Background

Clark Kerr was born on May 17, 1911, in Stony Creek, Pennsylvania, United States. 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.

Education

Clark attended Reading High School and in his youth acquired habits of industry and self-discipline. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from Swarthmore College in 1932 and a Master of Arts from Stanford the following year. He attended the London School of Economics and Political Science during 1935-1936 and in 1939 was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy in economics from the University of California, Berkeley. He was subsequently awarded numerous honorary degrees from the most prominent American colleges and universities.

Career

Clark Kerr began teaching economics at Antioch College in Ohio in 1936, followed by a year teaching labor economics at Stanford and the University of California before accepting a professorship at the University of Washington in 1940. Following five years at the University of Washington, Kerr returned to Berkeley to establish the Institute of Industrial Relations and serve as its director while teaching a regular load of classes. 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. In 1958 he succeeded Robert Gordon Sproul as president of the multi-campus University of California.

The rapid growth of universities in response to the post-war baby boom had begun when Kerr took office. Rapid growth and expansion of the university system were on the horizon, and during his tenure, the university doubled its enrollment to more than 50,000 students. The previous president had kept a tight reign on on-campus political activities to the extent that even Adlai Stevenson was not allowed to speak on the Berkeley campus. In 1949 Kerr had fought the application of faculty loyalty oaths, and that action identified him as a liberal in the eyes of many. Upon becoming system president he lifted the speaker ban on Communist speakers - winning him the American Association of University Presidents Meiklejohn Award - and liberalized a few other rules.

His policies were put to the test by the growth of activist groups on campus during the civil rights thrust of 1963-1964. Students aggressively pushed for remedies to racial discrimination in the university community and confronted local businesses, often leading to demonstrations and arrests. This antagonism led to Kerr's banning of on-campus recruiting and solicitation of funds for off-campus groups. Students denounced the president's action, and the Free Speech Movement was formed. In the fall of 1964 police attempted to arrest a non-student manning a table for the Congress of Racial Equality and were denied access to this individual by a massive 30-hour sit-in. Further incitement was provided by the Free Speech Movement. Kerr met with Marco Savio, leader of the protesters, and was assumed to have resolved the disagreement, but Governor Brown intervened the next day and ordered the arrest of the students. There was immediate campus outrage, and the Berkeley faculty voted overwhelmingly to meet the F.S.M. demands.

The next three years of Kerr's administration were marked by constant attempts at mediation between the university and various interests, including the California state government. Ronald Reagan became governor in 1967, and conflict developed immediately between his administration and Kerr over proposed cuts in operating funds and the proposal to end free education by imposing tuition and other fees. An impasse developed, and on June 20, 1967, the California State Board of Regents voted to dismiss him as president, pointing to what they saw as his mishandling of the 1964 unrest at Berkeley.

Clark Kerr's accomplishments as president lay primarily in the evolution of the University of California into a "multiversity," a term he coined. He argued that a university must of necessity cater to the elite, but in an egalitarian society its role is that of a "prime instrument of national purpose." It must serve many constituencies, including government, industry, and the general public as well as its students and faculty. He devised a master plan to coordinate programs of all the state's colleges and universities. The result was a hierarchy of higher education, with the top 12 percent of high school graduates attending the universities, the rest of the upper third attending the colleges, and the remainder attending the junior colleges. This model was considered by many to be a proper national goal.

Kerr continued to hold his faculty position at Berkeley's School of Business Administration (present-day Haas School of Business) following his dismissal as president. His administrative innovations led to his appointment as head of a Carnegie Commission study of the structure and finance of higher education. In 1968 the commission called for a federal civilian "bill of educational rights" to guarantee a college education to any qualified student regardless of his/her ability to pay. Kerr's committee evolved into the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education, whose final report Three Thousand Futures: The Next Twenty Years in Higher Education has become the benchmark for reform in higher education. Clark Kerr's membership on numerous governmental and industrial commissions throughout his career bore witness to his position of respect and influence. He was also an extremely active worker in the Committee for a Political Settlement in Vietnam. He and his wife lived in El Cerrito, California, in a home overlooking the San Francisco Bay, a tranquil site where he wrote and pursued his favorite leisure activity of gardening.

Kerr continued to publish through the 1980s. Economics of Labor in Industrial Society, edited by Clark Kerr and Paul D. Staudohar and Industrial Relations in a New Age: Economic, Social, and Managerial Perspectives, edited by Kerr and Staudohar appeared at the end of the decade. Kerr also co-authored The Guardians: Boards of Trustees of American Colleges and Universities with Martin L. Gade in 1989. The book discusses problems with the governing boards of various universities and suggests a number of reforms.

Achievements

• Clark Kerr was best known as the former president of the University of California system in the 1950s and 1960s, and for creating a master plan for higher education in the state that served as a national model. 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 has been listed as a noteworthy Academic administrator emeritus by Marquis Who's Who.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Uses of the University

    (America's university president extraordinaire adds a new ...)

    1966
  • The Gold and the Blue: A Personal Memoir of the University of California, 1949 - 1967 2001
  • Industrialism and Industrial Man: The Problems of Labour and Management in Economic Growth; with a Postscript 1973

Views

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.

Quotations: "Higher education has been very resilient in turning fears into triumphs. I expect that this will continue."

Membership

Kerr held memberships in many professional and honorary organizations, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Royal Economic Society, American Economic Association, National Academy of Arbitrators, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

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  American Academy of Arts and Sciences , United States

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  Royal Economic Society , United States

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  American Economic Association , United States

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  National Academy of Arbitrators , United States

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  Rockefeller Foundation , United States

Personality

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.

Interests

• gardening

Connections

Kerr married Catherine Spaulding Kerr, and they had three children: Clark E., Jr., Alexander, and Caroline Gage.

Father:

Samuel William Kerr

Mother:

Caroline (Clark) Kerr

Wife:

Catherine (Spaulding) Kerr

Son:

Alexander W. Kerr

Daughter:

Caroline M. Kerr

Son:

Clark E. Kerr

colleague:

Robert Gordon Sproul

References

• Clark Kerr's University of California: Leadership, Diversity, and Planning in Higher Education
  2010
• The Dream Is Over: The Crisis of Clark Kerr's California Idea of Higher Education
  2016