Kerr, Clark

(b. 17 May 1911 in Stony Creek, Pennsylvania; d. 1 December 2003 in El Cerrito, California), president of the University of California, labor economist, arbitrator, and intellectual.

Kerr was raised in an agricultural community near Reading, Pennsylvania. His father, Samuel William Kerr, was a farmer and schoolteacher, and his mother, Caroline (Clark) Kerr, was a milliner before marriage. Other ancestors had been educators. Kerr also had three sisters and a half brother. He attended Reading High School and in his youth acquired habits of industry and self-discipline. His rural upbringing and subsequent attendance at Swarthmore College, the Quaker institution in Pennsylvania from which Kerr graduated in 1932 with an AB, were lasting influences. At Swarthmore, he became a Hicksite Quaker and did field work from time to time for the American Friends Service Committee, in particular promoting U.S. entry into the League of Nations and the World Court.

Throughout his busy career Kerr expressed his love for the land by avid gardening. He gave gifts of trees to the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, for which he had a lifelong affection from the moment he laid eyes on its campanile. The Swarthmore ideal of liberal education with emphasis on ethical conduct influenced his dream of making the University of California, Santa Cruz, which he founded, into a U.S. version of the collegiate Cambridge University. What he had in mind was a publicly financed “Swarthmore under the redwoods.”

Kerr married Catherine (“Kay”) Spaulding on 25 December 1934, and the couple had three children.

After graduation from Swarthmore, Kerr attended Stanford University, where he took an MA in 1933. On the advice of a professor from Swarthmore, who thought his interests better served at Berkeley, he moved across San Francisco Bay to study for a PhD in labor economics, which he received in 1939. From 1940 to 1945 he taught at the University of Washington and impressed observers with his skill in resolving labor disputes in the Seattle area. He acquired a national reputation as a labor arbitrator by helping settle a dispute between the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union and the Waterfront Employers’ Association in San Francisco. In 1933 he had visited the scene of a bitter and violent agricultural dispute in the San Joaquin Valley, reinforcing his desire to seek peaceful solutions. Kerr’s writings as a labor economist appear in The Future of Industrial Societies, Convergence or Continuing Diversity (1983).

Kerr returned to University of California, Berkeley, as the director of the newly established Institute of Industrial Relations. His problem-solving ability and respect for fundamental values had become generally acknowledged. When the University of California became a multicampus federation, Kerr was appointed the first chancellor at Berkeley and served under the university president Robert Gordon Sproul from 1952 to 1958. Kerr’s relations with Sproul, who only reluctantly accepted the principle of nearly autonomous campuses, were strained, and at one point Kerr contemplated resigning. He stayed with the university, however, and succeeded Sproul, serving from 1958 to 1967 as president of the University of California system.

Kerr’s skill as a labor arbitrator served him in the tortuous negotiations with academic leaders and state politicians that in 1960 resulted in the California Master Plan for Higher Education. The plan served as an inspiration for other American states and attracted attention from abroad as a means of connecting two opposing ideals: democratic access to higher education and the need for merit selection. The key ingredient was an unlikely combination of differentiating institutions according to mission but linking them through student transfer. The resulting tripartite system of public higher education in California allowed properly qualified students to move from community colleges and state colleges and universities to the University of California, to which the plan assigned principal responsibility for doctoral education, law, and medicine. After more than forty years, the plan continued to be memorable for its lucidity and brevity. Critics, however, complained that it unduly favored the University of California, and representatives of the tier of state colleges and universities continued to agitate for a greater role in the granting of higher degrees. Kerr regarded the community colleges as the special underpinning of a democratic system of access to higher education and was concerned whenever the numbers of transfer students to the University of California tapered off.

In an essay published in 1992 Kerr retrospectively laid out the sources of his thinking about the purpose and structure of higher education in American democracy. He named Thomas Jefferson, John Rawls, Benjamin Franklin, and John Maynard Keynes as thinkers who helped him understand how an “aristocracy of talent” could function within an egalitarian society and a mixed economy. Eager to keep state and central government from interfering with institutional autonomy, a key feature of the California Master Plan, Kerr believed that political guidance was acceptable only if market discipline was respected.

In April 1963 in the Godkin Lectures at Harvard University, he spelled out the arrival of a new kind of university on the American scene. He called it a “multiversity” rather than a “university,” and he had in mind Harvard even more than the University of California. The essence of a multiversity was its capacity to serve many constituencies at once. Previous thinkers had established the American principle that the university must serve all interests in a democracy, juggling priorities against competing pressures. Kerr extended the principle and demonstrated how the internal structures of universities accomplished such ends. The university president, he said, had become a manager or arbiter of numerous clashing interests. Kerr believed the multiversity appeared to have no core, no animating lofty spiritual idea. The multiversity was a “historical necessity,” Kerr said, rather than a “reasoned alternative.” The lectures were published as The Uses of the University (1963). As of 2005 the book was in its fifth edition.

Detractors accused Kerr of advocating bargains with powerful external interests since the multiversity was a federal grant university and thus in need of funding. Kerr said that in other contexts, money may not be the source of all evil, but it was the source of some. Because he feared that undergraduate education would be neglected, Kerr launched the Santa Cruz experiment. Not long after the Godkin Lectures, however, the student disruptions of the 1960s began, and Kerr was unprepared for what one sociologist called “affective politics.” Santa Cruz fell victim to the countercultural movements of the 1960s, and Kerr’s collegiate ideal faded as the campus became another research arm of the University of California.

A scholar and intellectual, a student of the arts of negotiation and compromise, Kerr was unable to comprehend the tactics adopted by student radicals of the 1960s. These students denounced the university for its association with industry and the military and accused it and Kerr of creating a large and impersonal bureaucracy subservient to capitalist enterprise. Civil rights activism and anti–Vietnam War agitation led to use of the campus as a staging area for political advocacy. The activists never forgave Kerr for trying to depoliticize the campus environment. They questioned his alleged open-mindedness, fidelity to moral precepts, and commitment to equality of opportunity.

The “multiversity” reality of an institution without a center led to power vacuums and crises of authority that Kerr had not anticipated. During the California gubernatorial campaign of 1966, Ronald Reagan, undergoing the transition from Hollywood actor to public servant, made Kerr’s lenient handling of campus upheaval into a campaign issue. Conservative members of the university board of regents, long upset at Kerr’s role in fighting the loyalty oath policies of the 1950s, engineered his dismissal in 1967. He had also been blacklisted by J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who considered Kerr a communist. The truth, however, was that Kerr’s fear of turning classrooms into sources of ideology made him a lifelong opponent of communism. Kerr observed ironically that he had managed to offend both left and right.

After leaving the University of California, Kerr headed the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education and chaired the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education. He gathered leading academics and inspired creative work in educational policy. He wrote extensively, updating the arguments first advanced in the Godkin Lectures. His essays were collected in works such as The Great Transformation in Higher Education: 1960–1980 (1991) and Troubled Times for American Higher Education: The 1990s and Beyond (1994).

Kerr continued to travel, to advise, and to lecture around the world. He was repeatedly honored at home and abroad but retained the simplicity of his upbringing and religious faith. Well into old age he could be found unloading unwieldy cardboard boxes at a local recycling center. He died on 1 December 2003 in El Cerrito of complications after a fall. His remains were cremated.

Kerr was a shy man not given to flamboyance. His personal habits and tastes were plain and direct, as were his speech and prose. Because of these traits, Kerr’s words carried uncommon weight and authority. Optimistic by nature and conviction, his view of the world took on darker hues toward the end of his life. His Hicksite belief in the essential goodness of every person was sorely tried. He called the 1990s a “sad decade” and wondered whether universal access to higher education was compatible with meritocratic values. As Kerr wrote in his memoirs, his was a long life of “triumph” but also of “turmoil.” He had won and lost “big.”

The Clark Kerr Memoirs Project is being conducted by the Center for Studies in Higher Education of the University of California, Berkeley. The first two works in the series are Kerr’s memoirs, The Gold and the Blue: A Personal Memoir of the University of California, 1949–1967. The first volume is subtitled Academic Triumphs (2001), and the second, Political Turmoil (2003). Obituaries are in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times (both 2 Dec. 2003) and National Crosstalk (Winter 2004).

Sheldon Rothblatt