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By David Pierpont Gardner When Clark Kerr died at his El Cerrito home on December 1, 2003, at the age of 92, he was hailed around the country for his contributions to higher education. The New York Times wrote that, as Berkeley chancellor and UC president in the 1950s and 1960s, Kerr “created the blueprint for public higher education in the United States.” “There isn’t anyone who had as large a role in higher education as Clark Kerr did in the post-World War II 20th century,” summed up Arthur Levine, president of Teachers College at Columbia University. Berkeley Chancellor Robert Berdahl said that Kerr was, “without question, a legend in higher education.” His most praised and emulated accomplishment was the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education in California, which modified and confirmed a three-tiered system, with the University of California as the state’s primary research institution, enrolling the state’s ablest students for undergraduate and advanced studies; the California State University, focusing on undergraduate education; and community colleges, providing vocational training and two-year programs that could be transferred to four-year institutions. The idea behind the plan was that every graduate of a California high school who wanted further education could get it. Clark Kerr was born May 17, 1911, in Stony Creek, Pennsylvania. After graduating from Swarthmore College in 1932,
In 1952, in part for his firm support of faculty members who refused to sign the loyalty oath, Kerr was chosen as the first chancellor of the Berkeley campus. In 1958, he became president of the University system. His most influential book, The Uses of the University, presented as the Godkin Lectures at Harvard University, was published in 1963. After being dismissed by the regents in 1967, he chaired the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education and, later, the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education. He was named Alumnus of the Year by the California Alumni Association in 1981. Throughout his life, Kerr continued to be deeply dedicated to Berkeley and the University of California, and to advise Berkeley chancellors and UC presidents--including David Gardner, who here remembers his mentor and friend. --The editor
It was Kerr the intellectual more than Kerr the administrator who moved UC from the great university entrusted to him by President Robert Gordon Sproul in 1958 to the superior one Kerr bequeathed in 1967. A public university system rooted in substantive accomplishment and unchallenged achievement was his unwavering objective--that is what drove Clark Kerr--throughout his service to UC. I first met Clark in 1959 at a Christmas party at Alumni House on the Berkeley campus. Kerr had been UC’s president for a year and a half, and Glenn Seaborg was Cal’s chancellor. Also present were President Emeritus Robert Gordon Sproul and many of Berkeley’s senior faculty members, key staff,
The party was like the gathering of a large and extended family--as was the campus generally in those days--and people went out of their way to welcome us to Cal. I have always remembered the warm and gracious way the Kerrs, Seaborgs, and Sprouls put us at ease and made us feel at home. At this time, Kerr had bold moves in mind for the University in the decade ahead: the California Master Plan for Higher Education; a doubling of UC’s enrollment; converting the campuses at Davis, Riverside, and Santa Barbara from specialized to general UC campuses; constructing new campuses at Santa Cruz, Irvine, and San Diego; and decentralizing UC’s management structure.
To achieve these visionary goals required UC to deal effectively with fiscal, educational, political, and jurisdictional issues. Kerr needed to reach out to the University’s alumni and friends, and then to the citizens of the state, if public support was to be secured. Before long, I found myself arranging for Kerr (and Seaborg) to visit alumni clubs and civic organizations throughout California. My job was to set the dates, plan the meetings, extend the invitations, work with interested alumni and others, inform the press, donors, and UC’s friends, and make sure that these visits served their purpose. Most important to me, I would chauffeur Kerr as we toured the state. Our car was standard issue from the Berkeley motor pool--not very comfortable, not even totally dependable. Kerr sat in the passenger seat up front, the back seat strewn with his papers. When I tired, he drove. Always, we talked.
At meetings all over the state, Kerr would move through the crowd with a genuine interest in people, asking them about their work, their families, and mutual friends. He was a master at making complex issues simple, explaining his views in a positive fashion, taking account of his audience’s interest and level of sophistication, and phrasing his presentation accordingly. I remember him addressing a combined service/alumni club luncheon in the Central Valley just a few months before the Free Speech Movement. There had already been a few problems on the Berkeley campus, and Kerr was called to account by some angry alumni, who kept referring to Cal students
As I was driving Kerr, he spoke at length about his strategic plan for doubling the University’s enrollment while simultaneously improving its overall quality and capability --partly in response to my questions, but mostly because he wanted to rehearse his upcoming speeches. During these conversations, I came to appreciate
On these journeys, I observed how determined and competitive Kerr really was, how relentless a champion for his beliefs, how driven to achieve the best for the University of California. He was a person of great personal integrity, and a quiet, wise, and courageous individual. How else could he have succeeded in as volatile, complex, and unforgiving an environment as California in general and UC in particular?
Kerr had set aside two hours for the meeting. He took most of the first hour explaining the issues in dispute, how the campus was handling them, the role of the chancellor versus the role of the president, who the principals were, who the outside interested
When Kerr finished, and as though he had said nothing at all, the president of one of the alumni associations drew a three-page typed document from his coat pocket and read one of the most blistering and judgmental criticisms I had ever heard directed toward Kerr for his “handling of the FSM.” Clark listened to the entire statement without comment and then turned to him and quietly said, “Well, Bill, if I may paraphrase Shakespeare: ‘Hell hath no fury like that of a noncombatant.'" Reasonable people could hold very different views about the merits of the issues in contention, the motives of the protesting students, and the wisdom of his actions to date, Kerr said. But “no one should doubt,” he added, that his actions were taken to serve the most
essential and enduring values of free universities everywhere. “We will not secure these values for future generations by compromising them now merely to assuage the anger either of the protesting students or those who find fault with them,” he said. Kerr was a thoughtful, forthcoming, straightforward, and honest person. He was also self-effacing and shunned the trappings of office. But he was not one to be pushed around. Instead, he always sought to be himself and to preserve his independence. For example, on his final day as president, January 20, 1967, Kerr twice was asked to resign. But he refused to do so, believing that he “had done nothing that would warrant such an action.” After he was unceremoniously dismissed by the Board of Regents later that day--one of the worst decisions, in my opinion, the board has ever taken--Kerr joked that he had left the job as he had entered it: “fired with enthusiasm.” Nevertheless, this action wounded him deeply and, I believe, it troubled him the rest of his life, especially in recent years. He felt he had let the University down when it needed him more than ever. Whenever he raised this issue, I told him he’d had no choice;
Shortly before he was dismissed, Clark asked me to write a history of the Free Speech Movement; he volunteered his papers and any help he could give to the project. For a number of reasons, the book never came to pass. But, after our work together on that project, he went out of his way to help me in any way he could. When I was serving as president of the University of Utah and then of UC, Clark Kerr was my most valued counselor. No person could have had a better mentor, a closer colleague, a steadier friend, or a more honest critic. And I am sure I am not alone; many others have also benefited from Kerr’s friendship, generosity of spirit, and intelligent, candid, honest advice. It is very unlikely that we will see his kind again. How fortunate we were that Clark Kerr devoted to the University of California so much of his talent, energy, and remarkable life. David Gardner, M.A. ’59, Ph.D. ’66, served as the fifteenth president of the University of California (from 1983 to 1992) and was the CAA’s Alumnus of the Year for 1989. His “Earning My Degree: Memoir of an American University President,” will be published in the fall by UC Press. |
 COVERING THE CAMPUS: Time magazine, on October 16, 1960, praised Kerr's Master Plan and marveled at the "tidal wave" of students coming through Sather Gate.
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