Nicholas Dirks Berkeleyside

A casual chancellor Nicholas Dirks in his office. Photo: Lance KnobelThe second floor of California Hall is bright and airy, with a hushed air of importance. As Berkeleyside ascended the staircase last week, Dan Mogulof, UC Berkeley’s head of communications, alerted us to prepare for canada goose outlet store a shock: The new chancellor was wearing jeans.

When Nicholas Dirks greeted us in his office, he was indeed in jeans, with a pressed pale pink shirt (he made an unnecessary excuse for the jeans: “It’s the middle of August.”). The tall bookcases in canada goose coats the office were filled with scholarly texts, as well as popular fiction and nonfiction. For a man who oversees the well being of 36,000 students, more than 1,500 faculty members, 8,477 staff, 130 academic departments, and a $2.2 billion budget, Dirks’ desk was remarkably clutter free. A large Apple display was crowded with email messages.

Dirks, 62, the former executive vice president and dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Columbia University, officially took office on June 1 but spent six weeks flying back and forth canada goose outlet store uk between New York City and the Bay Area. He moved into the chancellor’s home on campus in mid July with his wife, Janaki Bakhle, an associate professor of history, and their 14 year old canada goose coats on sale son, who will be off to boarding school official canada goose outlet at the end of August (Dirks’ daughter from his first marriage works as a reporter at KPBS public radio in San Diego).

Dirks has longstanding ties to California. His parents moved to Santa Cruz in the 1970s when his father, J. Edward Dirks, was appointed the vice chancellor and dean for humanities at UC Santa Cruz. Dirks visited them regularly. He taught at Cal Tech in Pasadena for nine years before moving to the University of Michigan and then to head the department of anthropology at Columbia in 1997. Dirks specializes in South India, canada goose outlet nyc particularly the caste system and the impact of British colonial rule on the subcontinent.

Dirks hasn’t had a great deal of time to explore Berkeley yet, but a few things already stand out. A fitness enthusiast, he and his wife have taken their two dogs on walks in Tilden Park (although he hasn’t made it to dog friendly Point Isabel in Richmond yet). Dirks said his wife, who was born in Mumbai, has wanted to move to Berkeley “ever since she drove up University Avenue and realized you can buy saris down the street and you can get dosi up the street.” One of the first places they ate was at Vik’s Chaat on Fourth Street, which Dirks pronounced “very good.”

Berkeleyside’s Frances Dinkelspiel and Lance Knobel spoke to Dirks about his impressions of Berkeley, his perspective as a new chancellor, and his initial views on some areas of university/city relations. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Berkeleyside: What do you think of Berkeley so far?

Dirks: I haven’t really spent that much time at Berkeley. For me, Berkeley has mostly been both the extraordinary, iconic history of the city and the university and then [the time I spent] as an academic who has come here periodically to give talks and to be part of conferences and workshops and the like. In a way, I’m still discovering Berkeley.

Berkeleyside:Your academic background in anthropology and history seems out of the norm for where universities choose their chancellors or presidents. They’re often economists or lawyers or scientists because of the perception that that’s the way the world is going. Does that give you a different perspective?

Dirks: That’s an interesting question. I’ve been asked it in various ways a few times. I don’t know if I have a consistent response to it. I’ll just say that I effectively began my academic career writing about Gandhi. The truth is that in writing about Gandhi and then in teaching about Gandhi over the years I’ve thought a lot about civil disobedience and canada goose outlet black friday I’ve thought a lot about the need to understand, respect, and certainly evaluate in a historical canada goose outlet way the issues that are part of the fabric of life in this campus. In part, the understanding that I had when I came here that I’m going to have to engage these issues is canada goose outlet canada almost, for me, an ethnographic interest and buy canada goose jacket seeing what it is like to be involved in these issues from the point of view of administration, management, and so on. I’m even engaging my job in that sense, if you will, both historically and ethnographically.

“In writing about Gandhi and then in teaching about Gandhi over the years I’ve thought a lot about civil disobedience”

Berkeleyside: So this floor is the Raj?

Dirks:That’s the contradiction, right? My last book was a fairly critical evaluation of British imperial rule in India in the 18th century. It’s less uncommon for somebody with my kind of academic background to be in administration or a university president in the Ivy League than it has been in public universities and certainly in the University of California at large.

I actually didn’t think it was so strange until I came here and, obviously, both succeeded a physicist and also observed that most canada goose outlet uk of the leaders in canada goose outlet new york city the University of California system were from the sciences or engineering.

To your question, I think that one thing I’ve had to learn over the years is how to listen to people from very Canada Goose online different kinds of backgrounds. That’s partly what one did when one went to India in the 1970s and ’80s before the telecommunication revolution and information revolution. You spent long periods of time in villages trying to understand the caste system through listening to people talk from different perspectives that were both culturally unfamiliar but also sometimes politically even offensive.

Has this helped me in administration? I suspect so. I’m sure people from all sorts of disciplines have all sorts of ways to get whatever sensitivity might buy canada goose jacket cheap be helpful in doing these jobs, but certainly it was hardwired for me in that kind of background.

When I first went to India I was a kid and then I went back in years when it was hard to get a telephone call to come back to talk to my parents. Now university presidents are lining up to go to China and India and everybody is talking about the global university and it is a different age in terms of both the world we’re educating students for and the kinds of constituencies that we engage in every part of the university.

In that sense, having a background and having spent a lot of my life in Asia I think is helpful.

Berkeleyside: Do you think there are things you want to bring to Cal and experiences you want to offer Cal students to make it a more global university?

Dirks: I was encouraged when I went to one of the student orientation sessions earlier this summer. The Dean of Students said two things which I thought were terrific. One was you’re coming to a research university and what that means is you should do research. That doesn’t mean you’re just coming to attend a research university, it means you’re coming to do research. The second thing he said was that you’re coming to a place that really, really values the importance of study abroad, experiences abroad, and if not study abroad opportunities that might, through internships or other kinds of roles, take you somewhere in the globe outside of this area. I was canada goose outlet sale working at Columbia for years to try to increase the opportunities for students to Canada Goose Jackets do different kinds of things that would take them off campus and into an unfamiliar part of the world.

It really is a different world. In fact, my most recent research has been on the history of area studies in the US during World War II and then the immediate period afterwards, because before World War II, there were very few Canada Goose Outlet experts about parts of the world outside of North America and Europe on most American campuses. Then, World War II happened, FDR brought in William C. Donovan to run the Office of Strategic Services and he brought in academics from all over.

But much of what they did was to try to find smart young people to begin to engage the issues that the US was confronting in places like Southeast Asia and Japan and China, South Asia and the Middle East. Out of that, interestingly enough, came the beginning of a kind of development of expertise that led to the creation of area studies in the US. Quite literally, that is to say, a lot of the people who were drafted into the OSS [Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA] to write background reports and do research on parts of the world went off to universities, set up the first centers for Russian studies at Columbia, for example, or East Asian studies at Harvard or whatever.

But now, it’s a very different moment, so how do universities respond to this? What do you do to think about both our teaching obligations and the kind of expertise that is needed to engage in a different kind of global world? We haven’t even begun to think this through, partly it’s because as long as you think of globalization as a discrete thing that might be studied in one or two departments, you’re not getting the extent of the transformation, I think.

“What do you do to think about both our teaching obligations and the kind of expertise that is needed to engage in a different kind of global world?”

There’s almost a kind canada goose outlet parka of need to think about the global ecosystem within which the university is situated that will have to be, at every level, rethought, I think, in this coming century.

What I mean by ecosystem, in part, is if you’re going to be availing yourself of global expertise you have to think differently about how people are hired, https://www.dvu-nds.de how people are appointed in faculty positions, how courses are taught. We have all sorts of ways to evaluate scholarship on the basis of publication in few key journals. If it’s a global marketplace, what does that mean in terms of recognizing and evaluating what may be the new most interesting and exciting work that’s being done outside of the institutional circuitry that is part of how American higher education has established itself.

Dirks in a video taken shortly after his appointment as chancellor. Photo: UC BerkeleyBerkeleyside: Where do you place the role of teaching cheap canada goose in this vision of the university?

Dirks: I think there is no essential opposition between teaching and research. I think for too long those of us who have been committed to maintaining the importance of the research university haven’t thought enough about how teaching and research, in fact, need to be canada goose outlet joined in every level, in every conversation about research.

One of the things I’m going to be focusing on here is the character of the undergraduate experience, not just because there are a lot of undergraduates and we have a huge obligation to make sure that experience is productive in all sorts of ways, but also because I think it will actually help shape the future articulation of the research enterprise on campus. uk canada goose outlet I think Berkeley is a better place to do that than a lot of other places, in part because of the overall commitment on part of the community to issues of the public good, whether it’s in terms of clean energy or in terms of social justice.