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April 3, 2006 Vol. 77, no. 11S
Alumnus
of the Year: Karl Pister
On April 8, former Berkeley CE professor and former College dean Karl Pister (B.S.’45, M.S.’48 CE) will be honored as Cal’s 2006 Alumnus of the Year at the Charter Gala in San Francisco. Below is a profile of Pister adapted and excerpted from California, the University’s alumni magazine and written by executive editor Patrick Dillon. Karl Pister’s sublime Berkeley moment arrives often and like an expected guest when he mounts the stepped bridge spanning the south fork of Strawberry Creek and crosses into Faculty Glade. “Its incredible beauty hasn’t changed in the 50-plus years I’ve been around here,” says California Alumni Association’s 2006 Alumnus of the Year. The words of an aesthete might sound anomalous when matched against a nine-page, single-spaced résumé listing his 20 academic titles, his university and community awards, and his achievements in the engineering world of concrete and rebar. But, in fact, Karl S. Pister — B.S. civil engineering ’45; M.S. civil engineering ’48; Ph.D. theoretical and applied mechanics, University of Illinois ’52; professor of civil engineering at Cal; dean of the College of Engineering for 10 years; and chancellor at the University of California, Santa Cruz for six years — entered Cal in 1942 as a “terribly intimidated,” bookish 17-year-old farm boy from Stockton who had been told by counselors that he had an aptitude for English literature. He even struggled to avoid flunking his first Berkeley math course. It was then, on the precipice of experiencing failure for the first time, that the high school valedictorian and California Scholarship Federation Award winner decided to apply himself. More than 60 years later, even in retirement, he is still applying himself to the benefit of the Cal community and the world of engineering and education. Pister is eminently cordial and composed, his focus direct, his sentences structured and circumspect with a measured precision. He balances himself on a low center of gravity, something engineers strive for in tall buildings, particularly ones erected in seismic areas. He is the silver-haired sort you would send into challenging situations — say rebuilding New Orleans or Iraq. That Pister was chosen to head a 30-member panel to oversee reconstruction and upgrading of Boalt Hall School of Law, the Haas School of Business, 82-year-old Memorial Stadium, and their common areas — the most ambitious campus project in decades — surprises no one, because the plan combines gargantuan engineering challenges with the need for skillful political diplomacy. Building durable structures and building political constituencies from competing interests are Pister’s hallmarks. But when asked about his greatest engineering accomplishments, he demurs, saying, “I have always believed that developing people is more important than developing things. I take more pride in my students than in the research papers we produced.”
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