It’s not you, it’s me

...well, yes, it is you

By Kelly Coyne
From the May 2004 Print Edition

Dear Chancellor Berdahl,

At last, it seems, it’s time to go our own separate ways.

Who knew that it would end this way? I mean, we have so much in common: You like hiking, I like hiking. You like Cal football, and so do I. I think every student at Cal should be here because of their intellect and achievements, not the color of their skin, and you … well … nevermind.

I still remember the first time I saw you, Bob, your face aglow with candlelight. It was my freshman year — more than two years ago, now, at the spontaneously organized candlelight vigil on September 11, 2001. I’m sure you remember that night too. You made some comforting comments when all the world seemed to be going wrong. You were right when you told us “The world will never be quite the same again.” In fact, at that moment, I thought I liked you. But of course that was a stressful day – I must not have been thinking straight.

In the following months at Cal, it soon became apparent that we weren’t seeing eye to eye.

…In fact, I wasn’t seeing you at all…

The following months were sprinkled with student misconduct. But whenever a leftist student group acted up – stealing a thousand copies of the Patriot here, storming a lecture in Wheeler Hall there, or draining student money into a leftist lobbying scheme against Proposition 54 – you were nowhere to be found.

When a posse of disgruntled MEChA students penetrated the roof of our Patriot office and stole every last issue, you made the effort to take out a half-page statement in the Daily Cal condemning the acts and appealing to the Cal community to all get along. I suppose I still thought you were an alright kind-of guy. It was only after incident after rowdy student incident that I became fed up with your attempts to administer the campus through half-page ads in the student newspaper.

But I will give credit when credit is due. After all, you did spend several months rightfully prosecuting the SJP hooligans who in a riotous flurry, disrupted campus and halted classes during a protest. I wondered: had I underestimated you? Could it be that you just talked softly and carried a big stick? At that point, it seemed, you were prepared to lay down the law.

But my earlier assessments were soon reconfirmed. Instead of holding the students accountable for their actions, you backed off on the disciplinary procedures and let them get off without any consequences. It was then I realized something was missing. You lack one very important personal attribute: a backbone.

So I’m writing to let you know this just isn’t going to work. You and I just weren’t right for each other, from the start. Maybe I should have paid more attention to your preoccupation with “diversity” as the guiding ideal of Cal’s admissions process. As a middle-class kid with Irish roots, I never had right kind of that diversity you sought to promote on campus. And we never saw eye to eye on politics either. In light of Cal’s history of leftist politics, I should have expected that student groups with the correct political leanings would be able to disregard the rules and get away with it. As for the rest of us: we get to have our lectures and classes disrupted by surges of angst-ridden protesters and our student body funds diverted to political lobbying efforts.

By now, you’ve probably realized that I don’t like you very much. Not anymore.

But don’t fret, Bob, even though we’re moving on, we’ll always have our memories. I’ll never forget the way you tried to convince the national press that red, white, and blue ribbons were excluded from the 9/11 memorial due to cost constraints instead of political motivations. Or the way you desperately tried to shift the blame for this year’s Fulbright Scholar incident away from Sproul Hall to Federal Express. That was real swell.

Anyhow, good luck with everything. It was so considerate of you to decide to do the moving on, seeing as I have a degree to finish and all. Besides, you deserve someone who will appreciates all of your very special qualities, like your tendency to cave under pressure, and your persistent efforts to defy the will of California voters to keep race out of the UC admissions process.

They say that time heals all wounds. Take, for instance, that big fenced-in patch of dirt in front of Sproul Plaza. I hear it’s going to be a beautiful public space in a matter of months. I hope this summer break is long enough for us to get used to getting along without each other. I hear you’ll still be on campus next year, so I hope we can still be friends.

No hard feelings,

Kelly

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