Clark Kerr, who helped create the model of the modern American higher-education system as president of the University of California in the 1960s, and continued to play an influential role in national policy for decades after he was fired by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan for refusing to quiet student protesters, died last week following complications from a fall. He was 92.
As the first chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley in the 1950s, he defined the position of a top administrator in a multicampus public system by fighting to secure power and autonomy for the job that was largely seen as nothing more than an assistant to the system’s president.
During his tenure as president of the University of California system from 1958 to 1967, Mr. Kerr presided over a period of rapid growth in both the size and prestige of the institution. Three campuses were established -- Irvine, San Diego, and Santa Cruz -- and enrollment doubled to 87,000 students.
The university system turned into a research powerhouse, leading Mr. Kerr to coin the phrase “the multiversity” in his well-known 1963 book, The Uses of the University (Harvard University Press). In the book, which has been reprinted several times, he described a university’s “national purpose” as both a place for teaching and research, a revolutionary idea in those days, when the university was seen only as an ivory tower.
Later, as chairman of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education and the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education during the 1970s, Mr. Kerr championed the causes of financially needy students and was widely credited with the concept that federal aid to higher education should be given to students rather than only to institutions. As a result, and against the wishes of many in higher education, Congress created the Basic Education Opportunity Grant in 1972, the precursor of today’s Pell Grant.
“He was truly one of the giants of American higher education,” said David W. Breneman, dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, who was a graduate student at Berkeley when Mr. Kerr was the university system’s president. “No one vaguely approximates his stature today.”
Barry Munitz, a former chancellor of the California State University System who worked with Mr. Kerr at the Carnegie Commission, called him “the last, and probably first, national spokesman for higher education.”
Perhaps Mr. Kerr will be most fondly remembered for his great wit, which often made him one of the most quoted university leaders in the country. He once observed that “if you are bored with Berkeley, you are bored with life.” When he was asked at a 1957 faculty meeting what he was doing about parking, he said that the chancellor’s job had come to be defined as “providing parking for faculty, sex for students, and athletics for alumni.” The quip made its way into Time and Playboy.
Echoing a comment of others last week, Robert M. Berdahl, chancellor of the Berkeley campus, said, “We’re not likely to see leadership like Clark Kerr in higher education again.”
Architect of California Master Plan
A labor economist who helped negotiate hundreds of collective-bargaining agreements on the West Coast in the 1940s, Mr. Kerr’s first big foray into higher-education policy came in the late ‘50s. He was part of a small group in California assigned to come up with a plan to accommodate the huge number of baby boomers headed for college.
The result was the state’s higher-education master plan, which spelled out who should be guaranteed access to which state institutions and placed the state’s fast-growing but unorganized web of public colleges into three well-defined tiers. The blueprint, which would become the basis for similar plans in many states, provided a spot for the top eighth of the state’s high-school graduates at the University of California, for the top third at the California State University System, and for the rest at the state’s community colleges. It gave the right to award doctorates solely to the University of California and, in the beginning, promised a tuition-free higher education.
Thanks in part to Mr. Kerr’s lobbying, the plan was approved by the Legislature with only one dissenting vote and signed into law in 1960. State lawmakers have updated the plan about once every decade, but its original outline has remained true to Mr. Kerr’s vision.
The master plan amounted to “a treaty,” said Arthur Levine, president of Teachers College of Columbia University.
“Clark Kerr was the Henry Ford of higher education,” said Mr. Levine, who worked with Mr. Kerr at Carnegie. “He took the research university, which was the elite institution, and multiplied it to make it a mass-access university. He took the research function of that university and applied it to the general needs of society.”
Nicholas Lemann argued in The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999) that the master plan was “subtly loaded to favor the university’s interests over the state colleges,” but several longtime higher-education observers called that a cynical view reflecting what would be likely to happen if the master plan were written today.
“Here was a president of a research university who was instrumental in stimulating the growth of the Cal State system and the community colleges,” said Patrick M. Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, an independent research group with roots in California higher-education policy. “Can you imagine a university president going out today and creating a community-college system that would compete for funding with their university system?”
In many ways, Mr. Kerr was part of a generation of university presidents who used their prominent positions to influence policy debates not only on higher education but on other issues as well. A Quaker, Mr. Kerr was a lifelong peace advocate who in 1968 went to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as part of a group that was unsuccessful in its attempts to insert an anti-Vietnam War plank into the party’s platform.
“I can’t see a college president doing that today,” said Mr. Munitz. “It’s just not done.”
Clashes With Reagan
The Vietnam War helped to undo Mr. Kerr’s presidency.
Beginning in 1964, a series of student sit-ins and demonstrations at the Berkeley campus often forced Mr. Kerr to choose between the students and the demands of a conservative Board of Regents and lawmakers who controlled the university’s budget. Mr. Kerr did not always sympathize with the protesters’ causes, but as the demonstrations intensified, he agreed to eliminate restrictions that had been in place on political activities on the campus. That decision infuriated some regents and politicians, including Ronald Reagan, who ran for governor in 1966 on a platform that included “cleaning up the mess in Berkeley.”
When Mr. Reagan entered office in January 1967, he immediately cut the university’s budget by 10 percent and proposed charging tuition. Mr. Kerr responded by freezing admissions temporarily. Three weeks later, the regents voted, 14 to 8, to fire Mr. Kerr. Last year the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation under J. Edgar Hoover had conspired with the Central Intelligence Agency to covertly get Mr. Kerr fired because the bureau disagreed with his policies.
Mr. Kerr joked that he left the California presidency the same way he entered it -- “fired with enthusiasm” -- but he would later call the firing the “most painful event” in his life. In an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education in 1986, Mr. Kerr said the student protesters were partly responsible for prolonging the Vietnam War.
President Richard Nixon “played them as a very unpopular enemy,” he said. “Nixon just used them because they came to be so hated by the American public that he fought them and got support and, I think, continued with the war four years longer than it had to be.”
The bitter feelings over the firing lingered even after Mr. Reagan was elected president. In the 1980s, Mr. Kerr was part of a group that monitored elections in Central America and South America. That group was invited to the White House to present its report, but Mr. Kerr refused to go. “For most people, the highlight was meeting the president in the Oval Office,” Mr. Munitz said. Years later, Mr. Kerr told Mr. Munitz that “he wasn’t sure what point he made by skipping the event.”
“He began to understand Reagan’s perspective and even expressed some forgiveness,” Mr. Munitz said.
Post-University Career
After his dismissal, Mr. Kerr turned down job offers from Harvard and Stanford Universities, as well as his alma mater, Swarthmore College, in order to become chairman of the Carnegie Commission. For most of the 1970s, the commission produced a plethora of reports and studies on all aspects of higher education, including international education, the faculty, and law schools -- a collection that is often referred to today by scholars as the “five-foot shelf” of the commission’s works.
Mr. Kerr, whose research with the commission focused largely on federal policy issues, was able to persuade prominent scholars to write for him and turn their work into practical reports that carried influence with state and federal lawmakers.
Mr. Breneman, the University of Virginia education dean, said he used the commission’s 1973 publication “Higher Education: Who Pays? Who Benefits? Who Should Pay?” in finance classes he taught “well into the 1990s.” That book first argued that tuition at public colleges should rise to roughly one-third of the cost of educating a student, “an idea that is still cited today, and people have no idea where it came from,” Mr. Breneman said.
The commission’s efforts also played a part in the creation of the Carnegie classification system, widely used to categorize colleges and universities. Other recommendations, though, like creating a three-year degree, went nowhere.
Of all the commission’s work under Mr. Kerr, probably the most influential report was the 1968 publication “Quality and Equality: New Levels of Federal Responsibility for Higher Education.” That report, which was updated in 1970, argued for delivering federal aid directly to students through grants. It came as federal lawmakers were preparing to extend the Higher Education Act. Most higher-education officials backed a proposal that called for institutional-based grants, in which the federal dollars would flow directly to colleges. Mr. Kerr and the Carnegie Commission were among only a few advocating a student-based system, and they took a lot of heat from a higher-education establishment “used to getting its way,” Mr. Breneman said.
“People called him a traitor,” Mr. Callan said.
Mr. Kerr’s thinking eventually prevailed in Congress, and higher-education officials should be glad it did, Mr. Callan added. “Those funds would be much easier to cut today if we gave them to colleges and universities,” he said.
Mr. Kerr left Carnegie in 1980 to spend more time as a consultant and labor arbitrator, and to write reports for other organizations. While the commission continued, several scholars noted that its influence on policy discussions was never the same.
Tending His Garden
At the urging of the University of California, Mr. Kerr published his memoirs, The Gold and the Blue: A Personal Memoir of the University of California, 1949-1967, the first volume in 2001, and the second just this year.
During that massive project, he was in frequent contact with old colleagues and friends, sharing passages in his legendary cramped and illegible handwriting, using green ink, often on yellow paper. After getting a memo from Mr. Kerr, staff members often called one another “to discern what the notes said,” Mr. Munitz recalled.
Even as his health began to fail in recent years, Mr. Kerr continued to work on causes related to his deeply held beliefs, particularly that higher education should be open to all eligible students, regardless of income. To friends, he bemoaned the fact that the federal aid that he helped conceive was now built largely on loans, rather than grants. He also urged California officials to better prepare for the second large mass of students going to college, for which he coined the term “Tidal Wave II.”
The son of a Pennsylvania farmer, Mr. Kerr loved to tend his garden in his free time. In the 1986 interview with The Chronicle, he likened gardening to his job as a university administrator:
“A big weed was a regent, a medium-sized weed was some professor that was causing me problems, and a little weed was some student who was misbehaving.”
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CLARK KERR
1911: Born in Stony Creek, Pa. His father was an apple farmer who spoke four languages; his mother, a milliner.
1932: Graduates from Swarthmore College and spends the summer touring California on a “peace caravan.”
1933: Receives a master’s degree from Stanford University.
1939: Earns a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.
1945: Joins the Berkeley faculty as head of the new Institute of Industrial Relations.
1952: Is appointed to the newly created post of chancellor of the Berkeley campus. Before that, the campus was administered directly by the university system’s president.
1958: Becomes president of the University of California system.
1959: Helps write a master plan for higher education in California, which spells out who should be guaranteed access to which institutions.
1960: Appears on the cover of Time magazine because of his work on the master plan.
1963: Publishes The Uses of the University, in which he introduces the idea of the “multiversity” to describe the movement away from the ivory tower to a complex organization that is meant to serve the national interest.
1964: The Free Speech Movement begins, spawning a series of sit-ins and demonstrations on the Berkeley campus.
1966: Ronald Reagan is elected governor of California on a platform that includes “cleaning up the mess in Berkeley.”
1967: Three weeks after Ronald Reagan takes office, the University of California Board of Regents votes 14 to 8 to fire Mr. Kerr. Mr. Kerr is appointed chairman of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education.
1968: The commission publishes “Quality and Equality: New Levels of Federal Responsibility for Higher Education.” It argues for delivering federal aid directly to students through grants, even though most higher-education officials back a proposal for federal dollars to flow directly to colleges.
1972: Congress adopts the commission’s idea and creates the Basic Education Opportunity Grant, the precursor of today’s Pell Grant.
1973: The commission publishes “Higher Education: Who Pays? Who Benefits? Who Should Pay?” It proposes that tuition at public colleges, which is very low, rise to roughly one-third of the cost of educating a student. Becomes head of the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education the same year.
1980: Leaves the council to spend time as a consultant and labor arbitrator, as well as writing reports for other organizations.
1986: Is a co-author of The Many Lives of Academic Presidents, in which he writes that the power of college presidents has diminished.
2001: Publishes the first volume of his memoirs, The Gold and the Blue: A Personal Memoir of the University of California, 1949-1967: Academic Triumphs. The second volume, Political Turmoil, is published in 2003.
2003: Dies at the age of 92.
SOURCE: Chronicle reporting
http://chronicle.com Section: Government & Politics Volume 50, Issue 16, Page A1
