An Educator’s Legacy

It has been 30 years since Clark Kerr, the 12th president of the University of California, was abruptly fired by the UC Board of Regents, who disagreed with how he had handled student protests on campus. “I left the presidency just as I entered it: Fired with enthusiasm,” he quipped at the time.

Today, Kerr, 86, is widely regarded as higher education’s preeminent elder statesman, and he remains as enthusiastic as ever. After leaving the UC system, he served as chairman of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education and later the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education, publishing a series of reports, analyses and policy recommendations that have become mainstays in the literature of the field. “The Uses of the University,” his book based on a series of lectures he gave at Harvard in 1963, has been reprinted three times, each including new postscripts and commentaries from Kerr.

Now he is finishing up his memoirs--an examination of his six years as UC Berkeley’s chancellor, his eight years as UC president and, ultimately, his dismissal. His working title for the book, he told Times education writer Amy Wallace recently, is “The Gold and the Blue.”

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Question: What made you choose that title?

Answer: Those are the colors of the UC, of course. But I say the gold stands for all the good things that happened and for the support the state gave the university. And the blue stands for the difficulties that we had along the way. The book is more about the gold than about the blue.

Q: It was in 1949, when the UC regents threatened to fire faculty members who refused to sign a loyalty oath, that you first stepped into the spotlight. Explain how you, a labor economist and scholar, entered the fray.

A: I was a young faculty member [and] the junior member of the [Berkeley Academic Senate] committee on privilege and tenure. It fell to me to take the strong position before the Board of Regents. My first presentation before them, I got up and said I did not see how anybody in good faith could vote for their proposal to fire [the faculty who would not sign]. I’d served as a labor negotiator--I’d been the impartial chairman on the West Coast between the Longshoremen’s Union and the Waterfront Employers Assn.--so I’d seen a lot of conflict in my life. I was accustomed to it--slugging it out. [During the loyalty oath controversy] I came to the attention of the faculty. When they were asked to recommend a chancellor, to my great surprise, they recommended me. All of a sudden I gave up my research and became an administrator without ever intending to. I came in as chancellor in 1952.

Q: What was the mood on campus?

A: UC Berkeley had got the worst of the loyalty oath controversy--31 people were fired. The general feeling after that was that Berkeley was on its way down. There had been within the campus a certain amount of disagreement about the oath, whether to accept it or fight it, sign or not sign.

Before this, Berkeley had always been competing against [the University of] Michigan to be the best public university. But when I took over, many faculty talked about wanting to be even better than that. Many had this conviction [in the wake of the loyalty oath]--they wanted to move ahead. So I was able to do some things a chancellor wouldn’t normally be able to do. I changed department chairmen. I gave one department, [which] we wanted to beef up, five or 10 new appointments in a single year, instead of parceling out new positions equally to all departments. I was doing things the faculty wouldn’t normally accept, though I did it in conjunction with the Academic Senate.

Q: Did it pay off?

A: Yes. After I became president, Berkeley was rated the No. 1 graduate school in America. It was the first public university ever to get rated ahead of Harvard. I sent the Harvard president at the time an Avis button. The implication was you ought to try harder.

Q: You became UC president in 1958 and almost immediately got to work creating three new campuses--UC Irvine, UC San Diego and UC Santa Cruz. You also spearheaded the creation, in 1960, of the California Master Plan for Higher Education, which says that the top eighth of the state’s high school graduates are eligible for UC and the top one-third for California State University, while anyone who can benefit from additional education can attend a community college. The implied promise of the plan is a place in public higher education for all.

A: Yes . . . that was a promise made to the people of the state, to mothers and fathers and their children: Get a high school degree and you can go someplace. . . . It was an enormous job to do. I never worked so hard in my life on anything. And with the new campuses, we had to get the land and the initial leadership and set up a program at all three. It was extremely hard work, to start three at once and keep the rest of the university going.

Q: Then, in 1964, came the Free Speech Movement. You’ve said that your labor negotiation experience, which had helped you during the loyalty oath, impeded you during this period. What did you mean?

A: When the student revolt came along, I got handicapped this way: To me, controversy was the world you lived in. When it hit, the Free Speech Movement, I just took it as part of life--an episode, a problem to be handled. But an awful lot of people--alumni, regents--just got terribly upset. A lot of people felt this was the beginning of the revolution, the storming of the Bastille. They felt that something drastic should be done. I got phone calls [suggesting] taking a machine gun and shooting the students off Sproul Plaza at Berkeley, just fierce stuff. I was being pounded on to suppress the coming revolution, [but] I had no sense at all that this was a revolutionary situation. I thought the United States was absolutely solid in its devotion to democracy. So . . . I was not as sensitive as I should have been to how upset some other people could become under those circumstances.

Q: You clashed with UC Berkeley’s chancellor at the time, Edward W. Strong.

A: He was a hard-line person. He took some hard actions and the students blamed them all on me. I twice held off the police from them. [But at first] I was leaving things to the chancellor because I’d been responsible for the decentralization of UC and I was playing by the rules--which was a mistake, incidentally.

When a police car was captured [by students] at Berkeley, however, I had a call from [Gov. Edmund G.] Pat Brown. The chancellor had called in 600 police to release the police car. Brown said, “My operatives tell me that if those police move there’s going to be bloodshed,” which I think was quite likely. He said, “I don’t want another Alabama or Mississippi. You’ve got to step in and do something.” I hung up with him and got a call from a group of faculty members who said the same thing: “We’ve been trying to see the chancellor and he won’t see us. We think there’s going to be bloodshed.” So it became my baby. I did step in.

Q: Do you think the seeds of your firing were sown at that time?

A: It started there. [Some regents started to say] “not tough enough.” Some regents thought I’d been too soft on the students. There came to be about six regents who felt that.

Q: In 1966, Ronald Reagan was elected governor after campaigning on a pledge to clean up Berkeley, which he called “a hotbed of communism and homosexuality.” What was your relationship with him?

A: He had a Cabinet meeting before becoming governor and asked me to attend. I talked with some of the regents and wrote him a letter saying that I would attend out of courtesy to the governor, but I wanted it understood that the president of the university was not a member of the Cabinet of the governor--that I would go once and I would not go again.

Q: How did he like that?

A: I [later] made two appointments with him. I wanted to get to know him. He canceled both.

Q: Did Reagan in effect get you canned?

A: There were six regents who had already developed their doubts about me. He came in and brought in eight other votes. It wouldn’t have happened without him. . . . Years later, I ran into Lyn Nofziger, who had been Reagan’s press secretary. . . . He said, “We thought [the UC presidency] was one of our jobs that we could control.” That explained some of Reagan’s attitude toward me.

Q: You’ve described your firing as the most painful thing that ever happened to you.

A: I expected to be dismissed, so that wasn’t a surprise to me. What hurt me more was the way it was handled. I’d worked with the Board of Regents at that time, as chancellor and as president, 14 1/2 years. We’d done an awful lot of things together. The Master Plan, the new campuses, Berkeley getting to be No. 1.

[The regents met privately for two hours.] When they got through, and it was announced that the public could go back in to the meeting room, I walked up to the door and there the assistant secretary to the regents put her hand on my chest and stopped me. She said, “You’re not allowed in there.” I said, “But it’s a public meeting,” which means everybody else in California could be there. And she said, “It’s public to everybody but you. You’re not to come in.” I said, “If the chairman will come out and tell me that, I’ll accept it, but otherwise I’m coming in.”

[When the meeting was called to order], the chairman announced that I’d been fired “effective immediately.” I was prepared to be fired. But saying it was effective immediately as though I was some kind of criminal who had to go to the guillotine instantly, that was a little too much for me. They didn’t have to do it.

Another thing they did that offended me was they said if I would take the burden on myself and resign, rather than be fired, they would take very good care of me. I never asked what that meant. But that offended me. I had kept my salary as president at $45,000 so it would be lower than the governor’s. I wasn’t in it for the money. I’d taken so many tough positions that they’d seen, including with them, that this idea that somehow I could be bought off. . . . I said, “I’ve made a lot of tough decisions for this university and this is one you’re going to have to make and take responsibility for.” I never resigned.

Q: Have you forgiven those who forced you out?

A: I’ve known a lot of university presidents who were being fired during my period of time and they ended up being bitter and antagonistic toward their institutions and toward life. I decided that wasn’t for me. I really don’t have any sense of bitterness toward the people who voted against me. I can see how they could say, “We can’t go on with a situation where the governor and the president don’t get along.” I understand why they did it, why they felt under pressure to act as they did. And after all, they got a lot out of it. Reagan had cut the university’s budget quite substantially. So part of the deal the regents had with him was that if they voted for my dismissal, he’d take back $20 million in cuts.

One of our best regents in history [one he would not name] wanted reappointment, which he got. And Buff Chandler [Dorothy Buffum Chandler, the wife of the late Los Angeles Times publisher who was a UC regent in 1967] was concerned that Reagan had got John McCone, who’d been CIA director [from 1961-65], to agree to investigate subversion in the university. Buff didn’t want that to happen at all. She went into negotiations with the governor, I’m told, with the demand that he call off the McCone investigation.

So, I wasn’t sold all that cheaply.

Q: What would you like your legacy to be?

A: I was once asked what did I consider to be the most important thing I’d done, and I answered probably the most important thing would end up being the Master Plan, which was the first time in history that any state or nation guaranteed a place for every high school graduate in a system of higher education. And it’s stood for 30 years and become something of a model for the nation. But the thing that gave me the most pleasure was when Berkeley got rated ahead of Harvard--a public university on the far West Coast!