Will California’s Knowledge Factories Survive?

Clark Kerr was an uncommonly important leader in institutions of higher education from 1952 to 1979 and continues as one of their most astute observers and commentators. At 90, he has written a memoir in two parts covering his years as UC Berkeley chancellor and University of California president that constitutes a major contribution to our understanding of American research universities. The first volume is “Academic Triumphs.” The second part, “Political Turmoil,” will be published next year. Each covers the same years but focuses on different subjects.

Midway through his presidency in 1963, Kerr delivered the distinguished Godkin Lectures at Harvard. Titled “Uses of the University,” they concerned the state of higher education with emphasis on the research university in the United States. Those lectures contained Kerr’s analytic framework for understanding contemporary institutions of higher education and the challenges faced by their leaders. The lectures provide a useful benchmark for discussing Kerr’s memoirs. To what extent did their insights explain and guide his actions? To what extent did they illustrate his mastery of the subject, and what did they ignore that later proved of importance?

In the lectures, Kerr begins by tracing the origins of institutions of higher education from a community of masters and students (reformulated by Cardinal John Henry Newman in the classic “The Idea of a University”) to the present “multiversity,” a term seized upon soon thereafter by the rebellious student activists of the left to typify an uncaring place devoted principally to capitalism and the military rather than to students and the social underclasses of the country and the world.

Kerr later bemoaned his use of the term, accurately stating that he was describing and not advocating the image. The term “multiversity,” he explained, described the post-World War II research university, a huge and rapidly growing enterprise offering education, research and service to an expanding multitude of constituencies from undergraduates to hospital patients, from the Department of Defense to local libraries, from IBM to the AFL-CIO and from intellectuals to football fans, to mention only a handful of interest groups. Although some private universities come within the umbrella of the term, multiversity encompasses mainly the public research universities with their very large student bodies and expansive social and economic responsibilities.

The multiversity was radically different from its predecessors, such as the British models of Oxford and Cambridge. Renowned as undergraduate residential colleges for the British upper class, the latter focused on intellectual relations between faculty and students centering on classical education. It also differed from the German university of the 19th century, which didn’t offer residential amenities and dealt mainly with freely chosen academic inquiry in depth by advanced students and faculty. And finally it differed from one of the American university models, pioneered by Johns Hopkins in 1876: a place which had at its core a graduate school of arts and science, the “solid” professional schools (mainly medicine and law) and a few research institutes. Educator Abraham Flexner, as quoted by Kerr, described the Hopkins model approvingly as “an organism, characterized by highness and definiteness of aim, [and] unity of spirit.”

The multiversity reflects these forerunners, but it owes its special character to the invention of the American land grant university in 1862 by the passage of the federal Morrill Act. This pivotal legislation reflected a congressional determination to focus on servicing the social and economic needs of society and providing access to higher education to the children of farmers and mechanics. Because initial funding relied on the sale, lease and exploitation of federal lands, state governors and legislatures became important players and their objectives, which had to be satisfied, were considerably broader than those of the trustees who were the governors of private universities.

But the land grant university did not jettison the values of its predecessors. Rather it incorporated the new with the old. The University of California, founded in 1868, is a good example. Agriculture, engineering and a host of other practical curricula were added to the classical base. Actually, the rigor and intellectuality of the older disciplines affected teaching and research in the new subjects.

Kerr not only recognized the role the Morrill Act played in shaping the identity of the multiversity but also identified two other more recent developments. First was the determination of the federal government, especially during World War II, to rely on the research capacities of leading public and private institutions in matters of defense and related subjects. Especially with the rise of the Cold War, the government turned to university professors. Ultimately, this refocused the loyalties of many faculty members away from their universities and toward agencies providing the research funds. By the 1960s, the role of federal support for research, combined with increased research funding from industry, provided another set of important players whose needs had to be satisfied.

Thus, the university’s connection with the outside world intensified. Concomitantly, the separation of the worlds of science and technology, the major beneficiaries of federal subsidy, on the one hand and the humanities on the other deepened. In addition, access to institutions of higher education was significantly broadened, abetted first by the G.I. Bill and later by student financial aid. This substantially enlarged the numbers of students at most institutions of higher education, especially undergraduates.

The demand for university services called for rapid institutional growth and was not particularly congruent with the newly emerging interests of many faculty members. This disequilibrium strengthened the self-identification of students as a separate constituency detached from their institutional settings.

The momentum occasioned by the intense federal involvement, the emergence of a knowledge-dependent economy and the population of the Baby Boom created, as Kerr put it in 1963, “three great areas of [needed] related adjustments.” The first involved absorbing the enormous increase in undergraduate and graduate students through the ‘60s and maintaining a responsive curriculum, especially at the undergraduate level.

Expansion was coupled with intense competition to attract and retain top faculty. In a number of disciplines, this competition led to reduced faculty teaching loads at a time when many undergraduate students complained about lack of faculty attention. And, indeed, faculty time was increasingly devoted to research. Kerr offered suggestions to enrich undergraduate intellectual life, which animated the organization and curriculum at UC Santa Cruz in its early days.

The second necessary adjustment shifted academic emphases, generally toward engineering, science (most prominently biology) and medicine and enhanced professional training, especially in business administration. Referring to President James Conant of Harvard, Kerr, in his lecture, perceived problems in properly balancing advancement of knowledge (especially in the humanities and creative arts), professional education, general education and the demands of student life. And he worried about the need to bridge the gap among academic cultures (especially science and humanities) and to confront in some meaningful way the fragmentation of specialties so that intelligent discourse between and within disciplines was enhanced.

The third adjustment meant re-examining the role of the university in the life of society. Academic mergers were occurring with industry and government, as they had with agriculture. Moreover, campuses were centers for community cultural life: from lectures, theater, art exhibits and concerts to football and other sports competitions.

Some feared loss of objectivity in the academy and the loss of academic freedom. Kerr was optimistic. American higher education, he said, was “flexible, decentralized, competitive and productive.... Pluralism in higher education matches the pluralistic American society. The multiversity, in particular, is the child of middle-class pluralism; it relates to so much of the variety of the surrounding society and is thus so varied internally.”

Kerr saw the need to preserve “a margin of excellence in a populist society.” He referred to the difference between Thomas Jefferson’s equality of opportunity and Andrew Jackson’s equality in outcome and argued that attention to the first was critical for stimulating excellence. Interestingly, in his lectures, Kerr saw the problem of student alienation, but he did not foresee rebellion. He did not make much of student inclination toward using the university as a base for social change when he spoke about involvement in the life of society. Nor did he mention ethnic and gender imbalance in the university, although other writings show Kerr’s considerable sensitivity to the values of inclusion.

Kerr became UC Berkeley’s first chancellor in 1952 and UC president in 1958. So how did he cope with the challenges posed by the “multiversity” in these leadership roles?

When the regents--who have the same governing responsibilities as trustees in private universities and colleges--created the positions of chancellor at UC Berkeley and UCLA in 1952, they were responding to pressures from the Southern California regents for greater status and investment in UCLA and the need to decentralize, given the growth of the university.

Before this, the president, Robert Gordon Sproul, was the sole chief executive of all the campuses. Understandably, Sproul resisted this diminution of his power. He warned about fragmentation of “one university” into many. His base was at UC Berkeley. While Sproul accepted the new positions superficially, he resisted their implementation. A fascinating portion of the memoir deals with Kerr’s successful actions to function at least as a powerful academic provost under Sproul. Kerr ultimately was given authority to appoint department chairs and effectively govern faculty appointment and tenure decisions, subject to review by the president and regents.

As Berkeley’s chancellor, Kerr also managed to introduce serious academic and physical planning on the campus; laid the foundation for expanded student services, including housing and cultural presentations; and, quite important, rallied the faculty, demoralized by the loyalty oath controversies of the 1950s. From 1906, when national rankings were first made, UC Berkeley has been considered one of the top research universities in the country. Observers, however, expected its ranking to drop precipitously as a consequence of the loyalty oath fights.

Kerr blunted this perception and sold the faculty on the proposition that it could successfully compete with the private giants (then Harvard, Yale and Columbia), as well as with other prestigious public universities. Berkeley, under his leadership, was successful. It was rated as the most distinguished research and academically well-balanced university for the first time in the 1964 ratings.

Kerr was a very successful chancellor and addressed many of the problems he later spoke about in the Godkin Lectures. As detailed in his memoirs, he broke with university tradition and expanded student housing and student services, and he involved the faculty in coordinating academic and physical planning, a step which strengthened the position of engineering and such social sciences as sociology and political science. He was unable, however, to move the large biology establishment toward needed reorganization and the inclusion of microbiology.

In cooperation with UC Berkeley’s Academic Senate, he successfully demanded excellence in appointments and promotions and led Berkeley back from the precipice of lost distinction to leading the pack of research institutions. He was aided by faculty growth based on increasing student numbers and considerable turnover as veteran faculty members were denied tenure because they failed to meet Kerr’s standards.

In 1958, the UC regents chose him to succeed Sproul as president. Kerr’s struggle to find his place as chancellor at Berkeley prepared him, on becoming president, to change the management style of the university and decentralize authority to the campuses. When he became president, there were six campuses: Davis, Riverside, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, Berkeley and UCLA. Looking back at the Sproul days and before, he recognized how decentralization was a radical departure from the past and vested considerable new powers in the chancellors.

Kerr dismantled the centralized business office run under Sproul by James Corley and, for the first time, had local business officers report to the chancellors. This was a large step, for it involved the design and construction of buildings and established new administrative functions for the university. He also provided for public information officers on each campus. He reports that he cut University of California staff from 1,025 to 275 and turned over 750 positions to the individual campuses.

Ironically, although Kerr’s action, with the regents’ assent, realigned the University of California system, some chancellors whom he appointed thereafter chafed at what they saw as unwise constraints on their abilities to govern and to exercise the symbols of university leadership.

The two most outspoken were Franklin Murphy at UCLA and John Galbraith at the new campus at San Diego. In the positions they had previously held elsewhere, they were used to exercising complete administrative authority, and they wished for more independent status with direct reporting to the regents, rather than to the president.

In Kerr’s view, they saw the University of California as a confederation of independent campuses rather than a federated system. This didn’t result, but a tug-of-war between the center and the parts was (and continues to be) inevitable. This is best understood in the context of the rivalry between UCLA and Berkeley.

A close look at the eventual fortunes of the campuses, the status of the university and the maintenance of autonomy, however, suggests that the federated model has proved optimal. This is unique to the University of California and is the result of the way it has grown from one campus to many. Most other public university systems have resulted from amalgamation of previously independent campuses.

The maintenance of a single university was a platform that permitted Kerr and his associates, primarily Dean McHenry, who later became the founding chancellor at Santa Cruz, to exercise considerable influence in fashioning the California Master Plan for Higher Education in 1959, a version of which was adopted in 1960 by the Legislature and Gov. Edmund G. Brown.

An organized way to prepare for the tidal wave of new students to descend on institutions of higher education in California in the ‘60s was clearly needed. The role of community colleges was well established, but the dividing line between the state colleges and the university was unclear. The Master Plan was a treaty among the three segments, and the roles assigned to each have held for more than 40 years.

This achievement has been a goal for many other states. Among other matters it seeks to address the problem Kerr noted in the Godkin Lectures: how to preserve “a margin of excellence in a populist society.” The three defined segments provided all students with an opportunity for higher education. Those with excellent high school records could go immediately to the university; others could go to the state colleges. Any high school graduate could go to a community college, and the opportunity to transfer to the state college or the university existed for those who performed well in academic subjects at the community college level.

The Master Plan--which is still today considered a seminal blueprint for systems of public higher education--set the stage for needed expansion in all segments to meet the predicted increase of applicants in the 1960s. The university decided to limit expansion at UCLA and Berkeley, to provide for increased numbers at Davis, Santa Barbara, Riverside and San Francisco and to create three new campuses at Irvine, Santa Cruz and San Diego. This created extraordinary planning and implementation responsibilities and opportunities for Kerr.

The stories about building three new campuses make instructive reading, especially for those involved in creating new institutions, such as the University of California campus at Merced. Irvine turned out to be a solid conventional campus. San Diego, from the very beginning, successfully strove for the highest levels of academic achievement, especially in the sciences. This, along with the extraordinary scientific progress made at the San Francisco Health Science campus, helped to fulfill Kerr’s insights concerning the importance of biology. Santa Cruz was to merge graduate programs with quite innovative undergraduate education centered in a series of thematic colleges.

For a variety of reasons, well explored by Kerr, Santa Cruz never realized his dreams and eventually became much like the other campuses. But the effort to renew undergraduate education by providing a variety of college settings for general education persists there and also at San Diego and might turn out to be important innovations in the future.

Memoirs, a species of autobiography, are rarely self-critical. A reader worries that an author’s selective memory deliberately or subconsciously emphasizes positive aspects of past performance and minimizes negatives. Kerr’s memoir is quite trustworthy in reporting what occurred, as he experienced it. There is no sense of concealing or dissembling.

On the other hand, memoirs are windows into important aspects of an author’s character and personality. What we discover is a man who is thorough, analytic, informative and nonconfrontational. Kerr makes special efforts to applaud people, such as Sproul, who frustrated his efforts to function as a chief executive at Berkeley. He has very few unkind words for anyone, and he rarely seeks to portray the characters in his saga from other than an intellectual and pragmatic perspective. Thus, the memoir informs very well but does not present an intimate picture of the writer. Only occasionally do we share his personal sense of triumph or disappointment or joy or anger.

This omission is troublesome for three reasons. First, emotions, as well as rational analysis, play a role in decision-making. Second, it is critical to understand the passions of others in order adequately to deal with their challenges. Finally, the memoir would be more gripping to the reader if it included these dimensions.

One among a number of major controversies during Kerr’s presidency was suffused with passion and concerned the efforts of UCLA to obtain parity with Berkeley after the appointment by Kerr and the regents of Murphy as chancellor in Los Angeles. As Murphy saw it, as distilled from his 1974 memoir, UCLA historically had been treated as Berkeley’s little brother, and his mission was to elevate its status to a university of distinction by obtaining state resources equal to Berkeley’s and by vesting himself with authority to reallocate funds transferred to the campus and to appoint and grant tenure to faculty.

Equal, if not more important in Murphy’s view, the chancellor had to be assured of powers that indicated to the Los Angeles community and the academic world that he was the leader of a campus that was related to, but had an independent identification from, the University of California, much like Berkeley’s. Thus, for instance, the chancellor at UCLA should preside when the charter day of the university was celebrated there, he should grant degrees at graduation, he should be able to relate directly to regents, especially ones in Southern California, and not solely through the president, and be provided with ample entertainment funds.

Murphy believed that Kerr acted much as Sproul did and that Kerr’s quest to assure a single university shackled him much as Kerr had been shackled by Sproul. Murphy saw this as a product of Kerr’s ego and close identification with Berkeley as well as his intention to maintain that university as the flagship campus to assure its continued academic quality and reputation.

Murphy complained that Kerr refused to confront conflict directly and that most of Murphy’s interactions with the president’s office were through lesser system-wide officers. He also complained that he could not ascertain from the president’s office crucial information that would undergird his arguments that Berkeley was preferred.

Murphy asserted that because of Kerr, he was required to engage the support of powerful local regents (including Edward Carter, Edward Pauley, Dorothy Chandler and Norton Simon, all people of power and distinction in Los Angeles) and that he obtained his objectives only through their intervention. The president’s office, of course, thoroughly objected to Murphy’s tactics, and Kerr, it is said, sent close colleagues, including Dean McHenry and Vice President Harry Wellman, to straighten out Murphy. Their missions were unsuccessful. Murphy’s beliefs and actions are the stuff of drama and controversy.

We find out from Kerr’s memoir that UCLA eventually achieved much of what Murphy sought, although it is not presented as a personal triumph of Murphy’s or the work of the regents. In Kerr’s description, they appear as part of his objectives. Moreover, in his admirable way, he maintains his understanding of Murphy’s positions, given the latter’s presidency of the University of Kansas, where he reported directly to the regents.

Further, in Kerr’s view, Murphy’s history as dean of the Medical School at Kansas conditioned him to expect independent authority. But what is missing is how Kerr felt about Murphy’s attacks, especially when he went over Kerr’s head, encouraged intervention from the regents and tried to substitute himself for the president on “state” occasions at UCLA, such as, for instance, the charter day event in 1964 when President Lyndon Johnson and the president of Mexico, Adolfo Lopez Mateos, were given honorary degrees--and how Kerr sought to handle these matters.

Unanswered personal attacks by an important subordinate can seriously undermine the authority of a chief executive when made to sympathetic overseers. Whether that occurred is hard to discern. Kerr doesn’t say.

Kerr is clearly more interested in presenting the demands of the multiversity and showing how he laid the groundwork for an extraordinarily successful multi-campus university. The University of California has grown substantially and has embarked on developing another campus. UC Berkeley has retained its prominence; UCLA has also become a distinguished broad-based university; UC San Diego is a superpower in science and technology, UC San Francisco is one of a handful of leading academic health science centers in the United States and UC campuses at Davis, Irvine, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz and Riverside have departments of distinction and a number of them are recognized in the top quartile of American research universities.

These heady ratings owe much to Kerr’s wisdom and actions during his 15 years in leadership roles, when the university grew immensely. He managed to give sufficient independence to its parts to unleash creativity while preserving the political strength of a single university.

Due to Kerr’s stewardship, the University of California has achieved great distinction. The presidents and chancellors have continued after him to build on the base he nourished so well. It has withstood the political challenges of the ‘60s, the lean budgets of the ‘70s and the major fiscal crisis of the state of California in the first half of the ‘90s. But the competition has become much more intense. The leading elite private research universities have doubled and tripled their tuition and endowment income, giving them the ability to provide larger stipends for graduate students, more research equipment for scientists and higher salaries for selected faculty than any state-supported university, even one as relatively well-funded as the University of California, can afford.

Whether this imbalance will continue is hard to say, but this is the challenge to Kerr’s legacy, and the signs are not propitious as California edges toward a recession and is forced to shoulder large financial demands and lower revenues.