Ouster from U. of California
Article: Appointment by Carnegie Foundation
Article: Kerr’s Thoughts on Presidency
By WILLIAM REECE
The dismissal of Clark Kerr as president of the University of California was, in the opinion of close observers, inevitable.
The only surprise to these observers was that it came so soon.
Mr. Kerr himself had hoped to hold his office through 1968, weathering the storms that beset his administration with increasing force in recent years. The university will celebrate its 100th anniversary in 1968, and Mr. Kerr had hoped to be on hand -- as president -- for the event.
His belief that he could hold on to his office for another year and a half apparently remained strong despite the election of Ronald Reagan, an outspoken Kerr critic, as governor of California.
But persons close to the university’s board of regents doubted that he would be able to last that long. Many of them thought his ouster would come in February. Some said, in fact, that a definite plan to bring about Mr. Kerr’s departure at that time was taking shape.
But largely as a result of Mr. Kerr’s own actions last week, the regents fired him at their January meeting -- a month earlier than expected.
An Ultimatum?
Governor Reagan, backed by several other regents, insists that Mr. Kerr presented the board with “an ultimatum” at its meeting last week, in the form of a demand for a vote of confidence. Mr. Kerr, also backed by several regents, denies this.
The individual regents have given many versions of what happened last week between Mr. Kerr and the board. What consensus there is, however, seems to be as follows: that Mr. Kerr told some members of the board (and they agreed) that without the backing of the regents he could not fight for the university’s budget proposals against the Reagan administration’s economy-minded finance officials -- and that this statement is what some regents may have interpreted as an “ultimatum” or a demand for a vote of confidence.
It also appears that a relatively small number of regents -- perhaps as few as three or four -- held the power of decision. For at least as long as the university’s Berkeley campus had been wracked by student demonstrations against administrative authority, a number of regents -- but not a clear majority -- had doubts about Mr. Kerr’s leadership. Others, approximately equal in number to the first group, favored Mr. Kerr. Under the strong pro-Kerr urgings of Mr. Reagan’s predecessor in the governor’s office, Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, the “undecided” members of the board tipped the balance in Mr. Kerr’s favor.
Enter Governor Reagan
Last week, however, the undecided group appeared to conclude that the university would get nowhere without cooperating with the administration of the new governor, Mr. Reagan. And since Mr. Reagan obviously was not a fan of Mr. Kerr’s, these regents cast their votes against the university president.
When offered the opportunity to submit his resignation following the board meeting, Mr. Kerr refused. “I wished to take no voluntary part in a quick and complete response by the university to the shift in the political power and philosophy of the state,” he said this week. “My refusal to resign also demonstrated that the initiative for my separation as president lay with the regents and the governor, not with me.”
The crucial fact of university life is, in the opinion of Kerr supporters, the black eye that any political interference -- or seeming interference -- would be certain to give the University California among academic people elsewhere, as well as on Cal’s own campuses.
It could adversely affect’s Cal’s ability to attract promising scholars to its faculty -- observers say -- and even the regents’ search for a successor to Mr. Kerr. Political interference is generally considered by members of the academic world to be one of the most undesirable things that can happen to a university, and institutions that have experienced it in the past have frequently found it difficult to recruit new members to their staffs.
At a press conference this week, Governor Reagan denied that the university would “be sullied by partisan politics” during his administration. But the reaction to the Kerr ouster made it clear that many persons thought partisan politics already had affected the institution.
“The greatest blow to higher education in 99 years,” said the chancellor of California’s state colleges, Glenn Dumke, who himself may be on Governor Reagan’s list of prospects for dismissal.
“A major tragedy.” said Buell Gallagher, president of City College of the City University of New York.
“A profound shock to the academic community,” said Clark Byse, president of the American Association of University Professors and William P. Fidler, AAUP general secretary, in a joint statement.
Mr. Fidler said that if Mr. Kerr’s dismissal had been politically motivated public higher education in California was in “imminent danger.”
“This is a very serious thing they have done,” said Harlan Hatcher, president of the University of Michigan, in speaking of the board of regents action.
“An affront to higher education generally,” said Nathan Pusey, president of Harvard University.
“A sad day for higher education in California,” said Lloyd H. Elliott, president of George Washington University, “and it is one that is bound to have nationwide repercussions.”
“The implications of a political judgment affecting a great university will be tragic for the entire country,” said O. Meredith Wilson, president of the University of Minnesota.
Francis Keppel, former U.S. commissioner of education and now chairman of the board of General Learning Corp., said, “Clark Kerr is one of a handful of men who have earned the title of ‘leader’ in this century.”
Governor Reagan, responding to the educators’ comments this week, said, “They’ve got a strong union.”
In California the reaction to the news of Mr. Kerr’s ouster was immediate and vociferous.
On the university’s nine campuses the news spread fast. Faculty members, some of them summoned from classrooms by their colleagues, gathered in halls and offices to discuss its significance. Secretaries clustered in shocked groups. At Berkeley, faculty groups issued protests: one statement, signed by 81 faculty members, said the firing showed “political influence over the university.”
Owen Chamberlain, Nobel prize-winning physicist, presided over a meeting of faculty members. Mr. Chamberlain and 235 others signed a telegram to Mr. Kerr in which they expressed “indignation at the unwarranted action of the board of regents” and “gratitude for and confidence in” Mr. Kerr.
Academic Senate Reacts
Berkeley’s academic senate this week:
- Condemned the dismissal of Mr. Kerr and told the people of California that the majority of the board of regents has betrayed your trust. As of today, no reputable educator would assume the presidency of that university which yesterday was the envy of every other state.”
- Called for a mass meeting with “distinguished speakers” to discuss “the needs of purposes of the modern great university.”
- Asked the regents to secure the “advice and consent of the faculty” in future decisions affecting the “appointment and tenure of the president.”
- Told a committee to see how the faculty’s position would be changed “from petitioners to negotiators in matters of university welfare,” and to determine if a “professors’ union” would be an effective instrument.
The Berkeley student senate was summoned to an emergency meeting on Monday. Efforts were under way to organize a student strike on all of the university’s campuses. One the three-year-old Irvine campus, where the student body is normally one of the least demonstrative in the university system, large letters appeared on the library:
STRIKE MONDAY
On a walkway atop the library building, students carried a banner reading, “Impeach Reagan.” Across the way, in the student commons building, a sign was quickly raised: “In memory of Clark Kerr -- crucified by the acting governor.” The word “acting” had been painted in red, dripping letters, to imitate blood.
The Political Implications
Of more lasting significance, perhaps, were reactions on the political scene.
Numerous regents report that Mr. Kerr’s most vigorous supporter in last week’s meeting was Jesse M. Unruh, speaker of the State Assembly. Mr. Unruh, a Democrat, is expected to try to marshal his fellow Democrats in opposition to any proposals that Governor Reagan may make to cut the university budget and to impose tuition in the heretofore tuition-free institution. Before last week’s firing of Mr. Kerr, there was no assurance that the Democrats would be united. But Democratic resentment of the regents’ action, which they blame on Governor Reagan, may go a long way toward solidifying the party’s legislators -- at least on this issue.
Mr. Uhruh already is widely mentioned as a leading contender for the Democratic nomination for governor in 1970 -- a circumstance that gives added weight to his views on the university.
Meanwhile, what will be the effects of the Kerr ouster on the university community?
Some department heads had reported difficulty, even before the regents’ action, in recruiting new teachers for the university. They blamed Governor Reagan’s use of the university as a campaign issue, his threat of an investigation of the Berkeley campus by John J. McCone, former chief of the Central Intelligence Agency, his advocacy of tuition fees, and his announced intention of cutting the higher education budget. Such things, they said, scared off many prospective faculty members.
Others, following the firing, said the atmosphere of the university would be bound to change -- in some ways for the better, in some ways for the worse. Several said they welcomed the prospect of a tighter discipline over students at Berkeley - but that they hoped it would be brought about without political interference in the university’s affairs.
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Appointment by Carnegie Foundation
New York
Four days after Clark Kerr was ousted as president of the University of California, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching announced he had accepted the chairmanship of a three- to six-year study of the future structure and financing of all phases of U.S. higher education.
Mr. Kerr’s appointment, which he said he was accepting “at least for the present” on a part-time basis, had been arranged well ahead of the dismissal action taken last Friday by the University of California board of regents.
But Alan Pifer, acting president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, made a point of saying this week that “nothing has happened to change our view that no man is better qualified than he to lead a study of higher education’s future in this country.”
While lacking the drama of a political confrontation such as the one that led to his dismissal from the California presidency, the Carnegie study which Mr. Kerr will head may well equal the California episodes in long-term significance to U.S. higher education as a whole. It may even prove, eventually, to be almost as controversial.
The end result of the study, it is hoped, will be an analysis of “how Americans can afford the quantity and quality of higher education they are likely to demand in years to come.”
Preliminary Answers Needed
But what are Americans likely to demand of the colleges and universities over the next decade or so? Mr. Kerr and his study commission, to which 14 other persons have already been named, must somehow form an answer to that question before it can even consider the climactic one -- Where will the money come from?
Actually, the Carnegie study is expected to seek not just one answer, but a variety of answers. It is likely to acknowledge at the outset that no commission, however knowledgeable, can predict how higher education will develop in this country.
Rather than try, the Carnegie study will probably hypothesize a number of future combinations of colleges and universities -- of various sizes, academic characteristics, and types of control -- plus a number of economic factors and of forms which the public demand for higher education might take. Then it may examine a variety of financing possibilities.
“So broad will be the scope of the study,” Mr. Kerr was quoted as saying, “that no one answer, no one blueprint, no one ‘master plan’ for American higher education will even be attempted. We will take a hard look at all the complex elements in our society which affect higher education and which are affected by it.”
He said the study might try to answer such questions as these:
- What percentage of the population can be expected to go on, after high school, to some form of higher education? How many young people and adults would this involve?
- How many colleges and universities of all types would the United States need, in order to meet such a demand?
- In addition to instruction, how much research will the nation’s institutions of higher education be able to undertake? How much community leadership? How much continuing education for alumni and other adults?
- How will the needed colleges and universities be financed? How much by federal, state, and local governments? How much by corporate contributions? How much by individual donors? How much by tuition-paying students and their families?
To enable the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to launch the study, its sister foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, last week voted CFAT an initial grant of $300,000. Additional support will be given as the study progresses. A small staff is likely to be established, but the location of study headquarters has not yet been selected.
A Milestone for Carnegie
This week’s announcement marked the resumption by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching of important studies of higher education -- an activity for which it was famous in the early years after its founding in 1905.
One of the foundation’s pioneering studies was Abraham Flexner’s revolutionary analysis of American medical education, published in 1910. Other projects dealt with medical education in Europe, engineering education, the case method in U.S. law schools, American dental schools, and the teaching of physics.
More Educational Projects
The financial burden of the foundation’s most costly activity -- the providing of free pensions to college and university faculty members -- together with other factors made it necessary for the foundation to reduce its education studies in recent years. Last year, however, the foundation reached a financial position where, said Mr. Pifer in his annual report, it could “receive annual grants from the (Carnegie) Corporation for educational projects, probably studies in the field of higher education.”
The Carnegie study of higher education which Mr. Kerr will head is the first such project to be undertaken.
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Kerr’s Thoughts on Presidency
As president of a large and complex “Multiversity,” Clark Kerr was well aware of the perils inherent in his job. He spoke at length of the president’s responsibilities in the Godkin lectures that he delivered in 1963 at Harvard University. Here are excerpts:
It is sometimes said that the American multiversity president is a two-faced character. This is not so. If he were, he could not survive. He is a many-faced character, in the sense that he must face in many directions at once while contriving to turn his back on no important group.
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The American university president is expected to be a friend of the students, a colleague of the faculty, a good fellow with the alumni, a sound administrator with the trustees, a good speaker with the public, an astute bargainer with the foundations and the federal agencies, a politician with the state legislature, a friend of industry, labor and agriculture, a persuasive diplomat with donors, a champion of education generally, a supporter of the professions -- particularly law and medicine -- a spokesman to the press, a scholar in his own right, a public servant at the state and national levels, a devotee of opera and football equally, a decent human being, a good husband and father, an active member of a church; above all he must enjoy travelling in airplanes, eating his meals in public and attending public ceremonies. No one can be all of these things. Some succeed at being none.
He should be firm, yet gentle; sensitive to others, insensitive to himself; look to the past and the future, yet be firmly planted in the present; he should be both visionary and sound; affable, yet reflective; know the value of a dollar and realize that ideas cannot be bought; inspiring in his visions yet cautious in what he does; a man of principle yet able to make a deal; a man with broad perspective who will follow the details conscientiously; a good American but ready to criticize the status quo fearlessly; a seeker of truth where the truth may not hurt too much; a source of public policy pronouncements when they do not reflect on his own institution. He is one of the marginal men in a democratic society -- of whom there are many others -- on the margin of many groups, many ideas, many endeavors, many characteristics.
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The president in the multiversity is leader, educator, creator, initiator, wielder of power, pump; he is also officeholder, caretaker, inheritor, consensus-seeker, persuader, bottleneck. But he is mostly a mediator.
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To make the multiversity work really effectively, the moderates need to be in control of each power center and there needs to be an attitude of tolerance between and among the power centers, with few territorial ambitions. When the extremists get in control of the students, the faculty or the trustees with class warfare concepts, then the “delicate balance of interests” becomes an actual war.
Instead of power being commensurate with responsibility, the opportunity to persuade, for the president, should be commensurate with the responsibility -- he must have ready access to each center of power, a fair chance in each forum of opinion, a chance to paint reality in place of illusion and to argue the cause of reason.
http://chronicle.com Section: Past Chronicle Issues Volume 1, Issue 5, Page A1
