Clark Kerr was an economist and former Chancellor of the University of California. He was educated at Swarthmore College, Stanford, and Berkeley, where he earned his PhD in economics from 1939. In 1945, he became an associate professor of industrial relations and was the founding director of the UC Berkeley Institute of Industrial Relations. Kerr led UC’s rapid transformation into a true public university system through a series of proposals adopted unanimously by the Regents from 1957 to 1960. Under his leadership, new campuses opened in San Diego, Irvine, and Santa Cruz to accommodate the postwar boom in postsecondary education. In the mid-1960s, Kerr confronted student activists which eventually led to the expulsion of involved students. Kerr authored The Uses of the University and well as The Gold and the Blue: A Personal Memoir of the University of California, 1949-1967. He was Chairman of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education of the Carnegie Foundation.
In his lecture, Kerr discussed the changes in the system of American higher education in the previous decade. While the post-1957 period had seen enormous successes, including the expansion of the university system, the establishment of Boston and California as the science capitals of the world, the supply of manpower for an unprecedented level of American prosperity, and the increasing centrality of higher education to society, the best of times also made it the worst of times. Success turned to failure, as the rapid growth of the system led to resentment and unrest on campuses, the destruction of the university as a small community of scholars, and the increasing belief that universities were training more students than the future economy would be able to absorb. There was also a growing inability to assure the equality of opportunity in higher education. Wealth, race, and region all significantly impacted a student’s ability to go to college, and increasing costs made it harder for everyone to afford tuition. An ongoing fight about who the university should serve – the elite or society in general? – was raging, revealing that governance problems lay at the heart of the university structure. Finally, the increasing emphasis on management, especially the growing dominance of computers, threatened the system of higher education. While Kerr believed that each of these problems was enormous, he also thought they were soluble, and that once the solutions to the problems of inequality of opportunity and governance were found, the system of higher education would be better off for having faced them.
Kerr’s lecture was held on December 5, 1968. Listen to it below.