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Educating the State By Sheldon Rothblatt In the 19th century, an American university was not thought to possess the high standards and culture of the European leaders in education. For a publicly supported university to aspire to this lofty rank was regarded as difficult; for one in California, it seemed impossible; and for a multi-campus federation, unthinkable. Yet that is what eventually happened at the University of California. John Douglass, a Research Fellow at the Center for Studies in Higher Education on the Berkeley campus, has written an important book on the history of higher education in this state, The California Idea and American Higher Education: The History of California’s Pioneering Public Higher Education System (published, ironically, by Stanford University Press). The book is the most detailed study we possess of the development of our tripartite system of public higher education: the more than 100 community colleges, 23 campuses of the California State University and Colleges (CSUC), and the nine, soon to be ten, campuses of the University of California. The California Master Plan for Higher Education of 1960 is unquestionably the hero of Douglass’s narrative. It was both a conservative and a revolutionary document, preserving institutional autonomy (especially for UC) while demanding articulation and cooperation among the segments. Not only does the Master Plan define the missions of the three segments with clarity by keeping them separate; but, at the same time—and this is one of its most important aspects—it links the segments through the medium of student transfer, thus guaranteeing upward mobility for all those able and willing to take advantage of the opportunities present in our democratic culture. For the better part of a century prior to 1960, California’s colleges and universities were more or less independent entities that furiously and sometimes bitterly competed for state resources. Politicians naturally were drawn into these disputes, taking sides favorable to their constituents, and also using education as a means for advancing their political careers and prospects. Numerous study commissions and committees came to nothing. Each proposal was rubbished by someone. So divided were the players and sectoral interests that no reader can digest these detailed pages without wondering how any solution at all was possible, least of all one that was driven by the widest objectives. Douglass describes the recurring conflicts perfectly. His portraits of leading players—the usual suspects of Phoebe Apperson Hearst, Benjamin Ide Wheeler, Clark Kerr, Robert Gordon Sproul at UC, Glenn Dumke and others in the CSUC, legislators, governors, and public figures, especially the courageous Assemblywoman Dorothy Donohue of Bakersfield—give a nice sense of where personalities fit in the broader picture. The Master Plan represents what Douglass calls the “California idea” in the title of his book. The California idea is understandably a variant of the American idea, which emphasizes consumer importance, democratic opportunity, and low-cost higher education. But, as Douglass carefully explains, what makes the California idea so interesting and special is that it goes beyond the general American faith in education to create a public structure that allows for distinction. This in turn means that somewhere in the system there have to be centers of excellence, ranking with the world’s best universities, as measured by peer approval, reputation, and a capacity to compete in national and international markets for the best available academic talent. Thus, the California idea combines democratic, elite, and market features, but also stresses the concept of institutional boundaries. It is relatively easy to count the blessings of the University of California—its distinction across so many research fields, its contributions to the state’s agricultural and technological economy, its strengths in the medical sciences and parade of Nobel laureates, and its “multiversity” vision, given lasting form in a famous set of lectures delivered at Harvard by President Emeritus Clark Kerr some 40 years ago. But to do so without an appreciation of how that eminence came about is to reduce history to institutional hagiography. Douglass avoids this. Probably his most astute contribution to our understanding of California’s higher education history is to use his mastery of the documentary sources to show how political and institutional rivalries nearly destroyed UC, or—what is perhaps worse in light of its special idea of combining opportunity with quality—nearly condemned the University to a populist mediocrity. Problems existed from the start: problems of defining what a university meant, problems of distinguishing vocational education from scholarship and science, problems of deciding which of the state’s citizens were to profit from the development of a university. As the state grew rapidly in population, demographic considerations continually drove politicians and academic leaders alike to attempt to bring some sort of rationality into the provision for higher education, balancing the objectives of access, service, opportunity, and reputation. Berkeley, the original campus, took shape in a freewheeling, contentious, greed-mad territory far from the leading sources of European traditions of grace and culture. Anyone who imagines that the history of a university, even one that embodies a special idea, is a straightforward account of growth and improvement will find Douglass’s tale sobering. The point of his history is to illustrate how partisanship, political grandstanding, institutional jealousies, and competing visions of the purpose of education always threatened to intrude upon the California idea as it slowly and painfully developed in the period before 1960 and finally took shape in the grand policy statement of the Master Plan. Douglass ends his narrative at 1960, but in other remarks he alludes to on-going difficulties and unresolved issues. Among them are the conditions of public schooling and the challenges of funding enormously expensive systems of higher education. The generosity of taxpayers (and donors) is constantly challenged, especially as the state of California has numerous obligations that were not present 133 years ago when UC was founded, such as competing social, housing, transportation, and health demands. Other observers (Douglass among them) are wondering how much UC’s increasing pursuit of private giving, industrial contracts, start-ups and spin-offs, patenting activity, and market-related enterprise affects the internal configuration of disciplines and missions that have laboriously evolved. In some legislative quarters the Master Plan is criticized for not providing sufficient access at UC entry level for disadvantaged students, and University leaders have expressed concern over the lower numbers of community college students transferring to UC. Some CSUC leaders still chafe under the limitations on their educational mission imposed by the Master Plan. But, as Clark Kerr once remarked, the Master Plan was not a solution but a reference point for sober discussion. For UC, maintaining the overall quality of undergraduates, graduates, and faculty in the face of challenges from America’s private universities requires daily and vigilant attention from leaders, professors, and alumni. How is it that a university with such unpropitious beginnings eventually developed into a model of a public system of education? Edward Gibbon, the renowned historian of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, divided historical causes into primary and secondary ones. Primary causes, he said, are mysterious or vague, but secondary ones can be found in events and circumstances. Douglass touches upon many of the secondary causes. In other regions of the United States, private institutions drawing from a traditional elite were in command of markets before strong public sectors were established. Not so in California. The relative absence of tradition encouraged experiment. The state’s diverse population and helter-skelter origins gave rise to bold and original thinking (the underside of which was a tendency to boast and inflate). The state’s vast wealth and variegated economy provided opportunities for initiative, including democratic ones. The land-grant heritage forced universities and legislators to think in terms of multiple missions and to devise the means for a precarious balance between competing visions. Finally, a series of educational near calamities sent warning shots across the bow of the state’s political system. The first one, in the 1870s, made the University of California a part of the state constitution. The second made it a part of a larger system of educational provision. Historians may not always wish to accept chance as a cause in human affairs, but it is there nonetheless. California has often been lucky. A salubrious climate and natural beauty helped attract established academic talent. More significantly, California benefited from heavy government investment: World War II and the subsequent Cold War led to a concentration of enormous federal resources in the technical and educational infrastructure of the Bay Area. Silicon Valley is otherwise unimaginable, as is Berkeley’s success; and Berkeley’s example was a stimulus to the other campuses. Looking back from 2001, the ups and downs of UC are evident. But a single message emerges from The California Idea: The fate of the University of California, and the other segments, has always depended upon two factors. The first, hardly surprising, is California’s prosperity; recall how the economic doldrums of the early 1990s led to an unprecedented downsizing of faculty at UC. The second has been the state’s commitment to an “idea.” And perhaps this is the mysterious primary cause of the University’s success. When California ceases to believe in the idea—of a union between democracy and excellence—so will its stellar university. Sheldon Rothblatt, professor emeritus of history at Berkeley, is author most recently of The Modern University and its Discontents (Cambridge, 1999). Back to Top |
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