Jerome Byrne, 76; Gave UC Help on ‘60s Unrest

Jerome C. Byrne, the Los Angeles attorney tapped in 1965 to investigate and recommend reorganization of the University of California administration to help deal with student unrest over the Vietnam War and other issues, has died. He was 76.

Byrne, a specialist in labor-management relations with the firm of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher for more than 40 years, died Wednesday in Los Angeles of cancer.

After the September 1964 eruption of the Free Speech Movement on the Berkeley campus, the UC Board of Regents hired Byrne as special counsel to talk with students, faculty and administrators across the state about how to govern the growing “multiversity” in an era of protests.

Asked by The Times then why he would accept such a daunting assignment sure to reap criticism from all sides, Byrne quipped, “Fools rush in. . . .”

But within three months he presented the 85-page Byrne Report, a thorough and thoughtful study recommending such changes as greater autonomy for separate campuses to deal better with disturbances.

Byrne and his eight-person staff placed equal blame for the Berkeley uproar on regents for micro-managing, on UC President Clark Kerr for enabling others to usurp authority, on faculty for waffling between inaction and intervention without authorization, and on the students for ignoring established avenues such as student government for expressing their opinions.

In recommending that each campus be chartered as “an autonomous university within the system of higher learning,” Byrne criticized the existing administration for getting bogged down in detail. He said that regents should function as a broad policy-making board and that the UC president should act as a sort of chairman of the board for campus chancellors.

The report found no evidence that outside people or groups, including the Communist Party as many had claimed, had fostered the Berkeley incidents. Of 750 people arrested, Byrne said, 87% were students and the remainder were mostly recent alumni or spouses of graduate students.

Freedom, Byrne said in the report, is essential for a university to fulfill its four responsibilities: develop students’ character, train them for professions, conduct research, and aid the state’s agriculture, industry, commerce and government.

“A great university must,” Byrne wrote, “if it is to live up to its responsibilities, attract many faculty and students who will choose to pursue paths that the great majority of people regard as silly or dangerous or both.”

He urged taxpayers and government officials to tolerate “habits and values that seem profoundly alien to most residents of the state” to foster the freedom of thought necessary to a first-class university.

When the report became public, Byrne, who said he had “always lived a rather private life and enjoyed it,” found himself being interviewed by national news media as well as hounded by critics.

Unflappable, he told The Times in the summer of 1965: “Our study was unprecedented. The result was bound to be controversial.”

Born and brought up in Grand Rapids, Mich., Byrne graduated from Aquinas College there and later served on its board of trustees. He went to Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Law Review and graduated magna cum laude.

Byrne, who interned at Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher before his senior year at Harvard, moved to Los Angeles and joined the firm as a newly minted lawyer in 1951.

A Democrat, he did spadework in California for John F. Kennedy before the senator’s nomination for president, and raised money for Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown’s 1962 reelection campaign. He also was secretary of Democratic Associates, a group of business and professional men.

Byrne was a director and president of the Constitutional Rights Foundation.

In addition to his work for his own alma mater, he was a regent of Mount St. Mary’s College and a director and secretary of the Kolb Foundation, which provides scholarships to the University of Pennsylvania.

Byrne is survived by his companion of 30 years, John Beezley.

Rosary is planned at 7 p.m. Friday at Callanan Mortuary, 1301 N. Western Ave., and a requiem Mass will be offered at 10 a.m. Saturday at St. Victor’s Catholic Church, West Hollywood.

Memorial donations may be made to the Jerome C. Byrne Publication Endowment of the Constitutional Rights Foundation, 601 S. Kingsley Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90005, or to the Byrne-Beezley Fund of the Catholic Education Foundation, 3424 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90010.