BERKELEY — So what do we call this place? Cal? Berkeley? Cal Berkeley? UC Berkeley? This question hung above 10 of us -- nine visitors and one student tour guide, all gathered at a busy campus that simmered on an autumn weekday morning with undergraduate enthusiasm, intellectual fermentation and political skirmishing.
Way back in 1966, when he was running for governor and the university was awash in demonstrations, Ronald Reagan described this campus as "the mess at Berkeley." After winning that election, Reagan engineered the firing of the university president, cut the budget, proposed selling rare books from the library and sent the National Guard in with bayonets and tear gas, dramatic gestures that helped give this territory its own chapter in the history of dissent in America.
But that was a long time ago.
"You can pretty much call us whatever you want," guide Jenn Lerner told us. "As long as it's not Stanford."
And so we began, some of us considering commitments to UC Berkeley, some just curious. Berkeley, the city, is a famously liberal enclave of 102,000 people wedged into about 10 square miles just north of Oakland. Berkeley, the campus, is 1,232 acres of that, but most of the action is in the 178-acre central core, which faces San Francisco Bay from the low slopes of the Berkeley Hills.
That core area is where you find the school's key landmarks, including the 307-foot Campanile (a.k.a. Sather Tower, which serves as a North Star to many a meandering freshman), Sproul Plaza and stodgy old South Hall, which goes back to this school's early days in 1873.
Lerner, a junior majoring in American studies, rattled off facts at high speed, all the while walking backward and interrupting herself with offbeat asides. By many measures, she noted, this is the No. 1 public university in the nation, its current faculty decorated with seven Nobel prizes. (The laureates get preferred parking, which may be the ultimate measure of respect here.) In Sproul Plaza, we noted the campus Republicans and the Muslim students recruiting tables about 8 feet apart. There's also a dodge-ball league, Lerner added, along with about 800 other campus groups.
The cyclotron was invented here, and various Silicon Valley luminaries put in time here. The Bancroft Library (closed "until winter" for retrofitting) holds the world's top collection of Mark Twain papers and an early nugget from the gold rush of 1849.
