Calling all alumni! Now accepting story submissions to feature throughout the year. Please share a photo and caption, a short video clip, song, or a story of a favorite I-House moment through the story submission form. The form can accept up to 100 MB file uploads. For larger files, contact us at alumni@ihouseberkeley.org. Keep it simple, or get creative!
By Tim Holt (IH 1968-71)
I live in a small town in far Northern California with a total population of 1,700. Virtually every person I encounter while walking down the main street is familiar to me. I know their personal histories, and they know mine. It is, after all, a small town.
When I was an undergraduate at Cal strolling through Sproul Plaza it might as well have been Times Square. The plaza was full of people I didn’t know, who clearly could care less about me and my heroic quest for a diploma. And, to be honest, I didn’t care much about them either.
But when I moved into International House as a junior, all that began to change. I began to find something like a community. There were 500 students living at International House at that time, so it was something like a small town, albeit a small town whose population was incredibly diverse, talented, and had more than its share of quirky characters.
My neighbor across the hall had been born in Ceylon, grew up in Australia and could do a spot-on imitation of Winston Churchill, using a toothbrush in place of a cigar. And, as if that wasn’t enough raw talent, on the other side of the House, in the women’s section, lived Hedy West, the singer and songwriter who wrote “500 Miles,” one of the iconic songs of the Folk Revival Movement.
And it was a German graduate student at International House who demonstrated, in bold and dramatic fashion, one of the basic lessons that came out of Berkeley in the 1960s: that action at the grassroots level could produce real change in our society. Yes, there were all those campus protests that helped stop the Vietnam War, but there was also Christian, the German graduate student, who removed the door separating the men’s and the women’s quarters at International House and hid it under his bed. This was the 1960s, after all, and the International House policy of strict segregation of the sexes was ripe for change. It just needed a nudge in the form of a direct and simple action. But Christian’s action, bold as it was, was actually very much in line with the very beginnings of the institution. When International House was founded in 1930 it was one of the first coeducational college residences in the country. The idea of having male and female students live under the same roof shocked many Berkeley residents back then.
International House was founded on the simple idea that by comingling students from all over the world they would gain a better understanding and appreciation of each other’s cultures and world views. That was the goal, the ideal, but in actual practice students tended to group themselves by nationalities and regions. In the dining hall there was a big Latin American table, and, as I recall, similar groupings of Arabs and Asians.
Frequently, though, there would be cultural sharing in the form of dancing and singing from various countries in the main auditorium. And every weeknight, like motley tribes gathered around a communal fire, many of us would assemble in the Great Hall, our shared living room, to watch Walter Cronkite deliver the day’s news on an old black-and-white TV.
My own cultural exchanges at International House included drinking tequila with my friend Pepe from Mexico, and explaining the arcane rules of football to foreign students on a game day at the nearby stadium. My knowledge of foreign languages was broadened when I started dating a woman from Romania and learned how to say “Go to hell!” in Romanian.
In the dining hall I sat at a circular table with an eclectic group of English-as-a-first language students from the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland. Sometimes Ileana, my Romanian girlfriend, and Hans from Denmark would join us. If there was any cultural exchange going on it was subliminal. Our conversation was about school and tests and gossip about other House residents, as I recall, and maybe what our plans were for vacation breaks--the kind of talk that could have occurred in any dorm dining hall.
But that is precisely the point. The term “cultural exchange” highlights differences, and those differences were certainly something to celebrate and enjoy during our stay at International House. But in all those casual conversations in the dining hall, or in the Great Hall after the evening news, we were finding out that people from different parts of the world, even exotic and remote places like Bhutan, were people much like ourselves, who in their sometimes halting, accented speech expressed much of our own interests and concerns.
When I started dating a Spanish woman later in life she said that one of the things she liked about me was that I was one of the few people she’d met in this country who didn’t make her feel like a foreigner.
And I had International House to thank for that.
Tim Holt lived at International House from the fall of 1968 to the spring of 1971. He is currently the editor of the quarterly Northwest Review and lives in Dunsmuir, California.
