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When Berkeley’s Institute for International Studies hosted a luncheon in 1982 for Herbert York, chief U.S. ambassador to the Comprehensive Test Ban negotiations, there were winners of four Nobel Prizes at the table: Berkeley professors Charles Townes and Owen Chamberlain (Nobel laureates in physics), and Linus Pauling (a two-time winner). They were having lunch before York’s public talk on the Reagan-era nuclear arms buildup. Harry Kreisler, executive director of the Institute, was accustomed to hosting campus visitors who came to speak at Institute-sponsored events, but this time the combined star power of the guests overwhelmed him. “I thought: ‘What a waste!’” Kreisler says today, shaking his head. “These people were sitting around the table having a conversation, but there was no public participation. It was a shame.” Kreisler is a man with a singular passion for getting people interested in public affairs, and he knew he could do better than reaching a few hundred people at the occasional public presentations. Before long, Kreisler was sitting in a studio in Dwinelle Hall, interviewing his guests on video instead of lingering over dessert at the Faculty Club. Kreisler’s subjects include diplomats, statesmen, scientists, artists, journalists, soldiers, politicians, and literary figures—in fact, just about everybody of international prominence who visits the Berkeley campus. The first one-hour interviews were distributed by the University’s now-defunct Open Window program, which produced programming for public-access cable television stations. But it wasn’t until public use of the Internet became widespread that Kreisler’s video series—dubbed “Conversations with History”—really took off. The interviews and related materials on the Institute’s website, http://globetrotter.berkeley. edu/conversations, now get some 72,000 hits per week. Going on camera was a natural for Kreisler. As a boy growing up in Galveston, Texas, he was a fan of Walter Cronkite’s “You Are There,” which featured reenactments of historical events, complete with reporters interviewing historical figures; and he watched Edward R. Murrow’s “Person to Person,” in which the distinguished journalist interviewed politicians and literary figures in their own homes. “I was socialized by these television shows, and today I’m pretty well informed about public affairs and major international issues,” Kreisler said. “It was a good match.” Adapting his video series to the new technology of the Internet was not so natural. As Kreisler tells it, sometime in 1993, “a kid came in to install a blue wire in my office.” The blue wire was a T1 line for hardwired Internet access, and the kid (a student worker) explained it would allow him to get e-mail. “What’s e-mail?” Kreisler wondered. The blue wire turned out to have other uses as well. “The day I saw my first browser, I immediately intuited the meaning of this new technology,” Kreisler said. “I knew we were going to be able to spin straw into gold. Here I had these people on campus for a day, and I could transmit their ideas to the whole world.” There is a moment in Kreisler’s interview of Kenzaburo Oe, the Nobel Prize-winning Japanese novelist, where Oe describes the experience of hearing his brain-damaged six-year-old son’s first words. The boy had listened to tapes of birds identified by their songs and, on a visit to the mountains, he heard the call of a water rail. Suddenly, with great clarity, the boy spoke, in the voice of the audiotape: “It’s a water rail.” Oe then relates the sleepless night he and his wife spent waiting for the boy to speak again, and their relief, as a sparrow sang in the first morning light, when the boy said: “It’s a sparrow.” This is an emotional story, and one can hear the quiver in Oe’s voice, despite the somewhat choppy sound and video. Because this is the Internet, one can play it back again. And again. Or click over to the text transcript and read along with it. Or check out a picture of Oe and his son. Or look at a related video clip where Oe talks about how he found inspiration at Hiroshima after the birth of his son. Or follow a link to a gallery of other writers Kreisler has interviewed for the website. “This is true multimedia,” exults Kreisler, flipping back and forth between video clips, still photos, and text with practiced ease. “At first I thought we would just put transcripts of my interviews up. But I quickly realized that this was a visual medium, that it needed pictures. And that we could link separate files in creative ways.” With technical help from Web manager Letitia Carper and video digitizing from Berkeley’s Multimedia Research Center, Kreisler has become a virtuoso of the new medium. When the technology to air video over the Internet first became available, the video had to be chopped into short clips of a size that could be downloaded reasonably quickly. Kreisler believes the constraint has become a virtue. “I think of these little chunks as—you’ll forgive the metaphor—chicken parts, “ Kreisler says. “You can recombine them and make a different meal.” To that end, Kreisler has organized pieces of the interviews into what he calls “research galleries.” Each one deals with a particular topic addressed by several of Kreisler’s interviewees. For example, the Vietnam War gallery has contributions from former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ’37, filmmaker Oliver Stone, antiwar activist Daniel Ellsberg, and journalist Neil Sheehan. “This is my answer to the old undergraduate question, What if you invited Freud and Shakespeare and Jefferson to a dinner party? What would they talk about? Well, now I have a Congressional dinner party [including Ron Dellums, M.S. ’62, Alan K. Simpson, and Leon Panetta], a United Nations dinner party [including Kofi Annan and Sadako Ogata, Ph.D. ’63], and so on.” Kreisler hopes the interview chunks are palatable to a broad audience. “I realize that students in a 12th-grade civics class are not going to read and understand the whole thing,” he says. “But I think I can feed them a drumstick or two.” Attempting to reach that broad audience has changed the type of interviewing Kreisler does: “At first I just addressed public affairs and contemporary issues. But thinking about what a high school student would want to know from [war-crimes prosecutor] Richard Goldstone, it became a conversation about individuals’ lives and the ideas that mattered to them. What I asked became changed by who would be reading this material.” His latest project, “Connecting Students with the World,” takes outreach even further—allowing the audience to talk back to his guests via e-mail. Kreisler has organized e-mail question-and-answer sessions between high school students and campus visitors as diverse as South African freedom fighter Albie Sachs, former U.N. Undersecretary General Sir Brian Urquhart, and war photographer Gilles Peress. He and the Institute’s Nanou Matteson also work with educators, showing them how they can integrate the research materials into school curricula. “This is a fantastically liberating thing,” says Institute for International Studies director and professor of geography Michael Watts of the website’s outreach effort. “It breaks down the barrier between town and gown. Let’s face it—we talk a lot about outreach, but at the end of the day, much of what we do as academics is confined to the University. This is a very powerful way of reaching beyond the borders of campus.” “The beauty of the Web is that it leads to cooperation and collaboration,” Kreisler says. “Now I’m getting guests from all over campus—the Townsend Center for the Humanities and the Graduate Division, for example—and they’re reaching more people than ever before. This has become a way to link Berkeley visitors to different constituencies the University hasn’t been able to reach before.” The website has garnered a lot of recognition, having been featured as a top site by the New York Times, USA Today, and MSNBC. Kreisler’s favorite compliment came from Albie Sachs, the distinguished South African anti-apartheid activist and jurist. In his travels throughout the world, Sachs found that he was often asked questions that suggested a more-than-casual knowledge of his past. When he asked how his interlocutors knew so much about him, they would say, “Oh, we read it on the website.” Sachs, whose prison diary has been sold worldwide and turned into a drama broadcast by the BBC, told Kreisler: “You globalized me.” |
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