Author: Irwin Collier

Perhaps it is because I am an economist that I have been particularly sensitive regarding those of our discipline who have gone on to head colleges and universities. Or perhaps economists have indeed constituted a disproportionate share of such presidents/chancellors/deans. In either case, I feel sufficiently motivated to begin a new series “Economists gone university leaders” with this post dedicated to Clark Kerr, a Berkeley economics Ph.D. (1939). The title of his thesis was “Productive enterprises of the unemployed, 1931-1938”. He was the founding director of the UC Berkeley Institute of Industrial Relations and later became the first chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley and the twelfth president of the University of California.

Fun fact: Not only did then Governor Ronald Reagan vote to dismiss Clark Kerr but so too did the chairman of the UCLA Alumni Association and member of the University of California Board of Regents, Harry R. (Bob) Haldeman of Watergate infamy. 

There are two morsels of Clark Kerr’s wit to be enjoyed near the end of the post as a reward for reading two newspaper reports from 1967.

But first we begin with an inspirational thought from Clark Kerr’s early presidential years and an insight by the columnist James Reston as to how it was even conceivable that Clark Kerr could be fired. “As usual, the articulate and activist extremes have prevailed over the moderate and indifferent middle.” A lesson for our political times?

________________________

The duties of a great university

“A great university has a duty to the future as great as its duty to the present. It must do more than serve the immediate society which provides its support: it must preserve the heritage of the past; it must try to open new doors. Intellectually it must be both more conservative of established values and more bold in trying innovations than may be fashionable at any given moment. It must maintain scholars in studies which a layman might consider archaic. It must support novel explorations which most people consider speculative. In the interests of future generations it must take the long view and may often have to defend the unpopular.”

Source: Office of the President, University of California. Unity and Diversity. The Academic Plan of the University of California, 1965-1975, p. 2.

When the Center could not hold

“The feeling against Governor Reagan and the Regents for their clumsiness, insensitivity, and even brutality in dismissing Kerr like an incompetent janitor is very strong here [in Berkeley]. Faculty and students, who were remarkably silent when he really needed them, are now all rallying to his support, but it is too late. As usual, the articulate and activist extremes have prevailed over the moderate and indifferent middle.”

Source: James Reston, “Berkeley: The Dismissal of Clark Kerr,” The New York Times, January 27, 1967, p. 44.

________________________

Hail the New Chancellor!

CHANCELLOR AT BERKELEY

A civic dinner in honor of Clark Kerr, new Chancellor at Berkeley, has been planned the evening of Dec. 10 in the Peacock Court of San Francisco’s Mark Hopkins Hotel by a special Committee of the Regents in co-operation with President Robert G. Sproul.

Chancellor Kerr will be the principal speaker on the program, which will also include remarks by Governor Earl Warren and President Sproul, and music by the Glee Club, under the direction of Robert Commanday.

Approximately 450 civic, faculty, student, and alumni leaders are being invited to the affair which will introduce Chancellor Kerr to the Bay Area in his new capacity.

Chancellor Kerr was born in Pennsylvania and holds the bachelor degree from Swarthmore College, the M.A. degree from Stanford University, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of California. He completed his studies in 1939 and has since been an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Washington, from which post he came to the Berkeley campus in 1945.

That was the year in which the Institute of Industrial Relations was established by the State Legislature, at the Governor’s request, and in recognition of the fact that labor-management relations had come to be a crucial problem in the life of California and the nation. Chancellor Kerr organized the Institute, recruited a well-qualified staff, and directed a program of teaching, research, and public service, the success of which is attested by the co-operation of both management and labor.

In addition to his academic achievements Chancellor Kerr has a record of public service both local and national, including service as a member of the Federal Advisory Council on Employment Security, U. S. Department of Labor; public member and vice-chairman of the National Wage Stabilization Board; consultant on industrial relations,

Atomic Energy Commission; chairman of the Labor-Management Advisory Committee, United States Conciliation Service; vice-chairman of the Twelfth Regional War Labor Board; and member of Federal Fact Finding Boards in important labor-management disputes.

Upon assuming the chancellorship at Berkeley Kerr relinquished his position as Director of the Institute of Industrial Relations, a position which was assumed by E. T. Grether, Flood Professor of Economics and Dean, School of Business Administration. Chancellor Kerr retained his title as Professor of Industrial Relations, School of Business Administration, and in addition is serving as Research Associate, Institute of Industrial Relations.

Source: University Bulletin, A Weekly Bulletin for the Staff of the University of California. Vol. 1, No. 17 (December 8, 1952), p. 89.

________________________

The Backstory to Clark Kerr’s Dismissal as President of the University of California

1964 Turmoil Caught Kerr in Ironic Web
UC President, Skillful Negotiator, Unable to Settle Campus Strife Leading to Ouster

By William Trombley, Times Education Writer
The Los Angeles Times, (January 21, 1967), p. 15

Clark Kerr earned an international reputation as a negotiator of labor disputes.

But ironically it was his failure to settle campus conflict which set off the train of events leading to his being fired as president of the University of California Friday.

When Kerr returned to Berkeley from an Asian trip in September, 1964, he found the campus in an uproar.

Edward W. Strong, then chancellor, had ordered a halt to student political activity in an area outside Sather Gate where it always had been allowed.

Kerr thought the Strong order a mistake but also thought it would be awkward to reverse the decision.

Instead, he proposed that students be permitted use of Sproul Hall steps, instead of the banned Sather Gate area. He also recommended certain other concessions.

Sought Discussion

He did so, he said in later interview, because “I thought we could get things back into channels of discussion if we showed reasonableness. But it didn’t work.”

Instead, the Free Speech Movement exploded across the campus and onto the nation’s front pages and television screens.

From that time Kerr has led a troubled life.

Conservative members of the Board of Regents, who had never been happy about Kerr’s selection as president in 1958, solidified their opposition.

They were especially angry because Kerr opposed then Gov. Edmund G. Brown’s decision to call in police to arrest demonstrators during the Sproul Hall sit-in at the height of the FSM protest.

Strategy Has Worked

Kerr thought the demonstrators would leave the building eventually if the police were not called, a strategy that has been followed successfully in dealing with demonstrations on other campuses since then.

When a few students and nonstudents displayed four-letter words on signs and shouted four-letter words on the campus in the spring of 1965, some regents demanded that Kerr and Martin Meyerson, who had replaced Strong as Berkeley chancellor, dismiss the offenders.

However, Kerr and Meyerson thought that to punish the students without due process would revive all the bitterness of the fall and destroy the tenuous peace which prevailed on the campus.

The two officials announced their intention to resign, but later agreed to stay when the regents decided to permit them to settle the “filthy speech” incidents themselves.

Ouster Move

Regental opposition to Kerr reached a high point at the June, 1965, meeting of the board in San Francisco, when regents Edwin W. Pauley and John E. Canaday led a move to oust the president.

However, a coalition of “liberal” and “moderate” regents formed behind Gov. Brown to prevent the ouster.

The newly formed coalition of regents insisted, however, that Kerr carry out recommendations for decentralization of university administration which had been included in the Byrne Report.

This report, prepared for a regents’ committee by a staff headed by Beverly Hills attorney Jerome C. Byrne, found that the mammoth university was too highly centralized. It recommended that substantial administrative authority be delegated from the regents to Kerr and from him to the chancellors of the nine campuses.

More Power

Kerr moved immediately to grant more power to the chancellors. The regents also agreed to pass on some of their powers, and for about a year talk of Kerr leaving his post faded away.

The Berkeley campus was troubled by demonstrations against U.S. policy in Vietnam during 1965-66, but Kerr remained in the background, permitting Roger W. Heyns, the third Berkeley chancellor in three years, to work out the problems.

However, speculation that Kerr might quit or be fired was revived during the Brown-Reagan race for the governorship. Kerr made strenuous efforts to avoid involvement in the campaign, but there was little question that his administration in Berkeley was linked with Brown’s administration in Sacramento.

Doubt Remained

Even after Reagan’s overwhelming victory, however, there was doubt that Kerr would go.

The addition of Reagan, Lt. Gov. Robert H. Finch and Allan Grant, newly named president of the State Board of Agriculture, clearly gave the anti-Kerr forces a majority on the Board of Regents. But many observers thought the new governor might be reluctant to be identified with an educational purge.

When a new student protest led to further disorder, including a strike, at Berkeley in December, most regents supported Kerr in his determination to permit Chancellor Heyns to handle the trouble without regental interference.

However, the current controversy over the university’s budget evidently solidified the anti-Kerr votes on the board and persuaded them that this was the time to move against the president.

Kerr probably saw the end coming, however. A few weeks ago he concluded an interview with this reporter with the observation:

 “I had six good years in which to plan for the future of the university . . . then things went wrong in the fall of ’64, and I haven’t had that kind of support (among the regents) since.”

[…]

________________________

Clark Kerr’s Dismissal

Reagan Sides With Majority in 14 to 8 Decision

By Daryl E. Lembke, Times Staff Writer
The Los Angeles Times (January 21, 1967), p. 1.

BERKELEY – President Clark Kerr of the University of California was fired Friday in a surprise move by the Board of Regents. The vote was 14-8.

Gov. Reagan was present at the two-hour, closed-door discussion of Kerr’s fate and voted with the majority to dismiss the president from his $45,000-a-year post.

The dismissal was effective immediately. University Vice President Harry R. Wellman, 67, was named acting president pending selection of Kerr’s successor.

Theodore R. Meyer, chairman of the Board of Regents, said at a news conference that the subject of a successor was not discussed during the session at which Kerr was dismissed.

Reports of Dissatisfaction

Although there have been frequent reports for two years or more that the regents were about to fire Kerr, the move came as a surprise. The two-day meeting ostensibly had been called to discuss Reagan’s proposals for slashing the university budget and charging tuition for the first time.

Asked the reason for the dismissal, Meyer commented:

“We felt the state of uncertainty prevailing for many months should be resolved without further delay.”

 He added:

“President Kerr, being human, has strengths and weaknesses even as you and I. His strengths are obvious to all. His weaknesses I don’t intend to discuss for obvious reasons.”

Talked with Governor

Asked if Reagan requested the regents to fire Kerr, Meyer replied:

“The governor discussed the subject with me and others. I regard that conversation as confidential.” In response to another question, Meyer said: “Mr. Reagan didn’t fire Dr. Kerr and he won’t pick his successor.”

Voting with the governor for dismissal were these regents: Lt. Gov. Robert H. Finch, Meyer, Allan Grant, H. R. Haldeman, Edwin W. Pauley, Edward W. Carter, Mrs. Dorothy B. Chandler, Mrs. Randolph A. Hearst, John E. Canaday, Philip L. Boyd, William E. Forbes, Laurence J. Kennedy. Jr, and DeWitt A. Higgs.

Opposing the action were Assembly Speaker Jesse M. Unruh (D-Inglewood), Samuel B. Mosher, Norton Simon, William M. Roth, Mrs. Edward H. Heller, Frederick G. Dutton, William K. Coblentz and Einar Mohn.

At another news conference, Unruh describe Kerr’s dismissal as most

“unfortunate coming on the heels of an attempt (by the new Reagan administration) to depart from a 76-year tradition of no tuition for higher education in California and coming in a year of an attempted cut in the university budget.”
“Regardless of whether this was a partisan move, that will be its effect,” Unruh said. “It will be interpreted as a political move.”

Unruh Comment

Unruh maintained that although he and Kerr had their differences, Kerr was “no more culpable for the things for which the university was brought to task than the entire board of regents.”

“It is a bad precedent to fire a university president concomitant with a change of political party in the state administration.”

Kerr, 55, has been president of the university eight-and-a-half years.

[…]

Factor in Election

Reagan’s criticism of the university administration was credited as one of the principal factors in his defeat of Democrat Brown in November.

Kerr took the dismissal philosophically.

He said he was asked by chairman Meyer to leave during the regents’ discussion of a “personnel matter.” As the university president, Kerr also served as a regent.

Kerr and Dr. Max Rafferty, who as state superintendent of public instruction is also a regent, were the only members of the board absent during discussion and the vote on dismissal.

“Rumors have been around,” Kerr said at his own press conference following his removal. “I have felt like being in the ‘Perils of Pauline.’ Pauline always got saved, until to-day.”

He said it is not his nature to be “bitter or vindictive” and that he has no rancor over the regents’ action.

Reviews Policies

Kerr reviewed at his press conference policies under his administration which he said he hoped would be continued.

They include:

The “open-door” policy for qualified students who apply for admission; no tuition; dispersal of campuses rather than concentration of students in two or three mammoth institutions; decentralization of administration and striving to “make size acceptable to the individual student; achieving balance among teaching, research and service functions; stressing quality in choosing the faculty, and providing adequate facilities such as student unions and places for cultural attractions for students when they are out of classes.

Kerr also said he has fought hard for freedom on the campus.

He suggested that efforts be continued in seeking ways to give students a greater voice in governing the university or at least in advising the administration.

“Along with freedom goes respect for law,” he said. “I regret the occasions when there hasn’t been respect for law but in the totality of the university, those occasions have been minor.
A university can’t be run as a police state.”

Criticizes Regents

He criticized the regents for what he termed “yielding to the political winds in the state,” contending that the board members are appointed for 16-year terms to guard against political influence in the university administration.

“I don’t believe in the principle that because there is a new governor, there should be a new president of the university,” he said.
“Now this has happened. This is not done in the good universities of the nation and it is even out of fashion in the mediocre and poor ones.”

Kerr said he has received a number of job offers, including some made after his dismissal but has made no decision on his future.

He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1945 as director of the Institute of Industrial Relations and still retains the title of professor of industrial relations, a position to which he could return at a salary of more than $20,000 annually.

Recent Appointee

Unruh revealed that Allan Grant, recent Reagan appointee as president of the State Board of Agriculture and in that office automatically a regent, brought up the subject of dismissing Kerr at Friday’s meeting.

Unruh said that Grant, because he is new on the board, withdrew his motion to dismiss Kerr to allow Laurence Kennedy to initiate the action.

Unruh said the reasons given for the dismissal during debate on Kennedy’s motion were that Kerr “had lost the confidence of the regents and the people and that he was no longer useful.”

Executive Session

The regents met in executive session on Kerr’s status from 12:30 to 2:30 p.m.

At 3 p.m., Thomas C. Sorensen, vice president for university relations, made the announcement of the president’s removal.

Mrs. Hearst said she voted to remove Kerr “because he was inadequate as an administrator.”

William Coblentz attended Chairman Meyer’s press conference and, upon its conclusion, issued a statement charging that “the errors, mistakes and much of the blame of the majority (of the regents) have been foisted upon one man—Clark Kerr.”

Coblentz said that Kerr has been an outstanding administrator and that “the problems of unrest at Berkeley, the restlessness of students cannot be cured by the termination of employment of one man.”

The regents are expected to take up the question of a successor at their next meeting, Feb. 16 and 17 in Santa Barbara.

________________________

Two Samples of Clark Kerr’s Wit

“The chancellor’s job had come to be defined as providing parking for the faculty, sex for the students, and athletics for the alumni.”

— 1957 remark picked up by Time & Playboy

“The university president in the United States is expected to be a friend of the students, a colleague of the faculty, a good fellow with the alumni, a sound administrator with the trustees, a good speaker with the public, an astute bargainer with the foundations and the federal agencies, a politician with the state legislature, a friend of industry, labor, and agriculture, a persuasive diplomat with the donors, a champion of education generally, a supporter of the professions (particularly law and medicine), a spokesman to the press, a scholar in his own right, a public servant at the state and national levels, a devotee of opera and football equally, a decent human being, a good husband and father, an active member of a church. Above all he must enjoy traveling in airplanes, eating his meals in public, and attending public ceremonies. No one can be all of these things. Some succeed at being none.”

— The Uses of the University, 1995

Source: UC Berkeley News: Press Release (December 2, 2003).

________________________

IN MEMORIAM

Clark Kerr
Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus, UC Berkeley
Chancellor, Emeritus, UC Berkeley
University of California President, Emeritus
1911 – 2003

Clark Kerr died on December 1, 2003, at his El Cerrito home overlooking the San Francisco Bay Area and the University of California, Berkeley campus. As Sheldon Rothblatt wrote shortly after, “He had always appeared indestructible, his intellectual powers invariably on automatic pilot. He survived nasty attacks from the political left and right, and overcame the humiliation of an abrupt dismissal from office by the Board of Regents. At his death, his renown was never greater.” (“Crosstalk” [National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education], 12(1), Winter 2004, p. 2.)

Kerr’s professional interests were mainly in three areas. His academic fields were economics and industrial relations; he had a second career as a skilled labor management negotiator and arbitrator; his worldwide reputation, however, was largely based on his work as an academic administrator whose final years were mostly devoted to research and writing on higher education in its American and worldwide contexts.

Kerr received his bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College in 1932, where he also joined the Society of Friends, a lifelong commitment. After receiving his master’s degree at Stanford University in 1933 and his doctorate (all in economics) in 1939 from the University of California, Berkeley, he taught at the University of Washington for five years and was heavily engaged in ensuring industrial peace during World War II as vice chairman of the 12th Regional War Labor Board.

He was one of the founders of the professional association in his chosen academic field, the Industrial Relations Research Association. He was also a major contributor, perhaps the major contributor, to two major streams of industrial relations research and theory: (a) the so-called “California School” or “neo-classical revisionist” approach, which tried to bridge the two major then-current economics camps, the neoclassical and the institutional; and (b) “Industrialism and Industrial Man,” probably the first theoretically oriented study in what is now known as comparative international industrial relations. He continued to pursue this theme throughout his life (see, e.g., The Future of Industrial Societies: Convergence or Continuing Diversity? [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983]).

In 1945, he returned to Berkeley as director of its newly-founded Institute for Industrial Relations. When the infamous loyalty oath controversy arose in 1949, Kerr was a member of a relatively unimportant Academic Senate Committee on Privilege and Tenure, a committee that rapidly became central in the dispute. As a result of his efforts during that heated time, Kerr became well-known as a voice of reason, a calm negotiator and an able conciliator. When, in 1952, the Regents established the new position of chancellor at Berkeley, Kerr appeared the best choice to the Berkeley faculty, to then-President Robert Sproul, and to the Board of Regents.

During his six-year term as Berkeley’s first chancellor, Kerr set to work to repair the damage done by the oath controversy. As described in the first volume of his memoirs, Chancellor Kerr concentrated on building faculty excellence and planning for the academic and physical growth of the campus that would be needed shortly as the “tidal wave” of students—the first of the “baby boomers”—was expected to inundate higher education beginning in the early 1960s.

In 1958, Robert Gordon Sproul, UC’s president since 1930, retired and Clark Kerr was selected to replace him. As president, Kerr led the development of the California Master Plan for Higher Education (enacted in 1960) which provided for orderly growth among the state’s three public segments of higher education and also included the private sector in planning for the oncoming surge of students. He oversaw the administrative decentralization of the University of California, turning over most day-to-day decision-making to the campuses, under general university-wide policies. The staff of the Office of the President was reduced by 750 persons whose positions were returned to the campuses.

Developments during Kerr’s presidency included building, staffing, and opening three new UC university campuses, at Santa Cruz, San Diego, and Irvine. The existing units at Davis, Santa Barbara, and Riverside became “general” campuses, offering them equal opportunities with other campuses to engage in graduate work and research. Unlike many state systems, there would be no “flagship” campus within the University of California; similar faculty structures, admissions requirements, and expectations for excellence would be provided for all. In that vein, the University of California, Los Angeles, was given what Kerr referred to as “a place in the sun,” receiving equal resources with Berkeley in most areas.

Among other innovations, Kerr sponsored a university-wide library plan, increased the number of UC medical schools from two to five (and turned the University of California, San Francisco, from a local medical school into a leading medical research facility), enhanced facilities for student engagement in social and athletic life, established an Education Abroad Program, developed a Natural Reserve Program, and encouraged programs for arts and culture on the campuses.

While Kerr concentrated on improvements that would lead the American Council on Education, in its 1964 ranking of American research universities, to declare Berkeley to be both the most “distinguished” and the “best balanced” in the nation, political developments in the state and nation brought that campus the more dubious distinction of being the first to suffer major student disruptions.

Throughout his tenure as chancellor and president, Kerr had been under more or less constant attack from the political right wing in California and its legislature, led by State Senator Hugh Burns, chair of the senate’s Un-American Activities committee. Burns’s views were echoed by those of J. Edgar Hoover, longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who once wrote at the bottom of a memo, “I know Kerr is no good….”

But in the fall of 1964 the attacks on Kerr and the university’s administration came from the political left in the guise of the so-called Free Speech Movement. Throughout the remainder of his service as UC’s president, Kerr would contend with forces from both the left and the right, many actively engaged in attempts to oust him from his position. After the election in fall 1966 which brought Ronald Reagan to California’s governorship, membership on the Board of Regents shifted to the right, and on January 20, 1967, Kerr was abruptly dismissed. Later he stated that he left the presidency of the university as he had entered it, “fired with enthusiasm.”

Kerr was not long unemployed, almost immediately becoming the chair and research director for the newly established Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. In 1973 that organization was transformed into the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education, again chaired by Kerr. During the 13 years of the Commission and Council, over 140 volumes of research and commentary on higher education were produced, many written or drafted by Kerr himself, comprising the most complete examination of higher education ever produced.

After the Carnegie series was completed in late 1979, Kerr continued to write both on industrial relations and higher education, including studies of university administration and governance for the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, and culminating in his two-volume memoir of his life as a UC faculty member and administrator, completed shortly before his final illness (The Gold and the Blue: A Personal Memoir of the University of California 1949-1967. Volume I: Academic Triumphs (2001); Volume II: Political Turmoil (2003); University of California Press).

Perhaps Kerr’s best known book is The Uses of the University (Harvard University Press), based on his 1963 Godkin Lectures at Harvard and updated with additional chapters and republication every decade (1963, 1972, 1982, 1995, and 2001). In it he popularized the term “the multiversity” to characterize the modern research university. Other important publications included Industrialism and Industrial Man (1960, 1973 [Pelican revised ed.]), 1975 [Industrialism and Industrial Man Reconsidered]), written with others of the team that made up the Inter-University Study of Labor Problems in Economic Development; and Marshall, Marx, and Modern Times (1969).

Kerr served not only the university but also his country, as a member of numerous committees (among others, President Eisenhower’s Commission on National Goals, President Kennedy’s Advisory Committee on Labor Management Policy) and as chair of the National Committee for a Political Settlement in Vietnam. He was a member of the board of trustees/directors of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Swarthmore College, the American Council on Education, and the Work in America Institute (again—among others).

In 1964 he received the Alexander Meiklejohn Award for Contributions to Academic Freedom, awarded by the American Association of University Professors, and in 1968 he was the first recipient of the Clark Kerr Award for extraordinary and distinguished contributions to the advancement of higher education, presented by the Berkeley Division of UC’s Academic Senate. He received numerous honorary degrees from universities in the United States and abroad.

Kerr was an avid gardener, taking special interest in cultivating an array of flowers for his wife to enjoy, and apple trees. He claimed that, as a boy on his family’s Pennsylvania farm, he could recognize 50 species of apple trees by sight—even in the winter, after they had lost their leaves. Pennsylvania State University named its antique apple orchard in his honor, a tribute he especially treasured. He is also memorialized by buildings on UC’s campuses named for him, but the living tribute pleased him more. Kerr was the quintessential “egg-head,” both physically and intellectually, but possessed a strong sense of humor that enlivened both his conversation and his writings. He claimed, for example, that during his university presidency, he would take out his frustrations on the weeds in his garden, naming a small weed after a student who was giving him trouble; a larger weed would be called by the name of an annoying faculty member; and as he yanked it out, he would name the largest weed for a recalcitrant regent.

He was devoted to his family, and when one of his sons moved to western Australia, he visited every year to help with constructing farm structures and bringing in the crops.

Clark Kerr is survived by his wife, the former Catherine Spaulding, whom he met at Stanford, and his three children and their spouses, as well as seven grandchildren and a great-grandchild.

Marian L. Gade
George Strauss

Source: University of California Senate website.

Image Source: University of California, Berkeley. The Bancroft Library website. Fiat Lux Redux: Ansel Adams and Clark Kerr Exhibits. Detail from a portrait of Clark Kerr ca. 1966