Education: Master Planner

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Even in the days before the U.S. Civil War, Vermont’s farm-bred Congressman Justin Smith Morrill looked about him and saw an ill-trained nation speeding toward “decay and degradation.” His bold proposal: launch land-grant colleges in every state to educate farmers, mechanics and “those at the bottom of the ladder who want to climb up.” On a tense day in July 1862—as McClellan frittered away the Union Army at Malvern Hill—Lincoln signed the Morrill Act that gave 17.4 million acres to “people’s colleges.” So began the biggest effort in the history of man to hand higher education to anyone who wanted it.

Just as they revolutionized U.S. agriculture—and helped sow the farm surplus —state universities have reaped millions of students. In the 19303, Harvard’s President James Bryant Conant predicted: “During the next century of academic history, university education in this Republic will be largely in the hands of the tax-supported institutions. As they fare, so fares the cultural and intellectual life of the American people.”

One a Minute. How do they fare? As 3,567,000 students jammed U.S. campuses last week—with nearly twice as many due by 1970—the problem was numbers. From 4% in 1900, the proportion of college-age Americans who go to college has soared to 39% (five times as much as in Russia). In the past decade, three-quarters of the rise has gone to public campuses, which last year enrolled 58% of all U.S. college students. In 1970 they may enroll 65%, and in Western states already enroll up to 96%. This year state colleges and universities will confer 55% of all undergraduate degrees, 60% of masters’ degrees and 54% of doctorates. The U.S. academic economy has clearly shifted to the public sector.

The increasingly higher cost of higher education is one explanation: tuition has jumped 165% at private colleges since 1950. According to one recent estimate, the cost of four years at an average private college in 1970 will be $11,684, on an Ivy League campus $15,216. By then the four-year cost at state universities is expected to be only $5,800.

What happens when the vast generation of war babies (now 15-19 years old) really hits the public campuses? Nobody has spent more hours seeking precise answers than Clark Kerr, president of the mammoth, seven-campus* University of California (47,895 students), the largest college complex in the U.S. Few states are growing faster than California: whether by birth or by migration, the population increases by one a minute. Each year California’s growth matches the size of San Diego. Each day it needs one new school. Already it has the nation’s biggest public school system (3,300,000). Already it has the nation’s highest number of Collegians (234,000 fulltime), and 80% of them are on public campuses.

Freeze & Pry. Californians are proud of their university network, and well they might be. It is huge, young, brilliant, aggressive, progressive. It colonizes everything from the atom to outer space. At the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, Cal’s physicists run one of the world’s famed atom smashers. At the Lick Observatory at Mount Hamilton, Cal astronomers scan the galaxies. Thanks to Cal’s engineers, California’s farms are the most mechanized in the U.S. The university runs the atom-bomb city of Los Alamos, N. Mex. It owns ranches, apartment buildings, forests, hospitals, vineyards, movie studios and seven oceangoing ships. On its 25,877 acres, a man can freeze or fry without leaving the premises. The university employs 3,000 professors, parks 19,200 cars and offers 7,900 courses. This year Cal will cost $360 million to run—and it is only the beginning.

By 1975 Cal expects to add three new campuses and to educate 118,900 students. To do this, it must spend $700 million to build three times as much physical plant in the next 15 years as it has in the last 90. With awe, Harvard’s President Nathan M. Pusey calls Kerr’s job “one of the most difficult and exacting posts in the whole history of higher education.”

Collision. The job of running the biggest university in the country involves a lot more than mailing a budget to Sacramento. In no other state is there such hot competition among so many public campuses. In no other state is there such need for coordination among them. California has a good record in this respect. But ascetic, Pennsylvania-born Economist Kerr has made it better. This year’s top education news in California is the “Master Plan”—an academic armistice largely fashioned by onetime Labor Mediator Kerr, who in 500 major labor negotiations developed the subtle skill that makes aides call him “the Machiavellian Quaker.”

The armistice came after a head-on collision between Cal (with its seven campuses) and the 15 state colleges, which are also state-supported but owe no allegiance to Cal. State colleges used to concentrate on teacher training, but California’s exploding technology has given them a whole new direction—vocational training on an enormous scale. They now teach, besides teaching itself, everything from judo and fly-tying to aeronautics, electronics, semantics, penology and oenology (wine growing).

Growing at a dizzy rate, the state colleges have added eight new campuses since 1946 and more than quadrupled enrollment. They now have 68,000 students, more than Cal itself. Example: San Fernando Valley State opened in 1956 with 700 students, now has 3,415. By 1973 it expects 20,000.

Admission at these state colleges is lenient (the upper 44% of California high school graduates), though many who go there are among the upper 15% in their class, and are eligible for the university. They goto state colleges because the campuses are close to home and because they think Cal is too big for learning and too devoted to research. Also, state colleges cost as little as $66 a year. And they are far from backwoods institutions. The top three:

San Francisco State (12,000 students), a flourishing liberal arts school, boasts a $1,000,000 theater for drama students, a $2,000,000 science building, the championship football team of the Far Western Conference and 300 foreign students. S.F. teaches everything from engineering to skindiving. Most impressive feature: a topflight creative writing department including Novelist Walter van Tilburg (The Oxbow Incident) Clark. Another noted facultyman: Semanticist S. I. Hayakawa.

San Diego State (8,191), strong in science and math, is geared to the area’s aviation-electronics complex (Ryan Aeronautical, General Dynamics). S. D. boasts 26 major labs, hopes to get a nuclear reactor. Last year it had half the physics majors in the state-college system. The average freshman IQ: 120-125. The faculty Ph.D. rate: 63%. By 1970 S.D. expects 25,000 students. Says President Malcolm Love, onetime boss of the University of Nevada: “Though we are called a college, we are in deed and in fact a university.”

San Jose State (18,000), another feeder for the aviation-electronics industry (Ampex, G.E., Lockheed). S.J. has a $4,000,000 industrial-arts building, an expanding $9,000,000 engineering center. Highly “diversified,” it has 108 majors, from psychiatric technology to a full four-year course for policemen. (This is supposedly why San Jose cops are so “gentlemanly.”) Biggest and oldest (1857) college-in the system, S.J. is growing so fast that it is now the nation’s 25th biggest institution of higher learning.

Pecking Order. In so vast a barnyard, the academic pecking order is inevitably at work. Academicians rarely believe that doing a topflight job on a less prestigious level is sufficiently rewarding. All of the schools want to rise higher. Junior colleges want to be four-year colleges. State colleges want to be universities. Since all must battle for a dwindling share of the tax dollar, competition can be vicious. And with so many separate claimants, state legislators come to think with their scissors, and budgets end in ribbons.

This would be more alarming if the pride were not there. “Brother, you’re talking about the greatest system of public education in the world,” cries one state official. In recent years, Californians themselves have loudly agreed, and politicians have listened. Into the hopper at one session of the Sacramento legislature went 18 bills for new state colleges. The state-colleges system threw rings around Cal’s campuses—four colleges around U.C.L.A. alone.

As the new colleges multiplied. Cal’s alumni among the state legislators (now 35 out of 177) tried to hold down their budgets by line-to-line scrutiny. Tempers flew. Already restive at being weakly administered by three different agencies, the state colleges in 1958 demanded Cal’s kind of constitutional fiscal autonomy (which only six other state universities in the U.S. enjoy). They also demanded the right to confer doctorates—and to be universities.

At the time, Kerr had just stepped up from the chancellorship to the presidency at Berkeley. He has an entirely different style from his gregarious predecessor, Californian Robert Gordon Sproul. An able politician, Sproul wanted to pick off the state colleges one by one and make Cal campuses out of them (Cal got Santa Barbara that way in 1944).

Kerr had a different strategy. His favorite phrase, and occupation, is finding every situation’s “inner logic” (from the Quaker “inner spirit”). Kerr saw Cal’s future in a codification of the state’s entire higher-education system—an order of excellence from top to bottom. With roles properly specified in the state constitution, each level could grow without hurting the others.

Blue & Gold. “We could have gone along with guerrilla warfare except for growth.” says Kerr. “But it would have cost too much, and there was the problem of quality.” That problem is symbolized by a treasured piece of cloth: the blue and gold hood of Cal’s doctorate; had he let anyone else give it away, Kerr’s faculty might have hanged him. Having been a Berkeley professor himself for 15 years, he knew its feelings. Cal’s faculty is one of the most doctorate-minded in the country, and also one of the most democratically run. No new courses, deans or professors can be approved without action by the powerful Academic Senate. “The faculty can’t be driven,” Sproul said once. “It can only be persuaded.”

Kerr himself is an exceptionally persuasive man. With his bland face, rimless glasses and inevitable blue suit, he does not look the part until the “inner logic” begins to pour out (“He could talk the feathers off a bird,” says one defeathered regent). Says Political Scientist and Author Eugene (The Ugly American) Burdick. who was Chancellor Kerr’s academic assistant at Berkeley: “If you made an Organization Man, he would be it. That sleek, seal-like look. In a crowd no one would see him. He has the reputation of being terribly cool. But then he’s got this other thing of always fighting at the right time.”

Fair Trade. Kerr stepped into the college battle on the day that the state’s higher-education Liaison Committee was trying to decide how to bring peace. He took everyone to lunch, sold them all on the inner logic of bringing in a topflight private-college man to adjudicate the issue. No one had thought of doing that before. The choice was able President Ar thur G. Coons of Los Angeles’ Occidental College, a good friend of Kerr’s. From then on, things went well.

From his efforts emerged last spring a complex fair-trade pattern for California’s higher education. Calling for $1 billion worth of building by 1970. Coons’s recommendations specified the roles of the three college systems: the university, the 15 state colleges, the 63 junior colleges. State colleges do not get constitutional autonomy or the right to confer doctorates, but they get a strong new governing board, and their students may earn doctorates under Cal supervision.

The formula raises the University of California’s academic standards still higher—while at the same time allowing more Californians to go to college. The terms: Cal will accept only the top 12½% of high school graduates; state colleges will draw from the upper 333%. The two-year junior colleges—to be swelled to 85 while state colleges pause—will get everyone else. In sheer quantity, the junior colleges will eventually handle 80% of the total public enrollment—leaving Cal a mere 214,000 students by the year 2000. Without the plan, Cal could easily top 250.000.

All this is supposed to work under a super-coordinating committee, which met last week for the first time. But there is one big trouble: the legislature passed the plan as simple law, not a constitutional amendment, so future political meddling is inevitable.

Dead Level. The problem of all U.S. state universities in the 1960s is to keep mass education from becoming mob education. It is a problem created in part by state universities themselves, who made their motto “The state is our campus,” opened their doors wide, and inside (along with the valuable) taught fatuous courses from baton twirling to picnic packing. The result is vast educational empires, and an impulse towards empire building. Too often, state universities become amiable places with imprecise standards. Many a state university still fuzzily follows one of John Dewey’s fuzzier utterances: “Since growth is the characteristic of life, education is all one with growing; it has no end beyond itself.”

Letting boys and girls in to grow as they will, many state universities often ignore the special needs of the bright. The true honors society is the football team; the real classroom is the fraternity house.

Opportunity. As enrollment goes up, state universities now have a chance to grow up—not just to grow. All they have to do is grab the chance. Across the country, their entrance standards are rising. Only five states (Kansas. Montana. Ohio. Oklahoma, Wyoming) still require state universities to admit all high school graduates. Admittance tests are even becoming fashionable. And the great sleeper in U.S. education is the phenomenal rise of public two-year junior colleges.* which now enroll 25% of all college students (40% in California).

These low-cost† schools spell opportunity for millions, and they also help state universities escape their four-year rhythm: the high cost of admitting inept freshmen, then weeding out and flunking out. leaving upper classes half filled. By sending on only their ablest students, two-year colleges can lessen the pressure on universities.

Diversity. The way state universities can beat the numbers game is through such expansion of higher education on lower levels. With better students, they can set better standards, and many already have. Impressive honors programs have spread to 87 public campuses under the influence of the Carnegie-financed Inter-University Committee on the Superior Student. At Michigan State and Wayne State, separate colleges are devoted to gifted students. Honors courses have galvanized jaded professors—and suddenly given dullards a glimpse of “what a university stands for.”

Actually, the standard possible for state universities was never invisible: it was always there on the graduate level. While panty raiders giggled under the elms, the labs hummed with research by scholars. After fattening U.S. farms, state universities went on to pioneer the TV tube (Purdue), discover streptomycin (Rutgers), develop anticoagulants (Wisconsin), invent the cyclotron (California), provide instrumentation for U.S. satellites (State University of Iowa) and give sex a new name (Dr. Kinsey’s) to conjure with (Indiana).

If much “research” is not all it might be. and is sometimes at the mundane level that most impresses state legislators, there are signs of improvement. With huge budgets, state universities can lure and equip more top researchers. With lower tuition than private schools, they attract more graduate students. At the University of Michigan, 40% of the enrollment is graduate students. At Cal, it is 43%. Many state universities are moving in the direction of the exclusively graduate institution that the rest of the world calls a university—even though they will always have undergraduates.

Fandango. No public campus in the country has moved faster in that direction than California’s Berkeley, the Buckingham Palace of Clark Kerr’s empire, across the bay from San Francisco. Few campuses boast an odder beginning. Berkeley’s impecunious parent was a Congregationalist academy launched in 1853 by a Yale clergyman from Massachusetts. The campus was a fandango dance hall, but Founder Henry Durant in a letter home glowed over the “beauty and salubrity” of the place. He hoped to educate gold miners, and believed in looking on the bright side.

Later the Rev. Mr. Durant bought 160 acres out on Strawberry Creek, named it after Philosopher George Berkeley, the poetic Irish bishop of Cloyne (“Westward the course of empire takes its way”). The westward course was a poor one until Governor Frederick Low put tax and land-grant money into the campus, and 92 years ago started the University of California.*

Berkeley’s salubrious beginnings were not to everyone’s taste. Politicians complained that it neglected such useful arts as carpentry and blacksmithing. But it had the enormous defense of constitutional autonomy. The regents were also temporarily tamed by tempestuous President (1899-1919) Benjamin Ide Wheeler, a white-mustached autocrat who wore cavalry boots and galloped about campus on a white charger. Wheeler unintentionally created another freedom. His highhanded ways provoked a faculty revolt in 1919 that established the strong Academic Senate.

Neck & Neck. When Robert Sproul took over in 1929, he gave the faculty the best of academic prizes: prestige. Sproul raised cash for young Physicist Ernest O. Lawrence to build the first cyclotron, and Berkeley was suddenly the nucleonics hotspot of the world. Uplifted by its physics stars, the faculty began raiding other faculties across the country. Cal now has eight Nobel prizewinners (seven at Berkeley, including the chancellor, Chemist Glenn Seaborg) and more Guggenheims than any other U.S. university (1960 crop: 33).

The only other U.S. campus Cal cares to be compared with is Harvard. In one important rating of the academic world-memberships in the National Academy of Sciences—Cal and Harvard are neck and neck (63 to 63). In astronomy, German, physics, and Romance languages, Cal’s departments are tops. In humanities, it is far behind. Bob Sproul figured that few legislators read Milton or Shelley. He sold them on science instead.

As Sproul cheered on the physical sciences, so Clark Kerr has pushed social sciences. In 1945 he started Berkeley’s Institute of Industrial Relations to mesh socio-economic studies. As chancellor, he boosted the sociology department to first rank. He also went on teaching and writing. His second book, Industrialism and Industrial Man (Harvard University Press), will be out next week; his bibliography is now 13 pages long. As president, he goes on refining his hopeful world theory of “industrial pluralism” (that high technology in time tears down dictatorships instead of strengthening them). Some day, he wants to quitadministering and teach again.

Apples & Greek. Scholar Kerr first reached Berkeley in 1934 as a doctoral student. He had grown up on a Pennsylvania farm near Reading, gone to a one-room school. Clark’s farmer father had an academic bent himself. First of his Scots-Irish line to go to college (Franklin and Marshall), Samuel Kerr spoke Latin, Greek, German, French and owned a master’s degree from the University of Berlin. He spent his life raising apples, and his afterhours stimulating and roiling young minds. Recalls Clark: “He believed that nothing should be unanimous. If he found everybody else for something, he’d be against it on principle.”

At Swarthmore (’32), recalls Kerr, “I was a green country kid with a lot of people who had gone to private schools.” He learned some social graces, became captain of the debating team, president of the student body, a Phi Beta Kappa and a Quaker. He never learned to drink; only years later did he first taste liquor. “As a negotiator, I learned that whisky was a tool of my trade. You use it like a plumber uses a wrench.” He can still barely stand the stuff.

With his new-found Quakerism, Kerr found a social conscience, in the ’30s preached peace on street corners for the American Friends Service Committee during Swarthmore vacations. Kerr took his master’s at Stanford, went on to Berkeley for his Ph.D. (thesis: “Productive Enterprises of the Unemployed”). One day he attended a student congress near U.C.L.A., sat beside a striking auburn-haired girl named Catherine Spaulding, an engineer’s daughter and a Stanford graduate. As they silently watched some party-liners dominate the meeting, Kay scribbled a note: “Are you a Communist?” Clark scribbled back: “No.” She scribbled: “I’m not either.” Eight months later, having found other attributes in common, on Christmas Day Kay and Clark were married.

Skill & Courage. Going in for labor economics, a new field then. Kerr taught a year each at Antioch and Stanford, five years (1940-45) at the University of Washington in Seattle. When the operating engineers and the Pacific Coast Coal Co. stalemated on wage increases, they heard that there was a labor professor over at the university, asked him to arbitrate. He got both sides together in short order, launched a highly successful sideline. Until he became Cal’s president. Kerr was the busiest arbitrator on the West Coast, became noted as “tough, fair and expensive” (fee: $200 a day). He deliberately picked the toughest industries, gave himself remorselessly and settled as fast as possible. His most notable effort: a long, painful arbitration in 1946-47 between longshoremen and shipowners. Said usually intractable Dock Boss Harry Bridges: “The assignment was not an easy one. He performed it with skill and courage.”

Heretic & Conspirator. Kerr’s courage became well known at Berkeley in 1949, four years after he returned to set up the Industrial Relations Institute. That was the memorable year when the university regents outraged the faculty by threatening to fire anyone who refused to sign a loyalty oath. Professor Kerr signed, as did most members of the embittered faculty eventually. But he got himself elected to the hottest spot on campus—the Academic Senate’s privilege and tenure committee. When the committee went before the angry regents, Kerr delivered the first and strongest blast at the notion of firing nonsigners of the oath (26 were fired; 37 resigned). He won facultywide respect for this act (later he won back pay for the expelled). When a faculty committee was asked to nominate Berkeley’s first chancellor in 1952, he was the man. In his inaugural speech, he made sharp distinction between “the honest heretic and the conspirator.”

Commonwealth. During five years in the chancellorship, while also teaching and writing, Kerr gave some cohesion to the sprawling Berkeley campus. He built eight new dormitories and a student union, proposed a clear plan to junk vocational departments and use the space for research. When Bob Sproul announced retirement in 1957, U.C.L.A.’s football-puffing Chancellor Raymond E. Allen seemed to have the inside track to the presidency. The regents polled the nation’s top educators for other candidates, and opinion was nearly unanimous: “You already have Clark Kerr at Berkeley.”

President Kerr runs the University of California on green ink, inner logic and hope. These days he has too little time for his children (Clark, 18; Alexander, 14; Caroline, 9). Each night of his go-hour week he sends home a 14-in.-thick stack of letters in a grocery carton. Each morning he rises at 6:30 and pens answers for three hours in a tiny green-ink scrawl. The notes spread like green scripture throughout the empire: Decentralize, make the big small, use your own small head. If the inner logic of the Master Plan is really working, freeing Cal from state-college competition, he expects by 1975 to have a mighty commonwealth of universities. Cal’s growth plan:

¶ By 1965: Berkeley (now 21,563 students) and U.C.LA. (16,512) will stop at 27,500 each. Berkeley will have more graduate students, an even more luminous faculty. U.C.L.A. will also have more graduates, more dormitories, and solider courses to stave off the encircling “commuter” state colleges. ¶ By 1970: Davis (4,950) will hit 10,000, A changing cow college (cheer: “Bossie. cow cow, honey bee bee, oleomargarine, oleo butterine, alfalfa—hey!”), Davis will soon be a general university on a 3,000-acre farm-campus. Santa Barbara (3,504) will hit 10.500. Riverside (1,633) will hit 7,250. Converted from a citrus experimental station, it aimed to be a Western Oberlin, but will soon be bigger.

¶ By 1975: Three new campuses must be built, on their way to 27,500 students apiece. Near the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, imaginative Director Roger Revelle has 14,000 acres for a cluster of small residential “universities” grouped around each subject, is building a faculty from the top down this year, with an advance guard of Nobel Prizewinner Harold Urey and twelve other members of the National Academy of Sciences. Up the coast is the 1,000-acre Orange County site, donated by the vast Irvine Ranch. Somewhere south of San Francisco in the state’s North Central area, another site must be acquired.

¶ By 2000: A fourth new campus, for 15,000 students, will probably rise in the San Joaquin Valley because the whole system will still lack room for 24,000 students eligible to go to the University of California.

Last month those who were eligible for Berkeley were greeted at their first “orientation” by a fairly chilly official statement: “We assume you are adults. We won’t check up on you to see that you are in a given place at a given time. We won’t make sure you ask questions if you need answers, and we won’t make sure you seek outside help if you need it. Come to think of it, we won’t do much of anything for you. We assume you can take care of yourselves.”

How good an education will they get? It all depends on them. The schooling on Cal campuses is on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. Berkeley’s brightest faculty lights have long been more interested in their own research than in undergraduates. Still, there is a saying around Berkeley that it is better to be 50 feet from a great man than five feet from an ordinary one.

* The seven: Berkeley, Los Angeles (U.C.L.A.), Santa Barbara, Davis, San Francisco, Riverside, La Jolla. No kin to the University of California and not state-supported: Stanford University (Stanford), the University of Southern California (Los Angeles), the California Institute of Technology (Pasadena).

* Among alumni: Mrs. Herbert Hoover and Poet Edwin Markham.

* An unfortunate diminutive coined in 1901 by the University of Chicago’s first president, William Rainey Harper, when he helped launch the first public junior in Joliet, III. A more grown up name is now preferred: community colleges.

† Free in California.

* Explorers from Berkeley settled the southern colony at U.C.L.A. in 1919.