Goodbye to a Big Thinker

It is, perhaps, fitting that Clark Kerr died as the deadline tolled for another round of undergraduate applications at the university that owes so much to his vision. Last year, 77,000 young men and women vied for 30,000 freshman spots at the University of California’s nine campuses. This year’s total could surpass that, a measure of the university’s perennial ranking as one of the nation’s finest. Such is the legacy of Kerr’s confidence that California could offer a quality, affordable education to all who were eligible and the strength of the plans he put in place to make his vision a reality.

Kerr, who died Monday at 92, was the University of California’s 12th president, from 1958 to 1967. But his gift to generations that don’t know of him is measured less in the buildings and lecture series named in his honor than in the values of academic excellence and opportunity that this Pennsylvania native imprinted on his adopted state.

Kerr was an imaginative administrator and planner, a description that in these cynical times seems sadly oxymoronic. As UC president, he pushed the development of California’s Master Plan for Higher Education, released in 1960. The plan assured a place in California’s public college and university system for all state students and defined the roles of the UC campuses, the California State University system and community colleges. Kerr’s model has endured for 40 years, becoming a template for education planning around the world. Even California’s nasty political battles in recent years over affirmative action underscore how valuable a ticket to future success the state’s schools remain.

But the master plan was no sure thing in the Legislature. Lawmakers understood that approving it would commit them to decades of rising construction costs, enrollments and instructional budgets through uncertain economic times, and many had to be convinced. That in the end there was only one dissenting legislator speaks to Kerr’s quiet persuasiveness. Contrast that with the pinched horizon of today’s budget debates, in which -- absent visionaries of Kerr’s class -- politicians spar over how much debt they can push off to next year to duck the tough decisions now.

Kerr’s generation of big-thinking Californians, including his ally Gov. Pat Brown and Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh, has largely passed. That Californians now take as their due the institutions and facilities they helped build -- the aqueducts, freeways and the colleges and universities that Kerr so eloquently championed -- is powerful testament to these extraordinary leaders.