Karl S. Pister and the Foundation of Diversity in Engineering By Dr. Sheila Humphreys

With contribution and editing by Professor Loc Vu-Quoc

“When I was dean, I took diversity as a high priority and invested a lot of resources to help students make that adjustment and increase the underrepresentation of women and ethnic minorities.” –Karl S. Pister

Dean Karl S. Pister’s exceptional commitment to diversity in the College of Engineering built the strong foundation on which the College’s diversity program still stands. Pister came first to Berkeley as an undergraduate in 1941 in civil engineering. His increasingly senior positions at the University of California included professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (1952–1996) at UC Berkeley, chair of the systemwide Academic Senate in 1979, chair of the systemwide Academic Council from 1979 to 1980, chair of the Berkeley campus Educational Policy Committee, and chair of the university-wide Committee on Educational Policy. When chair of the systemwide Academic Council, Pister commissioned a comprehensive report on faculty involvement in student affirmative action that was delivered to systemwide President David Saxon.6 (Inset photo credit Peg Skorpinski.)

Dean Karl S. Pister

Thus, when Pister became dean of the College of Engineering in 1980 (subsequently serving until 1990), he arrived on the job with deep expertise and knowledge of the relevant challenges. “People are the new ‘gold’ to be mined in California,” he said. He was mindful of the pledge of President Daniel Coit Gilman at his inauguration in 1872: “The University of California … is the University of this State. It must be adapted to its people, to their public and private schools, to their peculiar geographical position, to the requirements of their new society and their undeveloped resources.” Likening students from underrepresented backgrounds at the university to California’s new gold, Pister urgently declared the need for “a full-scale effort to develop the vastly underutilized pool of human resources that reside in the people of our state.”

Karl. S. Pister, Report of the Universitywide Task Force on Faculty Rewards, University of California, Office of the President, June 26, 1991. Internet archived on 2019.04.26.

Dean Pister championed student diversity at all levels, from pre-college to postdoctoral students. From the outset, he recognized the need to develop and fund specific programs for both undergraduate and graduate students: “I began to realize the difficult cultural adjustments students from disadvantaged backgrounds and women face coming to the University, particularly into certain disciplines. When I was dean I took diversity as a high priority and invested a lot of resources to help students make that adjustment and increase the underrepresentation of women and ethnic minorities. We made significant strides during my tenure—the number of women in the engineering program doubled and significant progress was made to bring in more underrepresented minorities.”7

Pister also understood that most faculty members require incentives in order to prioritize their limited time to advance diversity. He chaired the University of California’s Universitywide Task Force on Faculty Rewards, dedicated to officially changing the faculty reward and promotion system, which included a strong recommendation to recognize faculty contributions to affirmative action. The Task Force report, delivered in 1991, contains this recommendation: “The development of human resources through personal mentoring and active involvement in affirmative action and other equity- and diversity-oriented pursuits is integral to the life and purpose of the University. . . . As the population of the state becomes more diverse, the populations of students and faculty must also become more diverse. Implementation of these and other diversity goals is a shared responsibility among all faculty, and faculty should be encouraged to pursue these activities and be rewarded for meritorious achievement in the areas of equity and members.”8 The Task Force’s recommendations eventually were adopted across the university, and yet the role of diversity contributions to academic promotions remains an issue. The recommendation was way ahead of its time, and only now, thirty years later, has this policy been adopted and even required for faculty applicants.

Scott Moura and Franklin Dollar, Minority Engineering Program (MEP) participants, circa 2000. Both are now professors.

At a universitywide affirmative action retreat in May 1987, Dean Pister reviewed the College’s affirmative action program during his tenure as dean. He explained the College of Engineering’s pipeline program, which encompassed pre-college through graduate students. The concept of a pipeline was relatively novel at this time. Pister contended that “an effective graduate affirmative action program can only be successfully built if it is attached to the end of a successful undergraduate program, which in turn is attached to successful pre-college, i.e., high school and junior high programs.”9 Building a lasting framework for underrepresented students at Berkeley is exactly what Karl Pister accomplished through his leadership as dean.

Minority Engineering Program (MEP)

In pursuit of the goal of building an effective pipeline, one of Dean Pister’s first actions when he became dean was to establish, in 1981, a support system for undergraduate students from diverse backgrounds. Dean Pister applied to the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME) for a grant of $25,000 to establish the program, called the Minority Engineering Support Program (MESP). As Pister relates in his oral history, “At Berkeley, Engineering was a leader in developing an undergraduate extension of MESA [Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement] in the 1980s. . . . The Minority Engineering Program was instrumental in increasing minority graduation rates in Engineering. . ..That program was designed to attract and retain underrepresented students in engineering at Berkeley. Later on that program was renamed the Minority Engineering Program (MEP) to make it congruent with a statewide effort that was connected to the MESA program. MESA had been focused on high school preparation for college and what we needed to do was to create a program that was focused on undergraduates initially.”10

Boot Camp: The legendary MEP Pre-Engineering Program (PREP) summer orientation. Credit: Berkeley Engineering

The dean allocated resources for staff positions to the MEP, which served underrepresented undergraduates in all engineering departments in the College of Engineering. Pister identified the multiple essential components for a successful minority support program: recruitment, admissions, financial and housing assistance, orientation, advising, academic support and tutoring, student study center, student organizations, personal counseling, and summer job assistance. These program elements remain in place today. The College’s undergraduate admissions policy was purposefully revised to incorporate an emphasis on broader elements affecting a student’s record, such as quality of high school and family background. Personal interviews of prospective students by MEP staff counted in decisions.

MEP concentrated on recruiting a diverse pool of undergraduates and then bringing students of color into a structure of support rather than leaving them to fend for themselves. The emphasis of MEP during the 1980s was on retaining engineering undergraduates through graduation. Gradually, the MEP program evolved to encompass a new element: encouraging undergraduates to prepare for graduate school. By the end of the decade, graduate school became a goal for many MEP students.

The legendary MEP Pre-Engineering Program (PREP) summer orientation, called Boot Camp, brought incoming freshmen to campus to spend two weeks living in a dorm and taking classes before their first semester. Staff moved into the dorms with MEP students. New students took placement tests and brushed up on their academic skills in calculus, chemistry, and physics classes taught by graduate students. Future engineering professors like Gary May (PhD EE, 1991), Reginald Desroches (PhD CE, 1994), John Harkless (PhD chemistry, 2001), and Erika Whitney (PhD bioengineering, 2001) all taught Boot Camp classes. Both May and Desroches rose to become deans of engineering, at Georgia Institute of Technology and Rice University, respectively. Contact with upperclassmen through Boot Camp fostered influential friendships and peer mentoring across class levels. The freshman Boot Camp has continued for thirty-five years and now runs concurrently with a parallel program for transfer students.11

Ms. Antoinette “Toni” Torres

Ms. Antoinette “Toni” Torres led the MEP from 1987 to 1994. Deeply committed to the welfare of students, Toni Torres was a key figure in building the academic support infrastructure for MEP.12 Torres speaks of the inspiration she gained from her partnership with the dean: “He was unwavering in his conviction that diversity was integral to excellence in engineering. . .. He was resolute in his belief that the great challenges in STEM would benefit from the voice, experience and insight of the broadest set of contributors, and that best practice would emerge from their collaborations.” Torres calls the MEP model a “game changer—a model in which diverse students in the College of Engineering were acknowledged as bringing intellectual and interpersonal strengths to the academic enterprise.” She attributes Pister’s ambitions for the MEP to his “deep regard for human capacity and potential.”13

Early on, Torres realized that minority freshmen were underperforming in calculus and physics and were migrating out of engineering to other departments after their first year. To improve persistence, she developed what she called “highly customized advising” and created new academic programs to improve academic support. Torres collaborated with the campus Professional Development Program (PDP) to strengthen MEP student academic performance in math by directing all students to join the famous PDP Math Workshop Program, which fostered collaborative learning communities, resulting in higher grade point averages in math and improved retention to graduation.14

Dr. Kamau Bobb, MEP participant in the 1980s, notes that the MEP brought students into “an entire infrastructure” of support. During Boot Camp, freshmen met students in student organizations like the Black Engineering Science Students Association (BESSA) and Black Graduate Engineering and Science Students (BGESS), with ties to the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE). The College dedicated a physical space called the Academic Center where MEP students could gather, which turned out to be a very essential component of the MEP. The Center was “a place for students of color to feel bolstered if necessary or at ease in a protected space. All that sense of isolation, that just didn’t apply,” Bobb remembers.15 It is interesting that the overall Berkeley campus has recognized the symbolic and actual importance of dedicated space for underrepresented students, with the establishment in 2017 of the Fannie Lou Hamer Black Student Resources Center.16

Fannie Lou Hamer Black Student Resources Center. Credit: Berkeley Engineering

Milton Howard (BS, EE 1986) was an electrical engineering undergraduate in the first cohort of MEP students. He had connected with Berkeley through MESA as an Oakland high school student. The MEP group gave him the sense “that we were all in this together.” The students formed instant study groups. Howard recalls how motivating Toni Torres was during his first two years and credits Charles Tunstall, the second MEP Director before Toni Torres, for his leadership of the group when Howard was an upperclassman as “one of the main reasons we went to grad school.”17

Kamau Bobb recalled how strongly the MEP students and staff were tied in his undergraduate days to faculty of color across the campus, some of whom he named: “[MEP] had intentional and targeted recruitment, structured academic programs and advising once on campus and a place for students of color to feel bolstered if necessary or just at ease in a protected space. The relationship between BGESS and BESSA was super strong and offered peer-to-peer mentoring and the MEP workshops formalized that in the academic space based on a model implemented by Toni Torres, MEP Director. Then there was the cross-campus strength led by Pedro Noguera and his cohort under the leadership of [faculty] Percy Hintzen and Roy Thomas,18 and staff. . . . There was an entire infrastructure that fueled students’ desire to come to Cal and support them once they got there. That surely took at least 20 or so years to build.”19

First African American Rhodes Scholar from Cal

Dr. Michele deCoteau (BS 1987) was a visible success story for the new MEP Program. A 1988 graduate of Berkeley’s Materials Science Department, deCoteau attests to the critical support she derived from both the Minority Engineering Program and the Professional Development Program during her undergraduate years. While at Lowell High School in San Francisco, deCoteau took the BART train daily to join the PDP summer program. One of three African American engineers in her freshman year, she was admitted to materials science with a Regents Scholarship. DeCoteau emphasizes how important it was that MEP included the families of students and assured them that MEP would “take care” of their students academically as advisers and advocates “and that MEP would be a second family.” As a freshman, she met Stacy Turner at MEP, and the two remain close friends today. “The African American freshmen stuck together,” she says, while looking up to juniors like Darryll Pines.20 Charles Tunstall, a former MEP Director, was an important influence on deCoteau in both getting into and getting through Berkeley: “Charles was my biggest cheerleader, and that makes a difference in a place like Berkeley.”

Dr. Michele deCoteau (Credit: Daily Cal)

Dr. Roy Thomas (ethnic studies) and Professor Harry Morrison (physics) approached Michele in her senior year and urged her to apply for a Rhodes scholarship. DeCoteau became the first Berkeley Rhodes Scholar in twenty-five years, as well as the first woman and the first African American ever selected from Cal. She remembers sensing resistance from the campus Rhodes Scholarship selection committee, who apparently had another candidate in mind. At the time deCoteau said that she sought to be a “role model proving that there were Black students doing well in engineering and at UC Berkeley in general.” She earned a PhD in materials science at Oxford in 1993 and taught engineering at a community college. Later deCoteau directed the College of Engineering’s Minority Engineering Program with distinction from 1996 to 2010.

Reflecting on the positive results of the Minority Engineering Program at a 1987 retreat, Dean Pister affirmed “the viability of an affirmative action program in a College where enrollment impaction is very severe.” He pointed to the improvement in the graduation rate of MEP students and the rising percentage of students (38 percent by 1987) who were accepted into graduate school. He advocated that the MEP model “ought to be implemented in every engineering school in the United States—for every engineering student!” Dean Pister concluded by telling his audience that the set of elements of a successful MEP “defines a program that is needed by every engineering student. Eventually the Minority Engineering Program would become a Student Engineering Program.”21

The Reentry Program in Computer Science: 1982–1996

In 1982, Dean Pister took the bold stance of supporting the Reentry Program in Computer Science, whose purpose was to prepare postbaccalaureate, “older” women and minorities for competitive admission to graduate school. The program, later called the CS Reentry Program, evolved from a 1978 conference for women in engineering.22 Energized by the conference, CS graduate women pushed and negotiated for three years to create a reentry program in computer science at Cal and a staff position to focus on programs for women. Graduate students Susan Eggers, Paula Hawthorn (CS PhD 1979), and Barbara Simons drafted the proposal for the reentry program, which Dean Pister later circulated to relevant foundations and companies.23 The students cited contemporary research that the pipeline of women in computer science was “leaky,” because the percentage of women decreased along the way from college to graduate school to full professorships.

Dr. Paula Hawthorn (Credit: Peg Skorpinski)

Then, as now, women are the largest pool of underutilized workers to meet the needs of the technical workforce. Reflecting on their own situation, the three students envisioned the Reentry Program in Computer Science as tapping into a new demographic: “older” returning students, women, and minorities trained in other fields. Paula Hawthorn recalled that nontraditional students had little chance of gaining admission to graduate school: “We learned that as the enrollment pressure on the department built up, the prerequisites for acceptance into the EECS graduate program became more stringent, so that people who had not followed a standard math/engineering program of study from junior high school had a hard time being accepted into the EECS graduate program. We wanted to give ‘non-standard’ students, like ourselves, a better chance.”

Dr. Barbara Simons (Credit: Peg Skorpinski)

The enrollment pressure on the already impacted undergraduate computer science courses was intense, similar to today’s surging demand for the CS major. The activism of Hawthorn and Simons, with support from Dean Pister, resulted in a majority of CS faculty agreeing to the project. Many prominent women computer scientists beyond the Berkeley campus supported the reentry idea and strategized with Hawthorn and Simons24 (CS PhD 1981) to gain approval from the CS faculty. Among them were Professor Thelma Estrin of UCLA, a pioneering computer scientist, and Frances E. Allen, the first female to be accorded the honor of IBM Fellow at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

The CS Reentry Program added nontraditional students to classes in an already overcrowded program without bringing new resources to the division. The idea was for industry to assume support of the program. A surprising number of companies signed on early to support the reentry program: Chevron, Textronix, Advanced Micro Devices, AT&T Foundation, General Electric Foundation, Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, IBM, Intel, McDonnell Douglas, and NCR Corporation contributed the first year.25 Corporate contributions raised the stature of the Reentry Program among the faculty and made it easier to negotiate for student services. The funds were used to pay half-time salary for the program coordinator and student tuition at UC Berkeley Extension.

“There are two good purposes to the reentry program. One is affirmative action, giving opportunities to deserving people who will be good role models for future graduate students. But, further, the program will increase the numbers of Ph.D.’s in CS. At Berkeley we only graduate about nine or ten a year. So many students see the financial advantage of getting a master’s but don’t want to continue in graduate school. … The program would be a roaring success if one-quarter of its graduates went into academics.”26

Reentry students brought to the program widely varying backgrounds, from German literature to theater design. Several had worked in tech companies like Lockheed, Varian, and Bechtel. The Reentry Program offered a compressed set of core upper-division courses, which represented a very streamlined version of the undergraduate major. Students spent an average of two years in the program, and some engaged in research projects. The CS Division provided substantial resources, such as computers, equipment loans, seminars, and a special lounge. Berkeley faculty sympathetic to the program individually advised the students and wrote letters of recommendation for graduate school. Women undergraduates and graduate students already at Berkeley encouraged reentry students by tutoring them and coaching them for the Graduate Record Exam (GRE).

Nina Amenta and Ronitt Rubinfeld, CS doctoral students. Credit: Peg Skorpinski.

Dr. Nina Amenta, now senior professor and former chair of computer science at UC Davis, believes that the program swung open the door to her career: “The reentry program was perfect for someone like me, with a degree in classics but years of programming experience. Without the reentry program, top graduate schools would never have considered my application and getting into a good school was of course crucial in my becoming a professor myself.”27

Google Senior Vice President Diane Greene speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2016 Pier 48 on 2016.09.13. Credit: Steve Jennings, Wikipedia, CC-BY-4.0.

Diane Greene is undoubtedly the most famous alumna of the CS Reentry program. Greene called the program “transformative” for her career. After receiving an MS in computer science at Berkeley, she founded a very successful company, VMWARE. Greene is one of the most prominent women in technology.28 Greene served as CEO for Google Cloud Computing and returned to Berkeley twice to deliver commencement addresses for both BA graduates in Letters and Science (2016) and BS graduates in the College of Engineering (2018). She was elected into the National Academy of Engineering in 2018 for “contributions in transforming virtualization from a concept to an industry”.29

The quantifiable results of the program include the number of computer science degrees earned and professional positions attained by CS Reentry students now active in the information technology field. These professionals would not have joined the technology work force without the Reentry Program, and they bring to their work the benefit of a broader disciplinary background. (Ironically enough, the rapidly growing new major in data science at Berkeley places a high value on disciplinary breadth.30) More durable effects of the program include a higher degree of sensitivity to “older” women students in the computing community and active recruitment of women into CS, as well as support for the graduate and undergraduate women’s groups Women in Computer Science and Engineering (WICSE) and later Association of Women in EECS (AWE). The Computer Science Reentry Program was terminated in 1998, a casualty as a result of the 1996 passage of California’s Proposition 209, which prohibits programs at public institutions from providing educational benefits based on gender or ethnicity.

The spirit of the Reentry Program lives on through the influence of its graduates, including several faculty members in computer science. Four years after the conclusion of the CS Reentry Program, a retrospective article summarizing the program’s contributions, “Leveraging an Alternative Source of Computer Scientists,” appeared in the Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGCSE Bulletin.31 The presence of nontraditional students during a fifteen-year period has exerted a lasting effect on the culture of computer science at Berkeley by opening the door to a broader group of students.

Left to right: Lisa Buckman, Dawn Tilbury, Ginger Ogle, Gitanjali Swamy, Sheila Humphreys, and Ruth Rosenholz (horizontal) at a WICSE lunch meeting, circa 1988. Credit: Peg Skorpinski.

Addressing Graduate Diversity: A New Office of Women and Minority Graduate Matters

With the Minority Engineering Program in place, Dean Pister turned to diversifying the graduate program by creating the Office of Women and Minority Graduate Student Matters in 1985. Pister appointed me to the new position of half-time academic coordinator for student matters. The associate dean for academic affairs and I were charged with developing and carrying out a plan to attract and support minorities and women. Our mission was twofold: “to intervene in the admissions process with the goal of increasing the number of women and minorities in engineering graduate programs, and to develop programs and policies which create an environment of support for these students in graduate school.” Our first action was to draft a graduate-level affirmative action policy for engineering, because none then existed. The policy was approved by the College of Engineering faculty in December 1985.32 The Graduate Council of the Berkeley campus did not yet have an affirmative action policy and adopted one at roughly the same time. The Graduate Council of Berkeley’s Graduate Division adopted the new policy: “actively to promote ethnic and gender diversity in the graduate student population through recruitment, admissions, financial aid, and retention programs, and to make continuous effort to improve the success of such activities.”

Actively recruiting graduate student applicants was a novel concept, because the College of Engineering already received more than enough applications to ensure a highly selective admissions process. To signal a push for women and minorities, the College produced new brochures with photos of students with whom prospective women and underrepresented students could identify. Faculty and graduate students embarked on recruitment travel to both majority- and minority-serving schools. Staff and students were sent to conduct outreach at key national conferences, such as the National Society of Black Engineers, the Society of Women Engineers, and the Graduate Engineering Minority (GEM) Symposium. When I took my first graduate recruitment trip to Howard University in 1986, Professor Lorraine Fleming, the first Black PhD graduate of civil engineering at Berkeley the previous year, had been newly appointed at Howard and welcomed me warmly.

“There Is a Perception of Berkeley as Uncaring”

In March 1986, shortly after the new Office of Minority and Women Graduate Student Matters opened, Dean Pister convened a meeting of minority engineering faculty from across the country. Twelve minority engineering faculty from other institutions agreed to attend. Our purpose was to seek their advice to help us shape the new graduate diversity program. The invited faculty members were urged to discuss frankly how UC Berkeley was perceived and how best to address the resulting challenges of recruiting a more diverse pool. They met for an intense day and a half with deans, the provost, and Berkeley engineering faculty and students, as well as separately as a group. They then attended the College’s annual Industrial Liaison Program, featuring technical talks by faculty and graduate students about their research.

After two days at Berkeley, the participants delivered their candid recommendations, which set the context for affirmative action in the seven engineering departments and for the new Office of Minority and Women Grad Matters. Their recommendations are as applicable today as they were in 1986. The thread that ran through their comments was this: “There is a perception of Berkeley as uncaring.” Participants identified issues, including the isolation minority students experience, campus climate, bias, and financial aid, but did not explicitly address hiring minority faculty. The participants made three recommendations: (1) individualize the review of applications from minority students; (2) make a commitment to financial support of minority graduate students (“Financial aid packages should be guaranteed to students making satisfactory progress for the length of time it might take to reasonably complete degree”); and (3) support enrolled minority graduate students for success and retention. The visiting faculty members had some general suggestions as well: “Use a personal touch with minorities”; “Have a person who helps negotiate the university system.” Other recommendations also centered on breaking down the isolation of students while sensitizing faculty: “Move your new [minority] graduate students together immediately!”; “Efforts should be made to identify and educate faculty members who may have both racial and sexist prejudices.”33

These recommendations from outsiders pushed the College to formulate new approaches. For example, regarding the review of graduate school applications, the suggestion to devote additional scrutiny to applications from minorities and women by admissions committee members was accepted and took hold after 1986. The notion of a closer or “holistic” review is now mandated by the Berkeley Graduate Division in every academic department.

Six weeks after receiving comments from the College of Engineering Visiting Minority Faculty Meeting, the College’s Committee on Graduate Study issued a memo to the College of Engineering faculty that restated insights gained from the March meeting. Among their recommendations were a recalibration of admissions criteria and much more focus on supporting students once they were admitted and had entered the university.

Results of the Graduate Initiative

Within two years, engineering departments attracted more minority graduate students. MEP Director Charles Tunstall invited the then director of the Graduate Engineering Minority (GEM) Consortium to talk to Berkeley undergraduates about applying to graduate school. The personal dynamism of this GEM Consortium director made him very influential in motivating students to attend graduate school. Milton Howard (BS 1986) attended that talk when he was a junior and recalls, “We left that meeting pretty focused, pretty excited. . . . Our eyes were opened to something we never considered. Most of us were first-generation college students.”34 Many minority graduate students in the College of Engineering were initially funded through a Graduate Engineering Minority (GEM) Master’s Fellowship.

Professor Andrew Meade

Professor Andrew Meade of Rice University, who was a GEM Fellow in the 1980s and graduated in June 1989 (left inset photo, taken in the Bay Area right after his graduation), reflected on his GEM fellowship: “I was fortunate enough to secure a GEM graduate fellowship at the MS level and was accepted to the mechanical engineering program. I loved the atmosphere and support so much that I stayed on for the PhD program. With the aid and funding from the MEP, I was able to graduate, and to move on to a career in academia. I’m presently a professor at Rice University in mechanical engineering and run the aerospace educational program. I also served as department chair, among other posts at the university. I credit the GEM Fellowship and am forever grateful to the hardworking and supportive MEP staff.”35

Dr. Colin Parris (Credit: Peg Skorpinski)

Dr. Colin Parris of General Electric (inset photo, right, when he was a graduate student in CS in 1988, credit: Peg Skorpinski) and Professor Jeffrey Streator of Georgia Institute of Technology were also GEM Fellows among others.

Berkeley began sending faculty and minority graduate students to recruit at minority-serving universities and colleges, as well as regularly sponsoring students at minority conferences such as the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE). The College of Engineering tripled the overall number of minority students, from nine to twenty-seven, within one year.36 A group of Black graduate students founded the Black Graduate Engineering and Science Students (BGESS) organization in 1986, which has helped not only to provide peer support but also to influence policy and practice in the academic departments. BGESS thrives today, thirty-four years after its founding, by creating community and peer support for African American students in STEM, and assistance with recruitment.

A Daunting Challenge: Diversifying the Faculty

Dean Pister pursued the challenge of diversity on the engineering faculty throughout his decade as dean. In 1980 Professor Susan Graham (computer science) was still the sole tenured female faculty member in the College of Engineering. The dean extended strategic invitations to the most distinguished women and minority engineers in the nation for short-term visits. These role models served as existence proofs for students, and for the faculty as well. In Dean Pister’s first six years, the College of Engineering appointed six women professors on the tenure track, although none was hired in EECS.37

Professor Mildred Dresselhaus

The College collaborated closely with the departments in initiating invitations to prominent engineers from diverse backgrounds: for example, the McKay Endowment in EECS, the Computer Research Association’s Visiting Lecturer Program, the Office of the President Regents’ Lecturers, and Berkeley Chancellor’s Professorships. These short visits, for several days or a few weeks, enabled highly visible women to interact intensely with students and faculty. Pister actively leveraged the program to invite to campus prominent women members of the National Academy of Engineering such as Professor Mildred Dresselhaus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Dr. Betsy-Ancker Johnson, a vice president at General Motors. Ancker-Johnson held a PhD in physics from Berkeley and had served as U.S. undersecretary of commerce.

Mildred Dresselhaus and Ancker-Johnson were the only living female members of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) at the time. Dresselhaus was the third woman engineer elected to the NAE, in 1974, and Ancker-Johnson, elected the following year, was the fourth. EECS also hosted IBM Fellow Frances E. Allen, a pioneer in the field of compilers, as a visiting scholar. Dean Pister advocated for Allen in a memo to Chancellor Heyman in 1987: “Allen will not only serve as a tremendous resource to the academic and research efforts of the Department, but she will also play an urgently-needed role model for aspiring female students both in the EECS Department and the College at large.” Allen was the first woman to receive the Turing Award in 2008.38

Visiting Women Professors

During the 1980s Mary Ryan, a progressive National Science Foundation (NSF) program officer, started funding programs to attract and support women in science. In 1982 NSF had initiated Visiting Professorships for Women (VPW), lasting a few weeks or upto a year, to address the lack of role models in science and engineering and “the resistance women encountered in trying to excel in male-dominated fields.”39 VPW awardees could not already be full professors, or at the zenith of their careers like the Regents’ and Chancellor’s appointees, but were at levels at which the Berkeley visit could advance their own careers. The visiting women, who stayed for two weeks, were required to interact with and encourage female students as well as carry out their proposed research. The EECS Department welcomed three VPW faculty grantees of this competitive program. In each case, the stint at Berkeley led to advancement for the women in their home institutions.

Dr. Jeanne Ferrante was awarded the first NSF VPW in 1985. A computer scientist at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Ferrante spent an academic year at Cal. A member of Frances E. Allen’s group at IBM Research, Jeanne taught a graduate class on parallel computing to sixty Berkeley graduate students and implemented a series of workshops titled “On Being a Researcher.”40 Professor Ferrante organized a panel to talk about what it is like to do research. Students were totally surprised and reassured, a senior professor admitted he “didn’t know what he was doing all the time, and where his research was going.” Ferrante later accepted a faculty job at UC San Diego and became the first female chair of electrical and computer engineering there.

The NSF chose Berkeley to host two additional professors under the VPW program: Mary Lou Soffa, from the University of Pittsburgh, and Dr. Ljiliana Trajkovic, member of the technical staff at Bell Labs. Dr. Soffa later moved to the University of Virginia, where she led the Computer Science Department as chair. The Berkeley appointment was instrumental in helping Dr. Trajkovic to make a subsequent transition from Bell Labs to a faculty appointment at Simon Fraser University, where she has tenure. In 1987 the EECS Department hired a second woman, Professor Avideh Zakhor, who was the first female faculty member in electrical engineering. During Dean Pister’s decade in office, seven women were hired on the faculty.

Faculty of Color at Berkeley in the 1980s

Hiring faculty of color presented a far more daunting task than hiring women faculty. As Dean Pister stated in his oral history, the dean can “take the moral high ground” but faculty search committees make the choice of whom to hire.

Dr. Percy PierreVFS (CC BY-SA 4.0)

In the absence of minority faculty in engineering, the dean used the same strategy as for women, by inviting distinguished engineers for short academic visits, in order to give students and colleagues exposure to successful role models. Among them were Dr. Victor Lawrence (AT&T Bell Labs); Professor John Foster, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University; Dr. Sandra Baylor Johnson, IBM Research; and Dr. William Velez, University of Arizona. Dr. Percy Pierre, a widely recognized leader in STEM education, former president of Prairie View A&M University, and former dean of Howard University, served as Regents’ Lecturer in 1990.41 At Berkeley, he met with Black graduate students and gave a lecture, “Improving Math/Science Education in Urban Schools.” Not until the decade following Dean Pister’s tenure, in 1996, was the first African American professor hired in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.

Chancellor of UC Santa Cruz

After completing his term as dean, Karl Pister was almost immediately asked by the president of the university, David Saxon, to take on service as interim chancellor of UC Santa Cruz. After a year he was appointed chancellor, a post he held until 1996. At Santa Cruz, Chancellor Pister worked to expand existing outreach programs, particularly with K–12 schools and the community college system. The work was interrupted by the Regents’ adoption, in July 1995, of Special Policy 1 (SP1) and Special Policy 2 (SP2) ending the use of race, ethnicity, and gender as factors in admissions, contracting, and hiring. A detailed account of Pister’s years as chancellor of UC Santa Cruz may be found in his oral history there.42

“The Conscience of the Upper Administration”

Up to the present Karl Pister has actively continued to give his time and wisdom in a variety of roles to advance access to the university. Some of his contributions are visible, but many have been behind the scenes.

UCSC Chancellor Karl S. Pister

(Credit: Peg Skorpinski)

In the wake of the Board of Regents’ July 1995 vote to end racial and ethnic preferences in admissions, a systemwide Outreach Task Force was created and charged with developing a strategic plan to protect UC’s diversity in the new post–affirmative action world. Pister served first as a consultant to the Outreach Task Force; later, at UC President Richard Atkinson’s request, Pister agreed to serve as vice president for educational outreach. Berkeley Provost Emeritus Paul R. Gray43 was dean of engineering in the period following the passage of Proposition 209 in 1996. He remembers Pister’s critical leadership at that fraught time for the university: “Karl Pister’s long career in academic leadership has been remarkable for many reasons, but his lifelong commitment to access and inclusion really stands out. He created the groundwork for much of the array of programs that have helped address this issue at Berkeley both in engineering and more broadly. His leadership during those difficult years in the 1990s at UCOP [UC Office of the President] as Vice President were critical in helping the UC system find its way and realize the importance of broad outreach and inclusion in its role as the leading public university system in the country. He provided an important part of the conscience of the upper administration at Berkeley and in the UC system in his various leadership roles. We all owe Karl a great debt for that.”44

Working closely with his campus and UCOP colleagues, Pister oversaw implementation of the Task Force’s recommendations and coordinated campus and systemwide programs to attract more educationally disadvantaged students to UC campuses. He saw the outreach initiative as an opportunity for a new land-grant model to complement the old: cultivating the rich talent of California’s young people through UC partnerships with K–12 schools, principals, teachers, students, and underserved communities. Pister’s leadership was critical to the early success of the most ambitious outreach enterprise the university has ever undertaken. Generous state funding made it possible to realize a number of the Outreach Task Force’s goals before the economic downturn of the early 2000s drastically curtailed UC’s efforts.

For two years, Pister served on the Regents Task Force on SP1 and SP2.45 Then, from 2002 to 2004, he directed the Center for Studies in Higher Education at Berkeley. In a final assignment, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau appointed Pister in 2004 as the chancellor’s senior associate to oversee a major capital program, the Southeast Campus Integrated Projects. In this role, Pister agreed to chair the task force on upgrading California Memorial Stadium—a commitment he carried out for eight years, until 2012.46

UCSC Chancellor Karl S. Pister

(Credit: Peg Skorpinski)

Karl Pister continues to engage in purposeful conversations with colleagues. He provides sage advice and mentoring based on more than sixty years of dedicated service to the University of California. President Emeritus Richard Atkinson summed up Pister’s enormous contributions to the University of California: “In many different ways and in many different roles, Karl Pister has led by example and helped shape the values of his profession and the culture of our academic community. His contributions reflect a passionate commitment to promoting social justice, a commitment that continues undiminished to this day. Few individuals in the history of the University of California have served it so long, so devotedly, or so well.”47