Mixed Legacy of Clark Kerr: A Personal View, The

Academe, Jul/Aug 2004 by Lustig, Jeff

The death of a higher education giant unleashed a flood of eulogies. A careful reassessment of Clark Kerr's contributions to American higher education reveals a more ambiguous legacy, especially for university and college faculty.

The death of famed educator Clark Kerr last December evoked tributes and testimonials everywhere from the New York Times to local faculty bulletins. Architect of California's famous Master Plan of 1960, skilled labor mediator, first president of the University of California system, bête noir of the early student movement, and chair of the distinguished Carnegie Commission on the Future of Higher Education, Kerr captured the diverse impulses of his times with rare thoroughness while clearly defining the key questions facing American higher education.

Absent from the eulogies, however, were evaluations of the great educator's contributions from a distinct faculty point of view. What did Kerr's visions of the multiversity mean for faculty? What did his project hold in store for people trained for professional autonomy and used to playing a central role in university governance? Most of the tributes for Kerr did not acknowledge the threats posed to faculty roles by Kerr's model of higher education, or the problems he himself came to recognize with it.

In fact, the route he mapped held more dangers than first appeared, and his times carried conflicting currents. But if faculty fail to develop an independent point of view, they will be unable to see those dangers or protect their role in an increasingly threatened institution. I offer this article, then, as one step toward a faculty perspective on Kerr's legacy from someone who has long been interested in his trajectory-from his brilliant, early economic articles, through his leadership of the University of California (and authorization of my arrest during the free speech movement), up to his late recognition of the growing crisis of his cherished university.

The Idea of the Multiversity

It is the contradictions of the man, not the times, though, that first catch the eye. Defender of professors who earlier refused to sign California's anticommunist loyalty oath, Kerr received the AAUP's Alexander Meiklejohn Award for Academic Freedom in 1964, only weeks before igniting the free speech struggle on his flagship campus when he denied Berkeley students the right to engage in political advocacy on campus. A Quaker by conviction and a problem solver noted for his patience, Kerr was the first university authority in the nation's history to preside over a massive police presence and arrests on his campus. Witness with economist Paul Taylor and photographer Dorothea Lange to the 1933 California cotton strike memorialized in novelist John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle, he later opposed campus organizing in support of the United Farm Workers. An accomplished negotiator, finally, he uncharacteristically discredited the motives of the student protestors, alleging that "49 percent of them [were] Maoists and Castroites" seeking the takeover of the university, only to have his own reputation secretly discredited by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That calm exterior seems to have hidden a fair amount of inner turmoil.

Kerr was a practical man, but there was a theory of sorts behind his practice. His 1963 book, The Uses of the University, explained what it was. As he saw it, the federal-grant university, the new educational complex that was displacing the old land-grant college, was destined to become the core site for "knowledge production and consumption" in the emerging knowledge-based economy. The new multiversity, as he named the complex, was also being transformed into a knowledge industry. It "and segments of industry are becoming more alike," he explained. As surely as form followed function, that meant the university was also becoming more of a bureaucracy than a community-"a mechanism held together by administrative rules and powered by money" (and, in his most prescient bon mot, united by "a common grievance over parking").

This model of the university and Kerr's subsequent elaborations of it will be his lasting legacy, and not, for example, the oft-cited California Master Plan. That plan was a more mixed accomplishment than education policy makers usually like to admit. It established a statewide tracking system in higher education in which the University of California drew from the top eighth of California's high school graduates, the state colleges from the top third, and the junior colleges from the rest. The plan failed to provide a college education for all who wanted it, despite familiar claims, because it contained no funding mechanism for that purpose. And it secured a near monopoly over the granting of PhDs to Kerr's own system. That a state with 20 million residents and nine public PhD-granting institutions in 1970 should, in 2004, with 35 million residents and a "tidal wave" of new students (Kerr's term), still have only the same nine public PhD-granting universities and growing obstacles to student access to its lower-track institutions is partly the result of that plan.