After a 50-year leave of absence, returning to Berkeley’s School of Journalism

Robert Seth Strauss, a 73-year-old master’s student at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, returned this academic year to complete his degree after a 50-year leave of absence. In this first-person narrative, he tells Berkeley News about his decades-long path back to campus. 

I first came here in 1973, after I graduated from Carleton College in Minnesota. My journalism career had started because I always loved sports. My sophomore year, there was a woman I wanted to date, and she was going to become the editor of the paper at Carleton. She said, “Would you be my sports editor?” I said, “Sure.”

Well, she never comes back to school, and now I’m the sports editor. Being the sports editor really meant I had to write the whole sports section. After this experience, I applied to journalism schools and ended up coming here. I wanted to be in California.

After my first term, I go to Dean Edwin Bayley, whose portrait still hangs in North Gate, and I tell him that I’m leaving. I’ve been going to school from age 3 to 22, and it’s been a long time. I don’t want to stay. He says, “Why don’t you take a leave of absence?” But I never came back.

I’ve had many careers since, I suppose. I started out as a sportswriter, but I’ve had every type of job. I worked at Sports Illustrated magazine when that was a big deal. I worked in TV a bit, not as a reporter, but as a producer. I also had a restaurant in Philly — Jerry’s. We had down-home cooking, everything you hoped your mother would make. I was a TV critic. My specialty was whatever I knew the editor of.

My career changed when I started writing books in 2011. The first was called Daddy’s Little Goalie. It was a bunch of anecdotes about being the dad of girl athletes. Then I wrote a biography of President James Buchanan. I’ve written another book since then on John Marshall, who was the longest serving Supreme Court Chief Justice, but he was really the Forrest Gump of the Founders. In my view, I’m a historian. Now I’m back here trying to integrate history with my studies as a returning student. I wasn’t going to take the narrative journalism track, because that was my professional life before. I take the audio concentration, and I’m taking photography classes.

I wrote what had to be a one sentence email to Geeta Anand, who was the chair of Berkeley Journalism then, saying “What if I came back?” I don’t know if they’d ever done anything close to that before. 

I’m in my quasi-retirement. I play tennis and travel, and I do a number of other things that you would expect somebody my age to do. I’ve been to 123 countries. We’re country counters.

But nobody has a retirement like a 25-year-old, which is what I have. When I talk to somebody here, they don’t they don’t talk to me like I’m their grandfather. They talk to me like I’m their contemporary.

I said I would be some sort of mentor to the other students, which I have. I’ve helped people get internships by connecting them to people that I know. I also have taken foreign students to Stanford. We went to the wine country, took them into San Francisco to do the touristy crap. I grew up in New Jersey; who would have thought I’d have a friend from South Sudan?

I’m taking a class this semester; it’s called “Brilliance of Berkeley.” The speakers are distinguished professors; they’re Nobel Prize winners; they’re MacArthur grant people. Each one of them speaks for 50 minutes. There’s a panoply of subjects. Even if you aren’t interested in molecular physics, you can stand listening to 50 minutes on the subject from the Nobel Prize winner! That’s another reason why I’m here. I wanted to get the experience of being at a big university.

It’s been a wonderful experience. I’ve always been the kind of person who wants to do unusual things and is not very afraid of doing them. I always tell younger kids when they’re getting ready to go off to college, “If your roommate says, ‘Come on, let’s do this!’ — short of shooting up drugs, go do it!” Because what is it, a waste of an hour? You might find that you like opera, or women’s rugby, or whatever else you didn’t think you would even bother trying.