By Steven Finacom

“Hearst” is a name known to almost anyone in Berkeley. Not only is there Hearst Avenue, running almost all the way across town, but also familiar facilities including the Hearst Memorial Mining Building, Hearst Greek Theatre, and Hearst Museum bracket the UC Berkeley campus.  

It’s been that way—“Hearst” on everyone’s lips, in one context or another—for more than a century.

However, the most prominent person behind that name, at least in its Berkeley connection, has receded into history. Today, Phoebe Apperson Hearst is not the ubiquitously known and revered figure she was in early 20th century California.

A new exhibit in the Bernice Brown Gallery of the Doe Library on the Berkeley campus aims to bring her back into popular familiarity and focus.  

Curated by retired University Archivist William Roberts, combining resources from the University Archives and Hearst Museum of Anthropology on the campus, and additionally supported by the College of Letters and Science, the exhibit, “Building Berkeley: The Legacy of Phoebe Apperson Hearst”, opened this past Friday just in time for Cal Day and will run through August 31.

A small Friday evening gathering in the Morrison Library adjacent to the Brown Gallery featured remarks by Chancellor Birgeneau, Will Hearst (William Randolph Hearst, III), one of Phoebe’s great grandsons, and a number of academic leaders, as well as a spirited impromptu commentary by noted California historian Kevin Starr.

Phoebe Hearst was “one of the University’s most important benefactors”, said Birgeneau. “Her legacy was, and remains, building Berkeley.”

The Chancellor, who has invested much energy in increasing student diversity on the campus, quipped that Hearst was “the matriarch of Access and Excellence.”

He noted he was a student at Yale when that institution decided to admit women for the first time. UC had admitted women in the 1870s, and Phoebe Hearst had later strengthened the place of women students at Berkeley by funding a series of women-only scholarships that became known as “Phoebes”.

“Hearst was a full century ahead of the times”, Birgeneau said.

From the beginning, Berkeley has always existed because of public / private partnerships” like that of Hearst and the University, he noted. He praised her “great leadership in the 19th century” and said that the architectural plan she funded for the campus was “one of the catalysts that make Berkeley the great campus it is today.”

University Librarian Tom Leonard also spoke, noting that Hearst academic benefactions were still producing results. Only five years previously the Library had received the last of the Tebtunis Papyri collected in Egypt on an expedition Hearst funded in 1899.  

Leonard described Doe Library, where the gathering was held, as “another monument to Hearst’s vision” and a key element of the architectural plan she funded for the campus. Doe will turn 100 years old in 2012 and a Centennial celebration is being planned.

At the same time, the new Hearst exhibit will allow “many thousands of people to get to know Phoebe Hearst better.” “I think she would be very pleased this afternoon”, Leonard said.

“I think the family is enormously proud of the association” of the Hearsts and Berkeley, said Will Hearst, Phoebe’s great-grandson. “This is really kind of our mother ship” for family philanthropy.

He was one of three Hearst descendants who attended the opening. The others were Anissa Balson and her daughter, Phoebe Balson.

“It’s not hard to be enthusiastic about Berkeley,” Will Hearst said. “This is a great institution.” “The University is really the seed corn of a society.”

“I’m particularly encouraged that the vocabulary of private and public is more emphasized”, he added. “The private sector is going to have to step up and do more”, as the University suffers from State budget cuts.

Hearst noted that the gathering “includes my old professor Kevin Starr. I’ll see you at office hours later,” he said, to laughter.

College of Letters and Science Executive Dean, Professor Mark Richards, told the gathering, “there’s so much to say about the Hearst legacy.” He reminisced that when he first came to Berkeley to join the faculty, a colleague took him to look at the Hearst Memorial Mining Building and told him, “Phoebe Hearst built this University better than anyone else.”  

“Phoebe Hearst set a level of aspiration for this land grant university”, Richards said. She believed Berkeley “was supposed to be just as good as Harvard or Cambridge, or the great universities of Europe…and if you look around you, you’ll see that it is.”

Richards said that if he had lived a century ago and had a similar fortune to hers and decided how to spend it on the University of California, “I’m afraid that I would fall short of the power of her vision.”
 

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