“The president of the University of California takes his final exam every month,” said Clark Kerr to a group of reporters last week. “I’ve taken lots of them and passed. This time I didn’t.” Indeed not. By a vote of 14 to 8, Cali fornia’s board of regents had just de cided to dismiss Kerr after eight years as head of the nation’s largest university.
Kerr’s firing was not all that much of a surprise; many of the regents have openly blamed him for failing to pre vent two years of intermittent disorder at the university’s oldest and most prestigious branch at Berkeley. But the timing of the dismissal was a shock. Only a week earlier, Kerr had fought forcefully, in joint cause with most of the regents, against a 20% budget cut and a tuition fee proposed by newly installed Governor Ronald Reagan (TIME, Jan. 20).
Precipitate & Unwarranted. Kerr, apparently, fought too hard. After the budget and tuition proposals had been explained to the regents, he temporarily suspended student admissions, as did Glenn S. Dumke, chancellor of the 18 state colleges. It was an obvious political gesture designed to arouse Californians against the budget cut, and it caused consternation among prospective stu dents. Reagan, who regarded his proposals as “provisional” and subject to compromise, angrily called the freeze “precipitate and unwarranted.” Equally disturbed were several of the regents, since Kerr had taken his action without consulting the board.
The actual firing came at the end of a relatively calm 1½-day public discussion of the budget, at which Reagan once again expressed his willingness to modify both the size of his cuts and the tuition fee. With business apparently completed, Theodore Meyer, a San Francisco lawyer and chairman of the regents,* told Kerr that the board wished to consult in private.
From previous conversations with Kerr, several of the regents had picked up the impression that he was weary of criticism and wanted his status clarified (he had not, however, sought a formal vote of confidence). Reagan’s newly appointed Regent Allan Grant first suggested the firing, which was formally moved by Laurence J. Kennedy Jr., a lawyer and one of the ten regents appointed by former Governor Pat Brown. When the vote was taken, anti-Kerr ballots included those of Reagan, Oilman Edwin Pauley, Mrs. Norman Chandler and Retailer Edward Carter, who had been chairman during the time of the riots. Among those supporting Kerr were Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh and Industrialist Norton Simon.
Afterward, Reagan said that “the regents have taken a very responsible action,” and Chairman Meyer defended the dismissal as being necessary in order to end “the state of uncertainty” at the university. Speaker Unruh, who the day before had implicitly rejected Kerr’s admissions freeze, declared that it set “a very dangerous precedent” to fire a president when an incoming Governor takes over. University officials, however, feared that the blunt manner of his dis missal would have an adverse effect on faculty recruiting. At some campuses, student organizations that less than a year ago were ready to demonstrate for Kerr’s dismissal, made plans to demonstrate on his behalf. Campus leaders warned that the regents’ action was a preliminary to a further crackdown on student behavior.
Lost His Cool. The truth of the matter was that neither politics nor any supposed anti-intellectual hostility on the part of the regents was the cause of the firing. In his eight years as president and six as Berkeley chancellor, well-meaning Clark Kerr had unquestionably done much for the university. He shaped California’s master plan for higher education. During his tenure, student population nearly doubled (to 87,000), and Cal rose in quality to the very top rank of American institutes of higher learning. Yet when the acid test of his executive talent came, during the student revolt, Kerr—as the students might put it —lost his cool. Thereafter, his indecisiveness managed to alienate, at one time or another, the regents, the faculty, the administration and the students alike. Unquestionably, many Californians agreed with the judgment of Mrs. Randolph Hearst, a regent who voted to oust him, that the president “lacked administrative ability.”
In the end, Kerr had not lived up to his own concept of what the modern multiversity president should be: a mediator between conflicting campus pressures and forces. In his 1963 book, The Uses of the University, Kerr wrote that “the first task of the mediator is peace —peace within the student body, the faculty, the trustees; and peace between and among them.” No one could deny that Kerr had failed to keep the peace at Cal.
* The board has 16 regents, appointed for 16-year terms by the Governor, and eight ex officio members, including the Governor, university president and speaker of the assembly.
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