Courtesy of UCLA University Archives Kerr with
UC Regents Chair Don McLaughlin at his
inauguration as UC President at UCLA in September 1958.
By Michael Falcone
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
[email protected] Seated next to an enormous window with
sweeping views of the San Francisco Bay, the elder statesman of the
University of California speaks about the modern university system
he built with the wisdom of a senior professor and the excitement
of an undergraduate. Nearly a half-century after Clark Kerr served
as Berkeley’s first chancellor and, later, UC president, he
traverses the university’s past, present and future as a
historian and visionary. Kerr, who will celebrate his 91st birthday
Friday, spoke with me at his home in El Cerrito, California. As
chancellor and president of the UC, Kerr dealt with the first tidal
wave of students, built three new campuses and led Berkeley during
its volatile Free Speech Movement. Last year, he published the
first 540-page volume of his memoirs, “The Gold and The Blue:
A Personal Memoir of the University of California,
1949-1967.” The second volume, subtitled “Political
Turmoil,” is forthcoming. Kerr is the author of several other
books, including his classic “The Uses of the
University” ““ a compilation of lectures he gave at
Harvard University on the state of higher education in 1963. Since
then, he has updated the book four times, most recently in 2001. It
remains an indispensable entrée to the complexities of
American college and university life. “¢bull; “¢bull; “¢bull;
Daily Bruin: In the first volume of your memoirs you write
about the UC’s “Academic Triumphs;” the second
volume will deal with “Political Turmoil.” Can you give
us a preview?
Clark Kerr: The great question about the University of
California is how it could have done so well academically when it
was going through so much political trouble. So, Volume Two is
about the political difficulties beginning with the oath
controversy during the Joe McCarthy period and going on to the
state committee on un-American activities, the so-called Burns
Committee, which got involved with the university and particularly
with me. At one point the committee claimed to have a record that I
had served as a person carrying messages back and forth to Latin
America on behalf of the Communist Party. There’s a lot
involving the Burns committee on un-American activities and then
the Free Speech Movement period here at Berkeley and then Ronald
Reagan. As I said the real question about the University of
California is how it could have been so successful academically
““ with the new campuses coming along, and UCLA and Berkeley
doing well ““ at the same time it went through all of these
political problems. But anyway, we did it.
DB: The parts of “The Uses of the University”
that were written in 1963 mentioned concerns of that time that are
similar to concerns of the present era of American higher
education. Are we just dealing with the enduring questions of
university life?
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CK: Well, not the “enduring questions.” There were
special problems then as now. Of course, one problem then was a
rising number of students to take care of. Then we tripled the
number of students in a little over a decade, now we’re
planning for about 50 percent. There’s a big difference
between going up by one-half and going up three times over. But it
is still an enormous problem. The other unusual thing at that time
was this enormous increase in research activity. In the 1950s and
1960s, the great emphasis was on physics and chemistry, with the
atomic bomb, and that led to the federal government spending money
on all kinds of research. There is a similarity this time around,
not that there’s going to be an enormous increase in research
across the board, but the new biological research is coming along
which I think is going to be the great issue for most of this
coming century. Those were the two enormous things happening in the
1960s when we were tripling the student body and turning what were
teaching universities in those days into great research
enterprises.
DB: Your most recent chapter of “The Uses of the
University” (2001) makes the point that the UC ranks superbly
well for research, but in undergraduate teaching it doesn’t
do as well.
CK: Yes, we talk about the rating academically but we forget
about the undergraduates when we talk about how great we are. We
ought to look at the totality of the situation, which is clearly
excellent ““ almost fabulous on the research side ““ but
not nearly so acceptable on the undergraduate side.
DB: Can the university do anything to account for this or
counteract it?
CK: The university is trying to do various things. There are
seminars for freshman all over the UC. That is an effort that takes
a fair amount of faculty time and interest. There is some effort to
correct the situation. It’s very important and very
desirable, but it’s really not sufficient to meet the
problem. I think we need to spend a lot more time and effort across
the whole United States in the handling of undergraduates. One of
the things that concerns me is that one way of rating colleges and
universities is by the proportion of their students that go on to
get the Ph.D. degree. I was just recently reading a survey that had
been made in the early 1990s which showed a listing of 70
institutions which had the best records in terms of the proportion
of their undergraduates that went on to get the Ph.D. degree and it
turned out that 50 of those 70 were private liberal arts colleges.
People that go on to the Ph.D. tend to have been very happy as
undergraduates. There were only 7 public universities in the total
list, and four of those were from the UC. Since more and more
instruction is in the hands of public institutions, the fact that
they do so poorly in the handling of undergraduates is a worrisome
thing. Twenty years from now, if this rate of public institutions
being the chief sources of future Ph.D.s keeps up, and they become
a smaller and smaller portion of the totality, what is the effect
on the research universities? For their own sake but also for the
sake of having a lot of good Ph.D.s, we have to pay more attention
to undergraduate instruction including particularly public
institutions.
DB: Since the UC is a multiple flagship university with
equal opportunities for its campuses to get funding, is there a
balance that needs to be struck? Specifically, in the future should
the UC try to ensure that UC Berkeley and UCLA remain the
“jewels” of the system?
CK: I was much involved in that decision (equal opportunity).
UCLA was a second-level campus, and I became quite conscious of the
problems at UCLA because my friend while I was a graduate student
at Stanford and at Berkeley was Dean McHenry, who was the student
body president while at UCLA. I got to know him and visited UCLA a
number of times and saw the agony of UCLA at being treated as a
second level campus. I became convinced through Dean McHenry that
UCLA was earning its way to the top and also that you
couldn’t forever keep a campus in L.A. at a second level to
something in San Francisco. I came along at a time when there was
an awful lot of resentment at UCLA at being a second level campus,
so it fell to me to give UCLA its place in the sun. That involved
giving it a first-rate university library. In fact as the most
recent ratings of university libraries show, UCLA has the
second-rated university library in the United States ““
Berkeley rates number five. In addition to giving them a top
library I also gave them more opportunity to hire faculty members
at over-scale levels and more authority to run their own affairs.
Having created a second star campus, the question is what are you
doing with the other campuses you are building? This was never
taken up directly with the Board of Regents as a policy but I just
began sending them budgets and proposals which gave every campus
equal or more or less equal opportunities and challenging them to
compete with each other. And actually this has worked very well.
The university has six members in the American Association of
Universities, most states have ““ in public universities
““ only one. This one university (UC) put together does better
in terms of all the academic standards than the whole Big Ten put
together. It wouldn’t do quite as well as the Ivy League. The
two big centers of education in the country used to be the Ivy
League and the Big 10 and now everybody would say it’s the
Ivy League and California. Our system of having several star
campuses has worked out quite well and I don’t think anyone
would want to go back to just having Berkeley.
DB: You were instrumental in the creation and development of
the state Master Plan for Higher Education in 1960. Presently
lawmakers are redeveloping that plan. What should they do to ensure
the continued well being of the university given the challenges it
faces?
CK: The big thing that we were working on in 1960 was equality
of opportunity. The big thing that we did ““ and nobody had
done it anywhere else in the world ““ was to guarantee that
there would be a place in higher education for every high school
graduate who wanted to attend. That was just absolutely phenomenal.
We did that by building up the community colleges, and provided
that at the university we reserve half of our upper division places
for transfers from the community colleges. We were really trying to
build toward equal opportunity as had never been seen before in
world history. In the mean time two sad things happened: One was
that the good high schools developed advanced placement classes and
the UC began taking advanced placement classes into account in
accepting students. The poor school districts had none at all.
While we were trying to increase equality of opportunity, there was
being built by this new system of advanced placement, inequality
for those from low income areas. Second, the good community
colleges will have college preparatory courses there that you can
then transfer your credits (to the UC) and the poor community
colleges will have no transfer courses whatsoever. So if you want
to transfer and you haven’t taken any transfer courses, you
can’t. The gains we thought we’d made in 1960, leading
the world, have now been taken away in very large part by the two
things I just mentioned. That’s where I think the new Master
Plan ought to concentrate ““ to bring back this greater
emphasis on equality of opportunity. We’ve got to give an
opportunity for the new people coming into the state to advance as
the new people coming in before them advanced. It’s a case
not just of not giving people and opportunity to move forward which
is our promise ““ our guarantee really as a nation ““ but
also being a detriment to the total population as they get served
by medical personnel, by people in the airports and so forth. We
aren’t building a labor force which is competent at serving
well our total population. I think that great forward step we made,
which people still come from around the world to study, has been
taken away from us and it needs to be restored not just for the
sake of the people who will get the education but for the people
who will be benefited by those who have the education.