When an old, dear friend passes

In appreciation

Christopher Edley

Friends,

A few days ago I lost an old and very dear friend.

As we age, it happens more often. I remember asking my father, in his late 90s, what was the most challenging thing he faced about being very old. “I’ve lost my friends,” he said.

The giant baby boom cohort, 60 million of us, is beginning to reach the years when the loss of old friends becomes common. This doesn’t make it any easier.

I feel Chris’s loss acutely.

Christopher Edley was a decent, brilliant, kind, funny man. I worked with him on and off for the past 43 years — on the Harvard faculty, on several presidential campaigns (Mondale and Dukakis), in the Clinton administration (he served as an associate director of the Office of Management and Budget), here at Berkeley.

I first met him when he joined the faculty of Harvard Law School, in 1981. Among his many students in subsequent years was Barack Obama.

He had a kind of rare courage to speak truth to power, without rancor or defensiveness.

When affirmative action was coming under assault, Bill Clinton asked Chris to oversee a review of affirmative action under the slogan “mend it, don’t end it.” Chris was eager to oblige.

He produced an impeccable report that made the case that affirmative action needed almost no mending. When Clinton’s political advisers pushed him to go public with his defense of affirmative action and take on the critics, he demurred. He told them there was no reason to dignify their absurd arguments. A few years later, he wrote that the “real goal” of critics of affirmative action was “to protect the current distribution of privilege and opportunity that has produced white-male elites in virtually every sector.”

That was Chris in a nutshell. He used facts, arguments, and logic to pulverize people on the right and in the so-called “moderate” middle.

Chris’s testimony against the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court was also a model of careful reasoning. He meticulously showed that Thomas — then a federal appeals court judge — was too politically partisan to be entrusted with a job on the highest court.

Chris even had the courage to tell a president-elect of the United States that he was making a dreadful mistake in his choice of chief of staff. It was an act of kindness to that newly elected president, even though it may have cost Chris a job in his administration.

I remember one evening in Cambridge in the 1980s when we passed a fence. Scaling it would have saved us a 20-minute walk. He patiently explained to me why it was possible for me to scale it, even at my height, but not for him. A young Black man scaling a fence could lose his life.

He was very funny. He saw humor in everything from the hypocrisies of left-wing politicians to the absurdities of academic politics. (“Why do professors fight so bitterly? Because the stakes are so low.” “Washington politics is dog-eat-dog. University politics is the opposite.” “Washington is the kind of place where your friends stab you in the front.”)

He became dean of the Berkeley law school, transforming it from a first-class institution into a hugely innovative first-class institution. Reluctantly, he then agreed to be interim dean of Berkeley’s School of Education.

Education — especially of poor kids — was his passion. He founded the Opportunity Institute, which funded innovative educational projects across the country, focusing primarily on disadvantaged kids. He co-founded the Civil Rights Project, which generated influential books, papers, and conferences. It became a model for research programs within law schools. He was on the board of directors of the little nonprofit I co-founded, Inequality Media.

The only things Chris loved more than a good discussion about some burning issue of public policy — especially one that bore on fairness and equal opportunity — were his wife, Maria, and his three kids.

But his extraordinary achievements aren’t really on my mind today. Nor his brilliance. Nor his courage or his humor. Or even his family.

What I’ve been thinking about is our friendship.

When an old friend passes, you can’t replace them with another old friend. You have only a certain number of old friends.

A limited number of people share your history. A limited number have moved through life with you. A limited number have talked and laughed and pondered their lives with you over the years.

A limited number of people have told you about their marriages and their kids and their hopes and frustrations, and you have done the same with them. As they age and as you age, you have gone through changes together.

It’s these cumulative understandings — the sweetness and depth of long familiarity, over breakfasts and dinners and celebrations and disappointments — that give integrity and meaning to strong friendships.

Old friends are irreplaceable. When they pass, a piece of you passes.