Clark Kerr, who helped create the model of the modern American higher-education system as president of the University of California system in the 1960s, and continued to play an influential role for decades after he was fired by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan for refusing to quiet student protesters, died in his sleep on Monday following complications from a fall. He was 92.
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. During his tenure, three campuses were established -- Irvine, San Diego, and Santa Cruz -- and enrollment doubled to 87,000 students. Later, as head of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education and the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies, Mr. Kerr championed the causes of financially needy students. He is widely credited with the concept that federal aid to higher education be given to students rather than only to institutions.
“He was truly one of the giants of American higher education,” David W. Breneman, dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, said on Tuesday. “No one vaguely approximates his stature today.”
A labor economist who helped negotiate hundreds of collective-bargaining agreements in the 1940s, Mr. Kerr became the Berkeley campus’s first chancellor in 1952, and the university system’s president in 1958. His first big foray into higher-education policy came in the late 1950s. He was part of a 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 master plan for higher education, enacted in 1960 and updated every decade since, which spelled out who should be guaranteed access to the state’s institutions. The plan, which many states across the country copied in the following decades, provides 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.
“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 college presidents who used their prominent positions to influence policy debates on higher education, as well as other issues. A Quaker, he was a lifelong peace advocate, who in 1968 went to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as part of a group that tried to insert an anti-Vietnam War plank into the party’s platform.
“I can’t see a college president doing that today,” said Barry Munitz, a former chancellor of the California State University System, who worked with Mr. Kerr at the Carnegie Commission. “It’s just not done.”
The Vietnam War also helped to undo Mr. Kerr’s presidency. As student protests intensified on the Berkeley campus in the 1960s, he did not always sympathize with the protesters’ causes but nevertheless refused to comply with a order from the system’s Board of Regents to quiet them. In 1966, Ronald Reagan ran for governor of California on a platform that included “cleaning up the mess in Berkeley.” In January 1967, two months after Mr. Reagan was elected governor, 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 (The Chronicle, June 10, 2002).
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. And the hard feelings 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. The 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.
During his tenure with the Carnegie Commission, Mr. Kerr focused on federal policy issues. His efforts played a part in the creation of the Pell Grants and to the Carnegie classification system, widely used to categorize colleges and universities. But his positions on delivering federal aid directly to students through grants, and later through loans, were not popular at the time with many higher-education officials, who wanted the money to flow to their institutions.
“People called him a traitor,” Mr. Callan said. “Thankfully, he succeeded. If he didn’t, those funds would be much easier to cut today if we gave them to colleges and universities.”
Background articles from The Chronicle:
Opinion essay in The Chronicle by Mr. Kerr: