Bob Russell:
I created CTNS in the Fall, 1981, including a founding Board of Directors. Claude Welch, Dean of the GTU, put together the necessary legal documents for CTNS to gain legal status as a non-profit educational organization of the State of California. For the first years I was given use of a faculty office the Jesuit School of Theology, Berkeley. (JSTB is a consortial member of the GTU.) A portal for the early GTU intercampus computer facility was located on the second floormen’s room just down the hall from my office! I developed syllabi for the new courses I began teaching each year to GTU seminary and doctoral students.
A couple of years later my faculty office moved to the second floor of the GTU North Building, 2465 LeConte Avenue. I shared it with our first part-time CTNS secretary. Note: The GTU purchased the North Building from a UC Berkeley fraternity during the sixties when being a fraternity was out of favor with Cal students. Later the fraternity wanted to buy it back but the GTU kept it!
As CTNS began to receive sizeable grant support from various non-profit organizations, the GTU moved the CTNS office to the Annex Building, 2452 Virginia Street. We initially had the north-east corner ground floor unit, including three administrative offices, a bathroom, and several closets. Eventually, during the JTF-Funded megaprogram “Science and the Spiritual Quest” (1998-2002), CTNS also rented the offices on the second floor of the Annex Buildingfacing north-west. And when we created and administered the JTF-Funded program, “Science and Transcendence: Advanced Research Series” (STARS) we rented an office complex at the American Baptist School of the West and another complex adjacent to it.
Finally in 2022, the GTU decided to move all of its programs into new offices in the remodeled GTU Library / Hewlitt Building. This included CTNS, the Centers for Jewish Studies, forIslamic Studies, the Center for Dharma Studies, and the Doug Adams Gallery. They are all on the ground floor of the Hewlitt Building, with the first four contiguously on the western wall and the Gallery in the north-western corner.
Braden Molhoek:
When I started working at CTNS in November of 2005, I was living in the one apartment building the GTU had for PhD students, which was next door to the GTU Annex and the CTNS office. Imagine my surprise when I was contacted for an interview that they wanted to meet me at the STARS grant office at American Baptist Seminary of the West (ABSW), which was not exactly next door. Every day I would walk through U.C. Berkeley’s campus to get to the STARS office at ABSW which is now the Berkeley School of Theology at the intersection of Dwight Way and Hillegass Avenue. Sometimes I would take mail between the offices because I was faster than inter-campus mail. We originally had the office space because of the personnel needed to create and promote three conferences for the grant as well as the tiered grant competition that would occur after the conferences.
Once the conferences were done and the application process for the planning grants started, we were able to consolidate office space. We moved to offices in the GTU Annex above CTNS, which also allowed some CTNS staff to move upstairs to have their own offices. Nathan Hallanger, the Program Director at the time, had his own office that also became the first place to house the Ian Barbour library. I shared a larger open space with Laurin Beckhusen, the Center’s IT consultant and Blake Horridge who was a student worker at the Center.
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In 2009, the Center was undergoing some down-sizing so we left the upstairs space and remained in the CTNS office on the first floor. In that time, though there were a number of changes. Over the years the GTU renovated the office space several times, including painting the walls and ceiling and adding carpeting.
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Months after Bob’s retirement in 2022 and the start of the “Virtuous AI?” Grant we were notified of the GTU’s plan to relocate all of the staff, faculty, and centers to the Hewlett Building and over the course of 9 months or so, we packed up the entirety of the office. This included Bob culling books in the office multiple times, donating most of them to graduate students and the GTU library. Chang In was also busy scanning CTNS archive files so we would store things digitally, taking up less space.
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The CTNS office space had pictures of the children of employees, a map that showed places where people had traveled for work, and decades of memories. This included laughter from birthday parties, chats with visiting scholars, and the comradery of graduate students and their supervisors. Paring down 27 four-drawer filing cabinets full of history, trying to identify what was most important to keep was a tall task, but in some ways was it was fitting. The Center was going through a new chapter so having a new space reflected this. Now on the ground floor of the GTU Hewlitt Building / Library, Chang In now has a desk outside the new office and Bob and I have desks in the new office, but the large painting of the Golden Gate Bridge that was painted by the partner of one of the Center’s students and used to hang in Bob’s office now hangs next to my desk, and we have several bookcases of CTNS published books and a full shelf of Theology and Science. There are still some things we would like to do to further personalize things, but we are settled into the new space. I look forward to filling the new office with more books and memories.
