To clarify, since people seem to think so, he wasn't the particular person fired, just an example. Another example is Rob Pike, who was L9 when he retired in 2021.
Patterson was very well liked when I was at Berkeley. Maybe a little eccentric but not in a bad way. He famously would buy his students pizza at the end of the semester, saying he used royalties from the textbook that he wrote and taught from (Hennessy* and Patterson).
