Birmingham Southern College - Southern Accent Yearbook (Birmingham, AL)

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FACULTY AND STAFF FACULTY STAFF— 21

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2c DIVISION

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In A World of Changing Needs . . . President Neal R. Berte Prepares BSC to Accept Those Changes It ' s a link after 6 a.m. on the Birmingham- Southern Campus. The early fall sky slowly lightens in the East as the dew and mist linger on the Hilltop before the hot day ' s sun burns them away. In BSC ' s old gymnasium, a solitary figure trots briskly around the basketball court as the dawn ' s early light gradually penetrates the buildings gloom. The early morning jogger is Birmingham-South- ern ' s familiar leader dressed in unfamiliar attire. President Neal R. Berte is wearing shorts and a sweatshirt with BSC emblazoned across the front. Pretty boring isn ' t it, Berte says several times as he laps the court 36 times — two miles in a little more than 20 minutes, a pace few college or corporate presidents could match. It ' s mindless excercise, Berte says afterwards as he leaves the gym. But you know sometimes I find that I do my best thinking about important things then, rather than when I ' m at meetings or writing a paper or dictating a letter. Berte excercises every morning, alternating be- tween jogging and rowing on a rowing machine. I think you need to excercise every day when you have a stressful job, he says. Indeed, Berte is a busy man. Today is a typical day: after his excercise, he ' 11 head across Birmingham for a breakfast business meeting, return to campus to handle school business such as answering mail (he dictates dozens of letters daily) , lunch with a new Birmingham resident, spend much of the afternoon in meetings, then attend an even- ing function for the college. Sometimes, he says, it gets to be a pretty long day. Berte defies any notion of academic leaders being removed from the outside world. Not restricting himself to educational leadership, Berte joins the city ' s top business and political leaders as a board member on numerous businesses, civic groups and service organizations such as Parisian ' s Inc., the Greater Birmingham Chamber of Commerce and the Jefferson-Shelby division of the American Heart association. If the ' ivory tower ' concept of the middle ages was ever true, it ' s not now, Berte says. Today we need to be involved in the community. When you ' re the oldest higher educational institution in the city, you have a responsibility to the community. Berte finds outside activity crucial to BSC ' S success, but says, 1 am first and foremost an educator. That ' s what I ' m here for. He says his role on-campus has shifted over the last decade. For the first four or five years the emphasis was on restoring the institution to finan- cial stability and getting the academic program reor- ganized, as well as rehabilitating the college ' s im- age, he says. The last four or five years we have been undergirding the college ' s liberal arts core and improving the physical plant. For the next four or five years we have to capitalize on the momentum of our improved image, to get the recognition as one of the best liberal arts colleges in the nation. At 47, Berte has come a long way in the relatively short time since his youth. Berte grew up in St. Bernard, a small suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio. It was very much a middle -to-lower-income family town, he says. It was very blue-collar — about a third of the community worked for Proctor and Gamble. Berte ' s father owned and operated a dry-cleaning business in St. Bernard and his mother was a secre- tary in a Cincinnati firm. Berte stayed home for college, attending the Uni- versity of Cincinnati all the way through his B.S. and M.S. in political science. He involved himself on campus and displayed his propensity for leader- ship as president of the junior and senior classes and as a newspaper writer and business manager. After receiving his master ' s , Berte received a Rockfeller Foundation Fellowship to seminary. He attended Union Theological Seminary in New York City. His experiences there convinced him to choose col- lege administration over ministry. He married Anne, and they returned to the University of Cin- cinnati, where he entered a doctoral program in counseling, with minors in administration and po- litical science. He completed his thesis, a compara- tive study of international students at Cincinnati and other institutions, in 1965. Berte made two work stops before coming to the University of Alabama in 1970. In Tuscaloosa he was dean and vice-president of New College. He left there to take the helm at BSC on February i, 1976, at age 35. After 1 1 years on the Hilltop, Berte says he had his family are still happy here. I really enjoy working with people, and taking the mission of the college and trying to mobilize the resources in such a way to provide an educational experience. I enjoy immensely the interaction with students and facul- Berte isn ' t modest about his accomplishments,! but he refuses to take credit for BSC ' s growth and I improvement. At best I have been sort of a traffic cop pulling things together. Again I think it ' s the quality of the faculty and students who have been the saving grace — it ' s easy for people to focus the good, and the bad, on the office of the president, but it ' s really no one person. —John DeWitt 22— FACULTY STAFF