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By David L. Kirp The idea that great university presidents are prime movers in the transformation of higher education is currently out of fashion. It’s the pull and tug of forces within an organization that matters, the researchers say, not the character of the leader. That may be true at present, when the typical university president is more a CEO than an educator, someone whose real job is to raise buckets of money, hire the football coach, and placate alumni, politicians, and business leaders. But it’s impossible within this depersonalized framework to comprehend the rise to pre-eminence of Berkeley and of the University of California. California’s phenomenal growth since the middle of the last century—the tidal wave of newcomers, the economic boom, the high-tech revolution, the demand for more and better higher education—had profound implications for higher education. How the politicians, the professors, and the citizenry would respond to those changes wasn’t clear: That’s where leadership was crucial. Throughout those years, many states were experiencing similar if less dramatic pressures. Still, it was Berkeley that, against the odds, became the pre-eminent university, not just among public institutions but, by all the rankings, in the world. As well, in 1960 the state adopted a master plan for higher education that was visionary in the true sense of the word. This was a systematic and wide-ranging plan for addressing the problems anticipated for the rest of the century. To understand how this transformation came about requires paying special attention to the accomplishments of one individual, Clark Kerr, Berkeley’s chancellor from 1952 until 1958, and then, until his firing by Ronald Reagan in 1967, president of the University of California. It is an exaggeration, but a forgivable one, to say that this diminutive, almost courtly, man re-imagined higher education in America. The Gold and the Blue, his two-volume account of those times, will be an important part of that legacy. It’s an exhaustively detailed work of reporting and reflection, some thousand pages in length, and for that reason will interest scholars of the University as well as those bound to it by ties of affinity. The memoir offers both a distanced and an up-close perspective on the Kerr era. At one moment Kerr is describing what’s going on—at the Greek Theatre, for instance, when, at a ceremony meant to heal political wounds, Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio is tackled by over-vigilant police;
Refreshingly, Kerr talks about his own mistakes—taking too little interest in Berkeley’s school of education (or the hideously brutalist design of Wurster Hall); imagining that the Swarthmore of the 1920s, his alma mater, could be recreated at Santa Cruz in the 1960s; not intervening when Berkeley chancellor Edward Strong took a hard-line stand against campus political activism. Kerr does his level best to be a reliable, not a self-serving, guide, and this candor serves both him and his readers very well. Since its founding in 1868, the University of California has been blessed with farsighted leaders: Daniel Gilman, who made Yale, rather than the trade school, the model for the new public institution; Benjamin Wheeler, who dispensed academic rough justice while astride his horse, and whose imperiousness prompted a faculty revolt that gave teeth to the notion of academic freedom; Robert Sproul, who built, and then iron-fistedly ruled, a state-wide university system. When he became chancellor in 1952, there was no reason to anticipate that Clark Kerr would join that pantheon. The position itself had just been created by the regents, over the opposition of President Sproul, who saw it as a challenge to his authority; consequently, Sproul treated Kerr as a glorified gofer. There was almost no staff in the chancellor’s modest office—Kerr had to get Sproul’s approval to hire a secretary—and, at the start, Kerr had so little power that he actually needed the president’s signature to authorize reimbursement for cab fare from the Oakland airport. Among the candidates for the chancellor’s job, Kerr was the most junior and the most liberal. His style was modest and unassuming. His training as a labor economist and his experience with labor-management disputes made him instinctively a mediator. Those considerations likely influenced Sproul’s decision, since they suggested that Kerr might be malleable; but it has always been a serious mistake to underestimate Clark Kerr. To understand the man, it helps to know something about the youth. The story of Kerr’s childhood, briefly recounted in Academic Triumphs, is a
Education mattered greatly in the Kerr household. His father taught classics and math at the local high school, and though his mother was a milliner with a sixth-grade education, she had much higher educational aspirations for her children. Attending Swarthmore College, Kerr writes, was “the greatest transformational experience of my life,” for there he acquired both a fine liberal arts education and the Quaker faith that “there is good in every person.” That credo, which stood him in good stead in his dealing with labor disputes and as a peace activist, was put to the test during his tenure as Berkeley chancellor and later, more dramatically, as president of the University. Kerr became Berkeley’s chancellor at a moment when academic freedom was imperiled. During the red-baiting days of the late 1940s and early 1950s, when reactionary legislators in Washington and Sacramento made their political living by claiming that communists were lurking in every classroom, the regents, at the initiative of President Sproul, inflicted a special loyalty oath upon the University of California faculty. Professors, who were already obliged to pledge their fealty to the Constitution, were now specifically required to deny any Communist Party affiliation; even communist beliefs were taboo. Not only was this measure constitutionally dubious, it was also an assault upon the integrity of the faculty. Quickly the battle lines formed. Professors vigorously challenged the oath; the regents fired 31 who refused to sign; the American Association of University Professors censured the regents. There was never any doubt where Clark Kerr stood on the matter. As a professor, he signed a petition against the loyalty oath. Early in his tenure as chancellor, he joined his fellow Quakers in publicly opposing an effort to enshrine the oath in the state constitution. It was a gutsy move, and the consequences, he writes, were “dramatic…. The chair of the board [of regents] came to my office and seized me by the coat lapels. He said I was being viewed as the ‘Red Chancellor’ of the ‘Red Campus,’ and he wanted me to retract what I had done.” Kerr didn’t blink. “I refused. I said that…I had not given up my rights as an American citizen when I became chancellor.”  Berkeley has been Kerr’s lifelong love—he describes his first view of the Campanile as wonderingly as European immigrants remember the sight of the Statue of Liberty—and this fiercely competitive man wasn’t going to preside over its decline. Not only did he have a sure sense of what the University should become, he also knew what was required to put those ideas into practice. The quotation with which Academic Triumphs opens, taken from Theodore Roosevelt, shows his pride in what he accomplished. “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena…. His place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither defeat nor victory.” Kerr was known as the “students’ chancellor,” in acknowledgment of his evident concern for students’ welfare. As well, he was a great builder (and a preserver of tradition: he refused to tear down South Hall, the oldest building on the campus). Still, what mattered most to him was the quality of teaching and, especially, research, for this was how Berkeley would achieve international renown. Kerr, a distinguished scholar who continued teaching and writing while serving as chancellor, appreciated that it was crucial to maintain Berkeley’s tradition of strong faculty leadership through the Academic Senate. But he was also willing to make tough calls. In allocating resources, he opted not to treat every unit alike but instead built up what he regarded as the best departments, among them English, physics, chemistry, and mathematics. Meanwhile,
In order to make such difficult decisions, Kerr had to know a lot about the intellectual vanguard in fields ranging from physics to sociology. He was also a good and unsentimental judge of professorial horseflesh. Faculty members who’d been hired on an emergency basis to teach the hordes of returning G.I.’s were let go; so many tears were shed in his office, he recounts, that he took to carrying a spare handkerchief. Resisting pressures to make Berkeley bigger in order to realize supposed economies of scale, he capped enrollment at 25,000 students. Again, academic values were uppermost in his thinking: A bigger university would result in departments too large to develop communities of scholarship among their members. Clark Kerr was named president of the University of California in 1958, a pivotal moment in the history of the system. The need for expansion was obvious—no sooner was he appointed than the regents voted to launch three new campuses—but the design remained unspecified. What would the new campuses look like? Moreover, three systems of higher learning—the University, the state colleges, and the community colleges—were competing for students and public dollars. Conversation across those divides was rare and planning nonexistent. Within two years, Kerr had negotiated a division of institutional labor, a “master plan” for higher education in California, making it the first state to create a system that joined elite, mass, and universal higher education. To students, this system offered an array of educational opportunities geared to their abilities; to faculty, it clarified responsibilities for instruction and research; to the commonwealth, it promised an informed citizenry and a well-educated workforce. UC Santa Cruz represented an audacious, and unanticipated, experiment in public higher education. Even as Kerr, in The Uses of the University (1963), was celebrating the “multiversity,” a throbbing and impersonal “city of intellect,” he was dreaming of an entirely different kind of institution: a university that would combine the virtues of a human-scale liberal arts college and a distinguished research institution, the best of Swarthmore and Berkeley. That’s not how things have worked out—Santa Cruz has become more or less like its sister institutions, distinguished mainly by a prettier and more isolated campus—and in his memoirs Kerr tries to comprehend went wrong. Surely it was problematic to open a classic liberal arts undergraduate college in an era impatient with anything that carried its own tradition; and it proved hard to persuade the faculty to teach across disciplines, particularly when scholarly expectations were so high. But UC Santa Cruz (as well as the other new campuses, to a lesser extent) shows that Kerr was willing to rethink the idea of the university. In that, he stood—really stands—alone. In the popular imagination, Clark Kerr is best remembered neither for his having brought Berkeley to academic pre-eminence nor for his farsightedness as president of the University of California. Instead, he will forever be associated with a small piece of real estate that sits at the entrance to the Berkeley campus, Sproul Plaza, and the epochal events that occurred there, beginning in the early 1960s. Kerr makes plain in The Politics of Turmoil, the forthcoming second volume of his memoirs, that throughout the many stages of the
Free Speech Movement controversy, as president of the University he was the man in the middle. He advocated freedom of speech—how could it be otherwise, for someone who’d stood up to the regents when he opposed the loyalty oath?—but was uneasy about freedom of advocacy on the campus. He sympathized with the passions of the students, many of them newly returned from the freedom rides in the South, but deplored their political naiveté. He empathized with chancellor Edward Strong, who saw in the students’ excesses a threat to Berkeley as a temple of learning, but opposed his repressive tactics. He appreciated that the Sproul Plaza dramaturgy had powerful implications for how the campus was governed, especially for the role of the faculty, which at one point effectively took control. But he also had to reckon with the broader political ramifications of these campus events. Berkeley’s natural enemies had a field day imagining a Bolshevik conspiracy, and even staunch allies like Governor Pat Brown turned into hard-liners when it came to Sproul Plaza. In Kerr’s account, the line between principle and tactics gets blurred, as was the case in real life. Were campus officials morally wrong to resort to such punitive tactics in an environment dedicated to the power of reasoned persuasion? Were they simply terrible tacticians whose moves played into the hands of the activists, prolonging and fueling the sense of grievance, turning the movement’s leaders into heroes? Or were they wrong on both counts? This is Kerr’s great white whale, the object of his obsession. He parses administrative memos and faculty resolutions with Talmudic thoroughness and describes events with minute particularity, all with a single end in mind: to make sense of what occurred and to imagine how events could have turned out differently. But the “right” response to this generation of protest, the best way to be a leader, won’t be found in the wording of a particular document or the behavior of the police on a particular occasion. The actions taken by Kerr and other administrators made a difference, but it was a difference at the margin. Whether the issue was free speech, “dirty” speech, or Vietnam, student protests nationally, and especially in Berkeley, were part of the Zeitgeist. The goings-on at Berkeley made an easy target for Ronald Reagan during his campaign for the governorship in 1966, and firing Clark Kerr was high on his political agenda. The suddenness and bluntness of the action—immediate dismissal, voted for by a board of regents beholden to a new master—was wounding and offensive. Resign or be fired, he was told, and characteristically he chose the harder, truer course. Being fired did not bring disgrace, as Kerr had feared. Quite the contrary: The buildings bearing his name that dot the campuses of the University are a testament in concrete to his persisting influence. The reports of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, which he chaired during the 1970s, remain influential in the governance of American universities. A new edition—the fourth—of The Uses of the University has just been issued. The book seems even more insightful and prescient now than when it was first published, nearly forty years ago; the new introduction is brimming with ideas about how to meet the challenges of these times. Sadly, there’s no one “in the arena” who combines Clark Kerr’s strength of mind and character with his political savvy—no one to shape a robust response to those challenges. David L. Kirp, professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at Berkeley and author, most recently, of Almost Home: America’s Love-Hate Relationship with Community, is engaged in a study of higher education in the “age of money.” |
 Clark Kerr looks back Photo by Dan Krauss
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