Clark Kerr

1911–2003 · 92 years

The Quaker arbitrator who promised every Californian a college place

Portrait of Clark Kerr — Los Angeles Times — 1964-06-12 — CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

His father farmed apples outside Reading, spoke four languages, and held a master's degree from the University of Berlin. His mother refused to marry until she had saved enough to send her children to college. Kerr went to Swarthmore, joined the Society of Friends, and remained a Quaker and a pacifist for the rest of his life. He turned down Columbia Law after a Quaker peace caravan showed him California, took a doctorate in labor economics at Berkeley in 1939, and spent the Depression and the war years arbitrating wage disputes up and down the West Coast, some 500 of them. Berkeley made him its first chancellor in 1952. In 1958 the Regents handed him the whole University of California.

The Master Plan of 1960 promised every Californian a place in higher education and then sorted the places into three tiers. Community colleges took anyone who could benefit from instruction. State colleges taught bachelor's and master's degrees. The University of California took roughly the top eighth of high school graduates and kept the exclusive right to award doctorates and do the major research. Transfer routes connected the tiers, so no door was final. Tuition was free to residents. Almost every state copied some version of it, and mass higher education in America has had that shape ever since.

The oath made him and the students unmade him. When the Regents demanded in 1949 that every employee swear he was not a Communist, Kerr signed it and then fought the firing of the colleagues who would not, and the fight is what built his name. Fifteen years later the Free Speech Movement put him in a vise. Berkeley students who wanted campus politics unrestricted read him as the obstacle. The Regents and the incoming governor read him as soft. Ronald Reagan had campaigned partly on cleaning up the mess at Berkeley, and on January 20, 1967, three weeks into his term, the Regents voted 14 to 8 to dismiss Kerr. He told an audience soon after that he had left the presidency as he entered it, fired with enthusiasm.

Five days after the firing he had the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, which he chaired through 1973 and then, as a council, until 1979. It produced some 140 volumes, the fullest survey of American higher education anyone has attempted. His 1963 book The Uses of the University had already given the century its word for what he ran: the multiversity, a place serving too many masters to be an ivory tower. The promise that proved least durable was the free one. Proposition 13 ended tuition-free public education in 1978, and fees have climbed since. Kerr died on December 1, 2003, at his home in El Cerrito, above the campus, at 92.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Clark Kerr's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Institute of Industrial Relations, UC Berkeley other
Founded at the urging of Governor Earl Warren 1945
Industrialism and Industrial Man book
Written with John T. Dunlop, Frederick Harbison and Charles Myers 1960
A Master Plan for Higher Education in California, 1960-1975 other
The report that split public higher education into three tiers 1960
Donahoe Higher Education Act law
The statute that gave the Master Plan legal force 1960
The Uses of the University book
The Godkin Lectures, and the book that named the multiversity 1963
The Gold and the Blue book
Two-volume memoir of the University of California, 1949-1967 2001

Life in brief

with age at each point

May 17, 1911 aged 0 Born on a farm at Stony Creek, Pennsylvania He attended a one-room school and called himself a Pennsylvania farm boy ever after.
1932 aged ~21 Graduates from Swarthmore and joins the Society of Friends Student body president and captain of the debating team. The Quaker commitment lasted his life.
1939 aged ~28 Takes a doctorate in economics at UC Berkeley His thesis studied the self-help enterprises of the unemployed between 1931 and 1938.
1949 aged ~38 Fights the firing of faculty who refuse the Regents' loyalty oath Kerr signed the oath himself, then argued the non-signers' case and made his reputation.
1952 aged ~41 Becomes the first chancellor of UC Berkeley The faculty nominating committee wanted him.
September 29, 1958 aged 47 Inaugurated as president of the University of California His address was called The Worth of Intellect.
April 27, 1960 aged 48 Governor Pat Brown signs the Donahoe Higher Education Act The Master Plan becomes law. Time put Kerr on its cover that October.
January 20, 1967 aged 55 The Regents dismiss him by 14 votes to 8 Ronald Reagan had been governor of California for three weeks.
December 1, 2003 aged 92 Dies at El Cerrito, California, at 92 Complications from a fall, at a house looking across the bay at Berkeley.