TEACHING ANTHROPOLOGY AT BERKELEY

Theodore D. McCown

University of California, Berkeley

The history of an academic department such as the one at Ber-
keley is complex and in the present context this essay presumes no more
than to set out a few sign posts. It was not created to be a teaching
organ of the University, although it soon became such, but was intended
to serve as museum and research institute.

Let me first say something about the way the department relates
to the history of anthropology and particularly anthropology as an aca-

demic discipline in the United States. The Peabody Museum was founded by
a gift of $150,000 to Harvard University and accompanying this the Uni-

versity agreed to establish the Peabody Chair of American Archeology and
Ethnology. Whoever held that chair usually taught students at Harvard;

and about the same time there was some teaching going on at the University
of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. This effort was modest and scattered.
Anthropology as an academic discipline did not come into any real focus

until the 1890's. One of the events that helped very materially was the
decision to include in the Columbian Exposition a large set of exhibits
of an anthropological nature. This was a new venture for international
expositions in this country although similar things had been done in

France considerably earlier. There was a very substantial Division of
Anthropology set up in connection with the Exposition. Frederick Ward

Putnam, then curator of the Peabody Museum and Peabody Professor at Har-
vard, was asked to head up the Division and he, in turn, drew in people
like Franz Boas, Alexander Chamberlain, and a whole host of others not

only to collect materials for the exhibition but also to collect infor-

mation. Many individuals were sent out with questionnaires and they did
what today we would call field work, both of an ethnological and a

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physical anthropological nature. Resources were insufficient to under-
take much in the nature of archeology. There was a considerable coming
together of anthropological interests through the numerous people who

were associated with the establishment of the anthropological exhibits
at the Columbia Exposition. This covered a total period from 1891 to

1894 with the actual exhibition opening in the latter part of 1892; it

closed in 1894.  It was during this period of time that Franz Boas began

the teaching of anthropology; first at Clark University, then at Columbia.
It is interesting to recall that his first title was Lecturer in Physical
Anthropology in Columbia University.

He retained that title for several years and then, five years

after his initial appointment in 1894, was made Professor of Anthropology.
One of his bright young men, Alfred Kroeber, was recommended by Boas to
Putnam, to come to California and take charge of the archeological and
anthropological collections that Mrs. Hearst had been securing since
about 1895.

Phoebe Apperson Hearst was the wife of Senator George Hearst,
the mother of William Randolph Hearst and the grandmother of William

Randolph Hearst, Jr. George Hearst was one of the movers and shakers of
the mines, railroads and various other enterprises in the west. The

Hearst family also was early involved in the newspaper business and their
first venture in newspapers was the San Francisco Examiner which the

Hearst family still controls. History is not altogether clear on what
interested Mrs. Hearst in doing something about anthropology; her idea

was to present to the University of California the materials to establish
a Museum of Man. Who aroused her interest in this is not altogether

clear. She was a friend of a woman who was interested in anthropological
materials, Zelia Nuttall, the daughter of the famous botanist Nuttall.

Mrs. Nuttall for many years was associated with the Peabody Museum. Mrs.

Hearst and Mrs. Nuttall were friends from their girlhood in Massachusetts.
Indirect evidence suggests that it was through Mrs. Nuttall that Mrs.

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Hearst came to rely on Professor Putnam as her senior advisor. He was

extremely influential in advising her what and whom to support. Beginning
in 1895 and for a decade thereafter she financed expeditions directed by
George Reisner, one of America's foremost Egyptologists, and Max Uhle, a

German archeologist who had been working in Peru and who was subsequently
supported by Mrs. Hearst in this work. She also employed several people
who, acting as her collectors, roamed the Mediterranean and Europe buying
up collections of archeological and anthropological interest.

By 1901 there had begun a steady stream of the crated materials
from Egypt, Peru, and Europe, arriving in San Francisco and Berkeley for

the new Museum of Man. Mrs. Hearst was appointed a Regent of the Univer-
sity and in this way came to be closely associated with Benjamin Ide
Wheeler who became President of the University of California in 1898.

Wheeler said in 1900 that one of the most pressing needs of the Univer-
sity was a museum and department of Anthropology. At the Regents'

meeting of September 20, 1901, they formally established a Department

and Museum of Anthropology. The department was for a few years the museum.
The main activity was the museum and this revolved around the collections,
but right at the beginning it also involved the concept of research.

Kroeber has recorded that Wheeler was rather loathe to agree
that a course in anthropology be offered on the campus. One can speak
in the singular because Berkeley was the University of California in

those years. A two hour course was authorized for the Spring term in 1902,
but it is not listed in any catalogue; Kroeber had three students in it.
It must have been authorized after the printing of the catalogue since

the first formal listing for Anthropology was in 1903 and that year there

were four courses offered. These were offered only in the Spring semester.
It was clearly understood from the start that Kroeber and his anthropolo-
gical assistant, P. E. Goddard, who later went on to become an important
figure in anthropology in the American Museum of Natural History, taught

only in the Spring semester and in the other semester were free to engage

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in research. This research right from the very beginning involved the
ethnology of California.

It is instructive to know what the courses were. Kroeber ob-
viously had as a model of what you taught in anthropology the subject
matter and concepts which had been taught at Columbia by Boas. Boas

taught several different kinds of things. From the beginning he offered
one course every year in Physical Anthropology. He offered one or more
courses in various aspects of American Indian languages, and he also of-
fered courses in ethnology. With the resources Kroeber had available,

namely, himself as a part-time teacher and Goddard as a part-time teacher,
in the first year in which there was any real set of course offerings,
they offered North American Ethnology as Anthropology 1 and Tribes of
Northwest California as Anthropology 2. This last was offered by Mr.

Goddard who had already spent a number of years in Northwest California
as a missionary, and had accumulated a very large amount of ethnological
and linguistic information. North American Languages was given by Dr.
Kroeber--"Prospective students should consult the instructor before

electing the course." This was a warning he gave in this and similar
courses because he did not want simply to give training in elementary

linguistics! He wanted students who had some linguistic or philological
training before he would take them in this particular kind of course.

Anthropology 5 was The Indians of California. This constituted the en-
tire offering of Anthropology.

In terms of what is offered in American Anthropology departments
today this is a highly curious sort of offering. Every one of these

courses would today be regarded as highly specialized, not offered earlier
than the upper division, for junior or senior undergraduates. The North
American Languages would probably be a graduate course. I have not been
able to find any records of the enrollment in these courses but my guess
is that neither Kroeber nor Goddard were overwhelmed with students.

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The collections that were being sent to the University on be-
half of Mrs. Hearst were stored first in a wooden building, the Meyers

Cottage, a cottage built on land that had become property of the Univer-
sity. Mrs. Hearst was persuaded to put up several thousand dollars and
the University constructed a building with a stout wooden frame, the

roof and walls being made of corrugated iron sheets.   This was designed

initially as a warehouse where the cases were brought and kept until there
was a suitable place for the unpacking and storage of their contents; it

was internally transformed and served as the physical headquarters of the
Department of Anthropology and its teaching staff until we were finally
moved out of it in 1952, into another temporary building, T-2, and then
finally in 1959 into Kroeber Hall.

The Museum collections were moved to San Francisco in 1903 and

housed in a building originally intended as the Law School of the Univer-
sity. This was located south of Golden Gate Park in what is today the
San Francisco campus. The lawyer-professors refused to move away from
downtown San Francisco because the horse-cars were too slow for them to
teach out by the Park and get back to appear in court on Kearney Street.
The building was of three stories, with basement, processed offices and
lecture rooms. It was an interesting wooden building that always posed

a problem as far as fire was concerned but it was in a part of San Fran-
cisco that was well away from the conflagration that took place in 1906

and the collections were not much damaged by the earthquake. The Museum
had a largely independent life from that of the gradually developing

teaching department until 1931 when changes with regard to the Medical

School and the Affiliated Colleges led to a demand for the space on which
that building was placed. The collections were brought to Berkeley and
were housed in a building that had been vacated a year or so before by

the Department of Civil Engineering. This was one of the older buildings
on the Berkeley campus, with a wooden interior, no elevator, and again

constituted a continual source of concern because of the danger of fire.

We must leave the Museum because it has related but yet separate history.

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The teaching program of the department stayed very much the way
it has been described, for a number of years. The first time a general
and comprehensive anthropology course was offered, extending over two

semesters, was in the year 1909-1910. Anthropology 1A and 1B, General

Anthropology, with Professor Kroeber teaching it, was offered to under-
graduate students. He had been largely responsible for teaching a one-
semester version for several years by himself. It now became a course
in which people who had joined the staff in 1910 and 1911 participated.
One was N. C. Nelson, who later left Berkeley to spend the rest of his

professional life as an archeologist in the Department of Anthropology in
the American Museum. The other was T. T. Waterman who taught here for a
number of years, then finally left anthropology for journalism. Kroeber,
Nelson and Waterman combined in 1910 to teach 1A, 1B as a course, the

first semester being physical anthropology and the second, cultural. It
was a sort of combination course. This continued for a number of years

until the twenties when, because of the demands that were represented by
the additional courses that had been added to the curriculum of the de-
partment, it became the responsibility of either Professor Kroeber or

Professor Lowie, after the latter had joined the staff of the department
in 1921.

This year-long course demanded suitable reading material and

this led Kroeber to the compilation of a syllabus. He and Waterman did
this initially. It was published by the University of California Press.
Later known as the Source Book of Anthropology, it was the first of the
readers which are now so numerous. It was in this course that Kroeber

worked out the ideas that you will find represented in the edition of his
textbook Anthropology published in 1923. As far as I know this was the
first formal presentation of a textbook in general anthropology in the

United States. If you are familiar with the writings of Professor Boas
you will find that he never brought himself to write a textbook. He

participated with some of his students and others in a book called General

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Anthropology, of which he wrote some sections. Kroeber's "Anthropology"
was interesting because it represented one man's view of anthropology as
he saw it and as he had been developing it himself here at Berkeley over
the period from 1909 to 1923.

Advance work with graduate students in ethnology and in primitive
languages was added to the curriculum in 1904 and 1905. One of the things
that is interesting is that Goddard was a linguist in the manner in which
this discipline was practiced in these early years, the first decade of

the twentieth century, and he offered every year a course on experimental
phonetics. Comparative Mythology and two courses, one on the Philippines

and one on Malaysia by David Prescott Barrows, were given in 1906 and 1907.
Professor Barrows, after whom Barrows Hall was named, was a member of the
Political Science Department. He was a man of considerable interest and
talent.

Another name who was to become an important figure in anthro-

pology was Edward Sapir. He was here as a research assistant working on
various aspects of California Indian linguistics in 1907 and 1908, but

did no teaching. In 1909 Goddard left to go to the American Museum and

it was the following year that Nelson and Waterman were added as instruc-
tors. The year 1908 is additionally interesting because in that year

Samuel Barrett, who was later to become the Curator of Anthropology at

the Milwaukee Public Museum and still later to become its Director, re-

ceived the first Ph.D. in Anthropology that was awarded by the University
of California. Two years later, a man who was to spend most of his life
as one of the curators of the Museum at the University of Pennsylvania,

James Alden Mason, received his Ph.D. degree. Then there was a consider-
able lapse of time, partly a consequence of the hiatus created by World
War I, before further higher degrees were awarded. This lasted until

1926 when the third Ph.D. was awarded to William Duncan Strong, who was
to become Lubot Professor of Archaeology at Columbia University. From
1926 on, there are few years in which there was not at least one higher

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degree and the department is now approaching the point where we antici-
pate ten or more degrees in the course of each academic year. There

has been a steady build-up of graduate and undergraduate work. As early
as 1918-1919 the introductory anthropology courses had enrollments of
over 300 students.

Professor Robert Lowie joined the department in 1919, coming

first as a visitor, returning to the American Museum for .a year and then
joining the department as an Associate Professor in 1921. Continuity of
instructional program was long given by Professor Kroeber and Professor
Lowie. Edward Gifford, who had become a member of the Museum staff in

1912, was appointed lecturer in 1920. Gifford would come across from San
Francisco three times a week in the afternoon and offer an upper division
lecture course. This constituted the staff of the department until 1931

when Ronald Olson was appointed Associate Professor. There were visitors

during the summer and others who came as substitutes when Lowie or Kroeber
had a sabbatical leave, but from then until 1938 the program of the de-
partment varied but little.

When I joined the staff in 1938 regular courses in physical

anthropology, with laboratory, were added, as were upper division courses
on prehistory and fossil man. Nearly a decade was to follow, much of it
occupied by World War II, before significant new changes took place.

Within the space of three years Professors Mandelbaum, Heizer and Rowe

joined the department. Culture and personality on the one hand, archeo-
logy in several aspects on the other, came to be vigorously represented.

Some of these changes were a consequence of Professor Kroeber's retirement
in 1946 with Professor Lowie becoming the Chairman of the department.

It is interesting to contrast the offerings I have mentioned
previously with the ones that were being offered to both graduate and

undergraduate students in 1937 and 1938. At this time you had a lA-lB
that had been presented for many years by Professor Olson. He usually

gave both parts of the course, with from two to four teaching assistants,

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depending on the size of the enrollment. My recollection of the course
when I took it in 1927-28 was that there were several hundred students;
in the late thirties the numbers were frequently 300-400. Olson was an
extraordinarily gifted teacher. One meets people who now have grand-

children in the University and when they learn that I am an anthropologist,
they will say, "Oh, yes, I had a course with Ronald Olson and it is one
of the things I really remember as an undergratuate."

The upper division courses were Ethnography of the World,

Chapters in Cultural History, both of these by Professor Lowie; Professor
Kroeber's Culture Growth and a course in The American Indian--these were
the standard ones.  The latter was required as part of the undergraduate

major, the idea being that no student should graduate with an A.B. degree
unless he had been exposed to some modicum of knowledge with regard to

the aboriginal peoples of the New World. Professor Kroeber also offered
a course on the Nature of Culture. Mr. Gifford presented Indians of the
Southwest and Primitive Inventions, and Mr. Olson gave Primitive Society.
Primitive Art was one of Professor Kroeber's new courses. Gifford alter-
nately gave Indians of California, or Africa, or Oceania. At one time or
another courses in Primitive Religion and a variety of other subjects

were offered. Professor Kroeber attempted for several years to offer a
course on the Anthropology of the Bible. I asked him why he abandoned

this and he replied that "I couldn't get the students to do the reading,"
and when I asked "What was the reading?" he said "The Bible." Reflecting
the concerns of the University and society during and just after World

War I, there was a course offered by Professor Kroeber on "War" and there
were lectures in connection with the museum on the "Status of Women." I
mention this because the offerings of the department reflected not only
the academic and professional considerations of the anthropologists but

have always mirrored in part some sense of the kind of interests that the
larger public has in anthropology.

Let me now say something about what was expected of graduate

students in the period of the twenties and the thirties. One offered a

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variety of subjects for the qualifying examination for the Ph.D. degree,
since then as now there was emphasis on the Ph.D. as the desirable focus
for professional training for anthropologists. M.A. degrees have always
been offered by the department but they have never been integrated in

any clear and close way with the graduate program. You were expected to
offer at least three fields but these were special fields and they cor-
respond to what most students offer today. There were two additional

fields, that were not regarded as special fields, which everyone offered.
These were World Ethnography and History and Theory of Anthropology.

World Ethnography was something you learned as an undergraduate in Lowie's
course, and you read it as a graduate student. There were no seminars on
this; it was simply something that you were expected to acquire. This

involved basic information with regard to languages, culture history and
ethnology of the peoples of the world. History and theory was something
that everyone was expected to know.  For a while there was a 30 page

reading list, mostly comprising articles that you were expected to read
because they were regarded as important. Systematic reading in history
and theory was later on somewhat simplified after Professor Lowie wrote
his book on the History of Ethnological Theory. It is an interesting

book but obviously not the history of anthropology. It is the history of
limited segments of anthropology as Lowie conceived it and as he saw it.

At the end of your second or the beginning of your third year of graduate
work you finally went and saw Kroeber or Lowie and said you thought you
were ready to take your "prelims." Next you settled down and wrote for

five days, morning and afternoon. One day was devoted to World Ethnography,
one day to History and Theory. Then a day was spent on each of your spe-
cial fields. These were read by Kroeber, Lowie and Olson.

If your written examinations were regarded as satisfactory,

arrangements were then made for you to have an oral qualifying examina-
tion, conducted by at least five people. Looking back over some of the
former committees, I discovered that some students had as many as seven

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people on their qualifying committee, three or four from the Department
and two or three from outside the Department. This picture changed

radically after World War II when the written examinations were cut down
to a mere three days. Now they have been eliminated altogether.

For several years the department followed a program in which
at the end of the first year students had a couple of days of written

examinations to test what they had learned in the first year. This proved
unsatisfactory because the first year graduate students spent all their

time preparing for the examination and not learning much that was really
very useful, so this was abandoned.

The kind of anthropology that developed and flourished between
the Wars no longer exists. There has been a tremendous amount of change
and the discipline today is quite different from the kind of anthropology
that was taught here in the 1950's. Further it should be kept in mind
that the very nature of anthropology, as the study of man demands new
approaches and viewpoints.

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