1964

I arrived in Berkeley in 1973 after living most of my life in the Illinois and Tennessee, having previously studied at Swarthmore, North Carolina, and the London School of Economics. I had never seen anything like the fog, the bay, the Free Speech Movement, and the arrests. Within the Department, Nat Glazer proved a careful adviser and I passed three of five required courses by exemption exam before classes began. Later that year, Leo Lowenthal let my skimpy German by for the second language.

I was born in Minneapolis, went to Carleton College, and came out to Berkeley only after my first year in India, in 1963-64, returning to India in 1970-71 to do my Ph. D. dissertation and then to finally 'settle' there in 1978. So I have taken something of the 'great years' of the 60s from Berkeley to India ­ and vice versa! When trying to combine living in India and teaching at San Diego didn't work, I quit and went to India.

I came to Berkeley in summer 1964. The previous year I'd been a grad student in psychology at Stanford; I was interested in personality and cognition but they assigned me to work in a rat lab, so I decided to switch to sociology across the Bay. Spring and summer 1964 were the time the civil rights movement hit the North. There had been big sit-in demonstrations and mass arrests in San Francisco to integrate hiring at auto row and the downtown hotels.