is sought and respected. “If you treat undergraduate students as grown-ups, as people who are historians at the moment, then it does raise their level. It makes me always think and write like a sophomore,” he jokes, “but it makes my sophomores think and write like me.” Sophomore Ricardo Miranda acknowledges the effectiveness of this method. “Sometimes he asks difficult, complex questions that can’t be answered in class, but he wants you to think about them--and you do. Your mind opens up and you think about things you might not have considered before.” All of which supports Brentano’s philosophy of education: It’s not so much about dates and facts, he insists, but the ability to evaluate information. “When you’re teaching, information is not what you want to get across,” he says. “We teach students how to think, and to consider sources in terms of what they actually can tell you. That’s helpful even if you’re reading a newspaper.” Brentano’s interest in history began when he was growing up in Newburgh, Indiana, a small town on the Mason-Dixon Line, and an elderly neighbor described to him her memories of watching Confederate raiders crossing the Ohio River. After he graduated from Swarthmore College in 1949 with a double major in English and history, he planned to continue his studies in English literature, but soon felt constrained by the strict canons of literary criticism. “The things people wrote in medieval history, particularly English medieval history,” he says, “were to me more toughly, tautly beautiful than anything else I’d read.” He completed his D.Phil. at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship; then, undaunted by the predictions of his advisors, decided to pursue a teaching position in the U.S. He inquired at several universities before Berkeley replied: “If you will teach 101 and 152A, and if you can sign our current loyalty oath, then you can come teach here.” Though he had no idea what those course numbers signified and had an incomplete understanding of what the oath entailed, with the confidence of youth--he was just 25 at the time--he decided to give it a go. From the beginning, Brentano felt strongly about the University’s role as a public institution and its duty to provide an affordable education to a broad range of California citizens. This might seem surprising in a man who was educated entirely in “elite” private schools, but in his hometown, he says, the social and institutional remnants of the Civil War were still very present, and questions of race and social justice were constantly at issue. Moreover, his parents were “extreme liberals, in a quiet Midwestern sort of way,” and they instilled in him a deep sense of duty to the community. He states it simply: “Everybody’s soul in relation to God is equal; there’s no hierarchy.” The diversity of Cal’s student population, Brentano maintains, is one of its greatest assets. He’s been active in strengthening outreach programs and encouraging equal access for ethnic minorities, women, students with disabilities, re-entry students, and those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Having a mixture of abilities and viewpoints in the classroom benefits everyone’s learning experience, he says. “I can’t imagine anything duller than a packed room full of valedictorians,” he insists. “They think the same way, they’re overprepared.” Brentano has occasionally been tempted away from Berkeley. Ten years into his tenure here he accepted a visiting professorship at Swarthmore, and he returned to his alma mater “with a clear understanding that if things didn’t go terribly wrong I’d be asked to stay--and that I would want to stay,” he recalls. But the experience was a revelation: “Part way through, it was absolutely clear that I never again wanted to teach permanently in an institution which was essentially restricted to privileged people.” As a public institution, Cal has a duty not only to maintain the highest standards of teaching and research, Brentano believes, but also to be a model of honesty. Members of the faculty have a responsibility to influence University actions: “It’s our duty. We belong to the University, we shape it and form it, we give it its reputation--good and bad.” During his term as chair of the Academic Senate in 1999, Brentano become anxious about the power of private funding to influence research and other decisions at the University. As state funding becomes increasingly tight, his concerns continue, but ultimately he believes that the University should be fully supported by the state. “It’s very hard to get people to be in favor of higher taxes,” he admits, “but that is the answer.” He remembers the Free Speech Movement as another instance when the integrity of the University was at stake. “From beginning to end, I thought that the principles of the FSM were right. Almost without exception, the administration behaved in an untruthful and mistaken way,” says Brentano, who maintains that the effects of the FSM were overwhelmingly positive for the University. The events of the 1960s also provided an enlightening parallel with his study of medieval Italy. “I work, in particular, on the early 13th century, in which spiritual fervor changed the way people treated each other,” he says. “Frances of Assisi and the people around him were dirty, badly clothed, unconventional in every way--like street people. All outward honor meant nothing. Partly through his inspiration, people changed. They gave away their things to the poor; they, in a way, loved each other; they became different in their attitudes. And I thought that that happened a lot in the ‘60s. I hadn’t really quite believed in the reality of change in the 13th century until I saw the change in my own time.” |
 Professor Robert Brentano Photo by Dana Davis
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