Commanding the main staircase in Haviland Hall for almost 100 years was a large portrait of a man in academic robes, in an imposing oak frame that bore the legend, “Alexis F. Lange.” It undoubtedly baffled generations of social welfare students, who could be forgiven for thinking it had something to do with Berkeley Social Welfare.
In fact, the portrait dated from the days when Haviland Hall was the home of the School of Education. Alexis Frederick Lange began at Berkeley in 1890 as a professor of English, and later, Scandinavian philology.
Among both students and colleagues, he was affectionately known as “The Chief.” During Lange’s first years at Berkeley in the 1890s, when he taught in the English department, Lange was approached by a student named Frank Norris. A budding writer, Norris asked Lange for his opinion of a long narrative poem. “He got it,” reported the Daily Cal. “The educator told him to brace up, be a man, and amount to something.” A few years later, in 1901, Norris published The Octopus, a scathing attack on the corruption and power of the Southern Pacific railroad corporation. He drew the inspiration for the book’s title from an 1882 cartoon depicting the Southern Pacific as an octopus with its tentacles in every aspect of California’s politics, society, and economy. “Since then,” said the Daily Cal, “Lange’s changed his opinion of the man but not of the poem.”
In 1907, Lange became head of the department of education, which he reorganized as the School of Education in 1913. The School served primarily to prepare high school teachers, and under Lange’s tenure, the teacher training program developed into one of the best in the country. He established the University High School, a hands-on training school, in 1914.
Expanding public education
Lange actively reformed California’s educational system. He believed schools are an agency of social direction and control, and therefore schools must maintain a close relationship with the population to remain truly democratic. In 1913, Lange was instrumental in persuading the Legislature to place the state Board of Education under the control of ordinary citizens, rather than educators, administrators, and education experts. He argued that basing public school financing on property valuations would provide equitable financing for public schools, a method that was eventually adopted by the state. Lange also promoted a junior high school system and, in 1912, chaired a statewide committee that recommended beginning secondary education with the seventh grade.
Lange’s greatest legacy, however, was the creation of the predecessor of today’s community colleges: California’s junior college system. Called “the father of the junior high schools, and of the junior college movement,” Lange helped establish a junior college system that would provide two years of baccalaureate-level college education. He saw this as a way to accommodate the growing numbers of higher education students, reduce the enrollment demands on the existing California colleges, and use the university education system more effectively. He helped pass California’s Junior College Act in 1917, which added vocational programs to the junior college curriculum.
Junior colleges increased the number of high school students who attended college, and by the 1920s, California had both the largest number of students enrolled in higher education in the U.S. and the highest rate of students attending college. California’s junior colleges grew from 38 in 1932 to 110 today, serving more than 2.5 million students, the largest higher education system in the world. They were reorganized as the California Community Colleges System in 1967.
Lange’s painting was unveiled March 25, 1924, just prior to the dedication of the new Haviland Hall. A few days earlier, a marble chair in the Greek Theater had also been dedicated to him. Lange was by then in poor health, and he would pass away less than six months later, at the age of 62. Remarkably, he died within only hours of the death of his twin brother, a principal of a Columbus, Ohio, school. In 2021, the portrait of Lange was relocated to the School of Education’s new home in downtown Berkeley.