Path to Power
Bersin grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., and attended Harvard University. He played football for the Crimson, and, even as an undersized guard who stood less than 6-feet tall, he managed to make the All-Ivy squad his senior year. Bersin was also regularly nominated as a top student athlete and he was class marshal at Harvard. As class marshal, he invited Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to speak at the 1968 commencement, an offer King accepted before being killed in April of that year.
He graduated from Harvard magna cum laude, was a Rhodes Scholar and studied from 1969 to 1970 at Oxford University, where he met Bill Clinton. Both Bersin and Clinton went to Yale Law School and graduated in 1973. Bersin worked briefly as special counsel to the Los Angeles Police Commission, the governing body of the L.A. Police Department, before joining the L.A. law firm of Munger Tolles & Olson and specializing in securities litigation and RICO crimes. He eventually became partner at that firm, and was recognized for pro-bono work with the Hispanic Urban Center. But in 1992, Bersin took a sabbatical. He moved to San Diego, where he taught at the University of San Diego law school while working on the Clinton-Gore presidential campaign.
Clinton Administration
In 1993, Bersin was recommended by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and nominated by President Clinton as U.S. attorney for San Diego despite the fact that he had no prosecutorial experience and virtually no criminal-law background.
But Bersin shook things up in the U.S. attorney’s office, firing a handful of supervisors and increasing the conviction rate from 67 percent to 78 percent in a little more than a year. "The principal benefit I bring to the office," Bersin says, "is the fact that I did not grow up within the system, and have no particular desire or plans to go on further. … I can come in and provide an honest assessment and different perspective."
In 1995, Attorney General Janet Reno designated Bersin as her special representative on border issues, a job that he held while retaining the position of U.S. attorney for San Diego. The position was created by Reno to consolidate the fight against drug and immigrant smuggling under one person instead of dividing responsibilities among the four states that border Mexico. "He will be the attorney general's eyes and ears" along the border, Justice Department spokeswoman Carol Florman said.
School Superintendent
After three years as Clinton’s “border czar,” Bersin changed directions again, accepting an offer as superintendent of the San Diego Unified School District despite having no previous experience in education.
Education officials expressed concern over an education neophyte leading such a large district, and some high-profile Latino groups were worried that it was inappropriate to appoint the former border czar to head a school system that is more than one-third Hispanic. “This is the challenge of a lifetime that I will devote all of my heart, soul and spirit to,” said Bersin, who went to public school. “This is a deep emotional and intellectual commitment to public education.”
Many of the doubts from Latino groups quickly faded, but Bersin made new enemies of the teachers’ union, which saw Bersin as dictatorial and said his top-down approach denied them any input into the reforms that were made. "He blamed teachers for any failure in student achievement and in the school," said Terry Pesta, president of the San Diego teachers union. "He came in and pretty much said that everything had to change, no one was doing it right. It was his way or the highway." Bersin was also accused of misusing an expense account of school district money, an accusation Bersin called “simply not true.”
Outside of San Diego, Bersin continued to be hailed as a reformer. In 2005, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) tapped Bersin to be the state’s education secretary, and he moved to Sacramento for a little more than a year. In November 2006, Bersin, who had been commuting back to San Diego on weekends to be with his family, left state government to take a job as chairman of the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority.
In 2008, Bersin contemplated a run for city attorney in San Diego, but determined that the race would have been too difficult partially because of the bad blood with the teachers’ union. In the spring of 2009, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano named Bersin border czar, a position that will focus not just on illegal immigration but also on the escalating drug war on the Mexican side of the border with the U.S. “What's going on in Mexico, across the border in Juarez, requires that we support the government of Mexico in its very valiant, courageous effort to both stem violence and also deal with the drug trafficking organizations,” Bersin said on CNN the day he was appointed.
