His is a name most students here have forgotten ““Â if
they ever knew it. His footprints are indelible on this campus. And
even if they don’t know who he was, students take for granted
the university he built 40 years ago.
Clark Kerr, who served as the University of California president
during the 1960s before being fired by the Board of Regents amid
political pressure, died Monday at 92.
Though his heart was at Berkeley, where he was chancellor for
six years before being promoted, his interest in improving the
university was hardly campus-specific.
Kerr turned California’s higher education system on its
end. He championed access, engineered a comprehensive plan for
accommodating enrollment growth in the face of budget cuts and
overhauled the stale expectations of a public university.
Without his leadership, the community college system as it
exists today ““ a statewide network of schools open to anyone
who wants to take classes ““ would likely not have been as
accessible. Kerr was committed to democratizing higher education
and he sparked the idea that everyone who wants a college education
should be able to get one ““ regardless of income or
geography.
He also equipped the UC for a period during which enrollment
doubled, constructing three campuses even when the regents were
considering the possibility of implementing tuition for the first
time. Merced is the only campus planned for construction since
Kerr’s tenure.
And while the country’s top public universities are known
by their flagship campuses ““ Ann Arbor, Mich., Austin, Texas,
Virginia ““ Kerr was responsible for transforming the
University of California into a brand name famous for both Berkeley
and UCLA, as well as eight other widely reputed schools.
Kerr was known for his passion for education, for preserving and
improving the institution even when politics and finances suggested
it couldn’t be done.
Now, his legacy is in jeopardy.
Administrators and politicians, bowing to budget cuts and
demands on campus resources, are threatening to betray Kerr’s
mission. They are slowly and persistently abandoning the purpose of
maintaining a world-class, widely accessible university system.
In an interview with the Daily Bruin in spring 2002, Kerr
offered a hint of his fears about the current state of the
university in California. Access, he said, is being diminished by
inequities in high schools and community colleges, where the
quality of education translates into a disparate amount of access
to four-year schools.
With the Master Plan for Higher Education under consideration
again, with a new wave of budget cuts expected in January and with
rumors of another round of fee increases, access is only one of the
university’s goals that is already eroding.
When will the Legislature finally take the university seriously?
When will the Board of Regents, entrusted with the student
interest, stop approving the fee increases that diminish student
accessibility? When will the university again have a leader
unafraid of standing up against state policies that endanger
long-term educational quality?
When Kerr was fired in January 1967 just as a governor furious
with Kerr’s toleration for protests at Berkeley took office,
the Daily Bruin Editorial Board wrote that the decision diminished
the possibility that someone with moral courage might risk his
career by agreeing to be UC president. Thirty-six years later, the
university is still facing a dearth of administrators with a moral
backbone. Clark Kerr was among the most educationally driven
leaders this university has seen.
His namesake isn’t affixed to a campus street sign, or to
a basketball court, or a dorm on the Hill. His presence is nearly
anonymous now, and the responsibility to preserve the university
tradition he built rests with his predecessors.
Everything Kerr worked for is on the line.