Karl Pister, former UC Santa Cruz chancellor and UC Berkeley dean, has died
Pister was a life-long advocate of broad and fair access to a UC education, and launched UC's statewide outreach efforts in the 1990s
May 16, 2022
Karl S. Pister, an engineering professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former UC Santa Cruz chancellor who devoted more than 70 years to the university, to higher education and to expanding educational opportunities for students from kindergarten to graduate school, died on Saturday, May 14, at his home in Walnut Creek. He was 96.
Pister had a remarkable career in higher education, starting as a structural engineering professor and dean of engineering at UC Berkeley and rising to UCSC chancellor and University of California vice president. Well in his 80s, he continued work that guided the direction of education and science, particularly in California.
Celebrating the Life of Karl Pister
View a video of the memorial event that took place on Saturday, Sept. 17, 2022, and a slide show celebrating Pister’s life.
“Karl was the quintessential academic leader. In each role he undertook, he significantly strengthened the University of California,” said UC President Michael V. Drake, MD. “His work has had a lasting impact in California and across the country, as well as on many generations of UC students and alumni. He was a wonderful and wise teacher, mentor, supporter and kind friend to me and many others fortunate enough to know him over his long and distinguished career. He will be missed.”
Pister was a champion of broad and fair access to the UC, staunchly advocating that all qualified students have the chance for a UC education. After the 1996 passage of California’s Proposition 209 — which prohibited state institutions from considering race, sex or ethnicity in admissions and hiring — his was a strong voice in assuring that the university would maintain vigorous outreach programs to California’s underrepresented students.
He was also known as a catalyst for collaboration, growing creative and, at the time, novel partnerships among academic disciplines, educational institutions, government, industry and communities.
In the late 1990s, Pister became the UC’s first vice president for educational outreach, leading its efforts to improve education for underrepresented students in California. Under his direction, the UC system developed perhaps the most comprehensive network of school-university collaborations in the nation, working with many low-performing schools to improve outcomes. Owing much to his advocacy, the state budget for this work grew, and the UC also expanded its role in educating K-12 teachers and addressing the shortage of school principals.
A child of Stockton school teachers
Karl Stark Pister was born in Stockton, California, on June 27, 1925, the son of two high school teachers. He and his younger brother, Phil, had the run of 320 acres and a house his family had owned since the mid-1800s. He was valedictorian of his high school class, but entering Berkeley in 1942 as a civil engineering student threw him a significant curve.
“I wasn’t educationally disadvantaged. It was cultural shock,” he said, according to an interview published in California magazine in 2006 when he was named UC Berkeley Alumnus of the Year. He said the experience informed his work with students throughout his life and led to his fierce advocacy for assisting first-generation and underrepresented students on their path to a college degree.
Pister earned his B.S. in civil engineering from Berkeley in 1945 while enlisted as an apprentice seaman in the Navy. A week after graduation, he mobilized to complete his Navy training and served in Okinawa in the aftermath of World War II. He returned in 1946 for a master’s degree at Berkeley, where he met Rita Olsen — a fellow student who was working on a teaching certificate — at a dance in Hearst Gymnasium. They were married in 1950 in Oakland and moved to Illinois for Pister’s doctoral studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
After Pister earned his Ph.D. in theoretical and applied mechanics in 1952, the couple returned to California. They settled in Lafayette, where they raised their six children: two sons and four daughters.
That same year, he joined the faculty in civil engineering at Berkeley, becoming part of an exceptional group of professors who built Berkeley’s enduring reputation as the world’s leading university for civil engineering. He became an international authority on structural mechanics and earthquake engineering, a founding father of the field of computational mechanics, and a pioneer in using computers to analyze the design of buildings, bridges and other structures.
Coupled with his teaching and research, he emerged as a campus leader, including as chair of both the nine-campus Academic Council and the systemwide Academic Senate in the late 1970s.
“The hallmark of Karl Pister’s leadership, at Berkeley and beyond, has always been integrity,” said Berkeley Chancellor Carol T. Christ. “He understood how to bring people together, and he was committed to examining all sides of a problem, dogged in his commitment to doing the right thing.”
Pister’s institutional leadership led to his selection as dean of the College of Engineering at Berkeley in 1980. He became a leading voice nationally in issues in engineering education and in shaping science and technology policy at the federal and state levels. As dean, he led Berkeley’s top-ranked engineering programs through a period of tremendous evolution, weathering the challenges posed by diminishing state budgets for the university.
He promoted interdisciplinary collaboration in critical fields such as manufacturing, environmental engineering, energy and computing; expanded facilities for microelectronics and computer-aided design; and led planning and fundraising for Soda Hall, a new building for Berkeley’s lauded computer science program.
He also intensified outreach to bring more women and underrepresented minority students into engineering, strengthened ties with industry and alumni, and nurtured a nascent fundraising program that brought in $100,000 in philanthropic gifts to the College of Engineering at the start of his term, and $30 million at its end a decade later, in 1990.
Santa Cruz’s sixth chancellor
In 1991, UC President David Gardner enlisted the help of his legendary predecessor, Clark Kerr, to recruit Pister as UCSC’s sixth chancellor.
“When Karl became chancellor in 1991, it was a turbulent time for our campus,” said current UC Santa Cruz chancellor Cynthia Larive. “State budget cuts were looming, there were protests over land use, tense relations with the city, and consensus on campus seemed out of reach. Karl’s leadership brought us through, with his signature commitment to transparency, working together, and the kind of problem-solving that defines an exceptional engineer. He made a difference on our campus that endures.”
Pister signed on in August 1991 for a two-year term as interim chancellor. Within seven months, the faculty successfully lobbied UC leaders to erase “interim” from Pister’s title. He went on to serve a full five-year term as chancellor.
As chancellor, Pister embraced the experimental tradition of UCSC and its strong undergraduate teaching program, while working to strengthen its foundations, research enterprise and growth. He steered the campus through dramatic cuts in state funding to the UC, oversaw a 30% increase in research funding, established clearly defined parameters for the development and protection of campus land, and significantly improved both town-gown relations and flagging campus morale.
He joined other UC chancellors in 1995 in issuing a unanimous public statement imploring the UC Regents to reverse their stance against affirmative action in admissions, and he led UCSC in deepening outreach efforts to underrepresented students. He founded the campus’s Leadership Opportunity Awards, now named in his honor, that help outstanding but low-income students from 13 community colleges make the jump to earn their degrees at UCSC.
Pister’s work on the state’s central coast was not limited to the Santa Cruz campus. He contributed to the conversion of Fort Ord into California State University, Monterey Bay; co-founded a consortium of partnerships between UCSC and local K-12 schools; and worked with the Monterey Bay Aquarium to develop research in the Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary.
Champion of educational outreach
After his chancellorship, Pister continued to focus on equal access to education at the UC Office of the President from 1996 to 2000. He created and led the new UC Office of Educational Outreach, which was devoted to these efforts, earning accolades for its success. These outreach efforts continue today under UC’s division of Academic Affairs.
In the years that followed, he held an array of positions aimed at strengthening education, including as chair of the California Council for Science and Technology, director of Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education, founding chair of the National Research Council’s Board on Engineering Education, and board member of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning, and the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He was also a founding trustee and corporate treasurer of the American University of Armenia.
A lifelong Catholic, Pister was also active in church and ecumenical activities, including serving as a member of the board of the Graduate Theological Union (GTU), a multi-denominational consortium of seminaries and centers for theological studies in the city of Berkeley. He was also a regent of the GTU’s Franciscan School of Theology, which awarded him an honorary doctorate of humane letters.
Pister’s list of honors is vast. He was a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the highest professional honor for a U.S. engineer, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. For extraordinary contributions to the UC and higher education, he received the UC’s Presidential Medal, and at Berkeley, he was given the Clark Kerr Award, the Berkeley Medal and the Berkeley Citation. The American Society for Engineering Education gave him its highest awards for contributions to engineering education and to advancing underrepresented minority students in engineering. He was twice selected as a Fulbright Scholar, and he won a raft of honors from national engineering societies.
Pister’s wife of 60 years, Rita, passed away in 2011. He is survived by their six children — Karl Francis Pister (Roger Renn) of Concord; Tracy Pearse Mulder of Stockton; Anita Pister-Khus of Concord; Jacinta Pister (Richard Whitmore) of Lafayette; Claire Brouwer (Kurt) of Waikoloa Village, Hawaii; and Kristofer Pister (Jennifer) of Orinda — 10 grandchildren, Sarena, Brendan (Lexy), Stark, Ann, Nathaniel, Kaiser (Mary Kate), Elijah, Marie, Veronika, and Luke, his great grandson, Maverick, his brother, Phil Pister of Bishop, Calif., and his dear friend and partner, Germaine LaBerge of Berkeley.
In lieu of flowers, gifts in his memory may be made to either the Karl S. and Rita Olsen Pister Graduate Fellowship Fund at Berkeley (give.berkeley.edu/pister or UC Berkeley Foundation, 1995 University Ave., Suite 400, Berkeley, CA 94704-1070) or to the Rita Olsen Pister Scholarship Fund at UCSC (giving.ucsc.edu or UC Santa Cruz Foundation, 1156 High St., Santa Cruz, CA 95064).