"Well,” says Dr. Michael Kerner, “I don’t think people will know that PAU had a football team.”
More than that, he later clarifies - PAU had an undefeated football team. From about 1978 to 1982, there was a “very regular” Saturday football game at PAU, then called PGSP. It was “ahead of the curve,” Dr. Kerner adds with a smile, since the team was quite inclusive, having men and women and students and professors. PGSP once beat the California Professional School football team in its one-and-only game against another institution, meaning that Palo Alto University football started and ended its intercollegiate era with a victory.
All things considered, Dr. Kerner, who arrived on site three years after PGSP’s founding, has played witness to an astonishing amount of the institution’s history - first as a student, then as an alumni leader, and finally as a member of the Board of Trustees. When asked about how the university changed during the time he attended, he quips that “we got chairs at a certain point - that was helpful!”
But his pathway to PGSP as the first ever out-of-state student was perhaps even more unlikely than the mere existence of the football team.
Kerner, who was from New York and living in Texas when he applied, came to PGSP when he was 25 years old and working with emotionally disturbed children. Finding the time to maintain communications with the university at that time was tricky, since right after he received his acceptance he was driving a dozen kids into the remote Wind River Range in central Wyoming for a lengthy backpacking trip that was definitively off the grid. In the spring of 1978, driving a van down a dirt road traversing South Pass - still today some of the most remote country that can be accessed in the lower 48 states - Kerner knew it was now or never for accepting his bid at PGSP, but had no way of getting in touch.
Fate intervened: by some miracle, on the side of the dirt road at the base of the Winds, he spotted an improbable - nearly impossible - phone booth, and pulled over the van. He called PGSP looking for the registrar and waited desperately while it rang over 20 times. Meanwhile in Palo Alto, Cliff Brothers heard the phone ring persistently – Brothers was a student who had participated in the selection committee for new students such as Kerner, and before that day hadn’t been in the PGSP building for six months.
But he was there to pick up the phone when Kerner called, and that twist of fate brought Kerner to the Bay Area and to PGSP, still at that time an unusual school with classes at 4:00 and 7:00 pm, made for working students. “I learned a lot from the other graduate students,” Kerner remembers, both the Master’s and doctoral students.
The student community was like nowhere else he had ever experienced. The students - some of whom had founded the school - had a substantial amount of participation in University decision-making. Kerner has a strong memory of 50 students in a room together carefully debating the pros and cons of pursuing official accreditation - an ultimately affirmative decision that turned out to be pivotal. This was representative of the culture, he says - “people wanted to be there; people participated, people were engaged.”
And the students benefitted from outstanding professors - John Smolowe, a Gestalt teacher (who also moonlighted on the football team); Peter Goldblum, who pioneered PAU’s groundbreaking work in LGBT+-focused care; Amy Wisniewski, who “made almost every student think that neuropsychology was the best” at a time when the field was brand new. Of the latter, Kerner reflects warmly on her dedication - caring deeply for every student in the school. Once, he wrote her a five page paper, “and she wrote back five pages of notes.”
“There was an equal level of commitment and engagement from faculty and students - it was unique.”
Kerner also remembers the attentiveness of PGSP leaders to the quickly-evolving nature of the field. “I was sitting in a class of 12, maybe 14 of us,” when the instructor mused that he wasn’t sure where the field was going to find room for all of the students. But “[President] Bob Kantor said to us - ‘This field is going to grow. We’re at the cusp of people bringing in psychology to sports, of neuropsychology’...The school really started around inspirational, larger thinking.” Later, Kerner was the student representative to the hiring committee that selected President Allen Calvin.
Kerner launched his career straight out of PGSP – he met an adjunct professor who ultimately built a pathway for him into her professional practice, where he stayed for 25 years. In hindsight, he says, “I feel like I made a really good choice. [PGSP] was the first time I went to school that I really enjoyed school!” Reflecting on his own pathway, Kerner is grateful for the unique and powerful role that his time at PAU played in his life. “It gave me the opportunity to be in a career that I’ve really enjoyed.”
His relationship with PAU extends to his current tenure on the Board of Trustees, an experience that has given him yet another new perspective on the university - and has also confirmed for him the exceptional quality of a PAU education. “When you look at the number of students [at PAU] and how many lives they touch – it’s exponential.” And year after year, he has seen PAU students excel as they build clinical experience; he points specifically to “unbelievable” rates of acceptance to first-choice internships.
“We have always done a great job of training people. The quality of the people that we put out in the community is exceptional.”