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Former University of California President Clark Kerr, shown in a file photo from June 9, 2002, in

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University of California President Clark Kerr offers a compromise on campus political activity wh

Clark Kerr, the University of California president for much of the tumultuous 1960s whose model for higher education redefined the mission and purpose of universities across the country and throughout the world, has died. He was 92.

Kerr suffered complications following a fall, and he passed away Monday at his home in El Cerrito.

During a life that spanned 10 decades, the son of an apple farmer who became UC Berkeley’s first chancellor and the UC’s 12th president was many things to many people. He was a husband of 69 years to his wife Catherine, and a father of three. As a young professor, he was highly regarded as an economist by his faculty colleagues.

He was dismissed as an oppressive administrator by the student leaders of Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement. And he was weak in dealing with campus demonstrators in the eyes of conservatives responsible for his firing as president in 1967.

But today, years removed from the polarizing demonstrations of the 1960s, few university administrators have anything but praise for Kerr, who, at the time of his death, was regarded as the elder statesman of higher education.

Chancellor Albert Carnesale said last spring, for example, that Kerr’s book “The Uses of the University” is “as close as we can get to the Bible” in the field of higher education. UC officials laud him for increasing the university’s quality as the UC endured the massive enrollment boosts of the post-World War II era. Under Kerr, the UC opened three new campuses and became the first multiple flagship university system in the country.

California’s 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education, of which Kerr was the chief architect and which was designed to offer an affordable higher education to anyone who pursued one, has been imitated widely.

Current UC president Robert Dynes reflected on Kerr’s life Tuesday and said, “He was remarkable. ... I find it awesome ... and very humbling that I am sitting in the same chair as Clark Kerr.”

David Saxon, a former UC president, said Kerr was the “most influential and important leader in higher education in the 20th century.”

“I had the highest respect for his integrity, his ability, and his intellect,” Saxon added.

One of Kerr’s great accomplishments was making California a center for what he called the “production of knowledge.”

But his life began on the East Coast. He was born in 1911 in Stoney Creek, Penn. Kerr received a bachelor’s degree in economics from Swarthmore College in 1932 before traveling west for a summer with a Quaker service organization.

Kerr had planned to return east to enroll in law school at Columbia University, but on the spur decided instead to stay in California and take classes at Stanford University for a year. In the introduction to the first volume of his memoirs, Kerr recounts how he wrote to one of his professors at Swarthmore about his plans to study at in Palo Alto. The professor wrote back. Kerr writes: “I was making, he wrote, a terrible mistake; if I were foolish enough to be in California at all, I should transfer as quickly as possible to Berkeley.”

After a year, Kerr did just that – and began his life at the University of California. Kerr earned a Ph.D. in economics from Berkeley in 1939 and became a key labor negotiator.

After World War II, the G.I. Bill sent millions of post-war servicemen to college, and with enrollment surging at universities, faculty were in demand. In 1945, Kerr joined the faculty at Berkeley. At the time, the UC consisted of the highly regarded campus in Berkeley and a few satellites – a “southern branch” in Los Angeles, for example.

When Kerr’s professional career at the University of California came to an abrupt end in 1967, the UC was a world leader in higher education. In short, Kerr made the modern UC.

During his recent visit to UCLA, Dynes made note that six UC campuses are are now members of Association of American Universities, a group of roughly 60 distinguished research universities. No other public university system has more than one campus in that group. Much of the credit for this success goes to Kerr, Dynes said.

“(Kerr) set the tiller in place. ... He was the visionary,” Dynes said.

•••

The outlook was not always so rosy for the UC.

After fascism, the post-war United States soon found itself another enemy: the communist Soviet Union. Facing a military threat, Americans also feared internal subversion. At the UC, this fear manifested itself in the form of a Loyalty Oath.

All faculty had to declare their allegiance to the United States and disassociate themselves from communism. Saxon remembered the oath as “a terrible idea for all kinds of reasons.” In Saxon’s mind the oath so betrayed the notion of academic freedom that he found it “personally intolerable.” He did not sign it.

Clark Kerr did. But Kerr also disagreed with the idea and rallied faculty against the regents’ policy. In the end, the faculty effort was not successful, and more than 30 professors, including Saxon, were fired.

Though faculty were fired, Kerr won the respect of his colleagues. They nominated him to be Berkeley’s first chancellor in 1952. (Before 1952, the UC president, operating out of Berkeley, ran the campus.) But while his stance against the oath earned him the respect of colleagues, others developed the impression that Kerr was soft on communists. This reputation, unfair though it may have been, would haunt him for years to come.

In the six years Kerr served as chancellor, the campus slowly recovered from the Loyalty Oath debacle which left morale low and embarrassed the university. In 1958, UC President Robert Sproul resigned, and as chancellor, Kerr was the natural choice to replace him.

In an inaugural speech, Kerr said the “university over the centuries has moved from its role as the guardian of the past to that of the explorer of the future.” Given this role, it was the task of universities “to create new knowledge.” He ended, “This can be a truly Golden Age in the life of the University of California during what may yet become a Golden Age for mankind.”

If Kerr saw universities leading the way toward a Golden Age for mankind, then it was a new kind of university that would be paving the road ahead. Kerr observed modern universities were really “multiversities” – not one community, but many.

Multiversities educated future doctors, lawyers and teachers. They conducted research and participated in public service – all under one umbrella. Multiversities operated as integral parts of society, not as ivory towers that were removed and isolated.

And while most public institutions developed along the model of one “multiversity” surrounded by satellites, Kerr abandoned this notion. Though former UCLA Chancellor Franklin Murphy felt Kerr favored Berkeley, a large part of Kerr’s legacy was decentralizing the UC. Kerr worked hard to make UCLA in particular a standout campus.

During his tenure as president, the university spent money to develop a top library at UCLA. From 1960 through 1968, more than 100,000 volumes were added to UCLA’s library annually. In addition, L.A. administrators were given more authority and the southern campus’ student population surged by more than 10,000 from 1960-1967.

While Kerr saw organizational flaws with the UC system, he also saw problems with California’s other higher education institutions. The role of state universities seemed to more frequently overlap with the role of the UC’s campuses.

Kerr led the effort to establish a master plan for higher education. The plan that eventually emerged called for tuition-free college. The UC was to accept the top 12.5 percent of high school graduates and the California State the top third. Anyone who was 18 years of age could attend a community college. The ambitious plan set new standards for university affordability and accessibility.

The proposal, which became law with the signature of then-Gov. Pat Brown, solidified Kerr’s legacy as an internationally renowned educator. But as time progresses, many have wondered whether Kerr’s was a vision whose promise could not be fulfilled. Kerr himself was among those concerned.

“The big thing that we were working on in 1960 was equality of opportunity,” Kerr said in an interview with the Daily Bruin in spring 2002. “The big thing we did ... was to guarantee there would be a place in higher education for every high school graduate who wanted one. That was just absolutely phenomenal.”

But then, Kerr said, “two sad things happened.” First, the UC began weighing Advanced Placement classes in its admissions, hurting the opportunity of students from high schools that didn’t offer AP classes. Also, some community colleges now offer high numbers of courses with credits that transfer to UC. Others have few such classes.

Contemplating these developments, Kerr said, “The gains we thought we’d made in 1960, leading the world, have now been taken away in a very large part.”

•••

In his memoirs, Kerr continually returns to the idea that it is remarkable the UC improved as it did academically during his time as president while simultaneously enduring political turmoil. It was the UC’s academic success that earned Kerr his reputation; it was its political troubles that ended his career.

Kerr cited the Loyalty Oath as the a major political assault on the UC but also said the Berkeley Free Speech Movement greatly threatened the university. The Free Speech Movement erupted in the fall semester of 1964 as student groups from the right to the far-left joined to oppose administrative policies against disseminating certain political material on campus. As president, Kerr was the target of many students’ frustration at what they perceived to be unfair policies.

UCLA communications studies professor Paul von Blum was a student at Berkeley and active in the Free Speech Movement. He acknowledged Kerr’s distinguished career but said in 1964 Kerr demonstrated an “insufficient understanding of the First Amendment.”

“He was not a supporter of student political rights,” von Blum said.

The demonstrations at Berkeley did not stop in 1964 after the Academic Senate voted to expand students’ speech rights on campus.

Kerr, meantime, maintained a moderate approach to dealing with student demonstrators. While students felt like they were being bullied, conservatives began to grow angry at what they saw as Kerr’s soft response to unruly demonstrations.

By 1966 a law-and-order actor-turned-politician, Ronald Reagan, was on his way to the governorship. One of his campaign mantras was that he would clean-up the “mess” at Berkeley. Many members of the politicized Board of Regents had been lining up against Kerr, and when it became clear the president would not get along with the new governor, Kerr was doomed. At the first regents meeting after Reagan took office, Kerr was fired.

It was later revealed in an investigative report in the San Francisco Chronicle that the FBI had illegally compiled information to smear Kerr.

Years later, Kerr was given an FBI document that had been obtained by a reporter. All of the document’s words had been blacked out except for a small blurb handwritten by J. Edgar Hoover: “Kerr is no good.”

••• 

In 1996, when a Boalt Hall law school student sought to be the only student representative on the Board of Regents, he called the former UC president who had become a legend in the world of higher education.

To Jess Bravin’s surprise, Clark Kerr not only called him back, but invited him to his home to discuss some of Bravin’s ideas for the UC.

Bravin and Kerr talked about the financing of the UC. The two agreed that administrators and state officials were headed in the wrong direction, relying more and more on students to fund their own education through higher student fees.

Bravin, who was successful in his bid for student regent, was impressed that Kerr not only kept well up to speed with UC affairs, but that he was so “down to earth” – willing to share his thoughts at his home over grape juice and cookies.

Kerr never abandoned the university – even after he was dumped.

In fact, just weeks after being fired, Kerr attended a building dedication at UC Santa Barbara. During his remarks, Kerr reflected on his time as president of the UC. Kerr said he left the presidency as he entered it: “fired with enthusiasm.” Able to joke, Kerr later acknowledged that his firing was a painful experience.

And he may not have been the only one hurt. The campus demonstrations did not end with Kerr’s dismissal. In fact, thousands marched at UCLA in protest when Kerr was fired.

And if students disliked Kerr, they found out his replacements weren’t any better. Peter Camejo, the Green Party candidate for governor in the last two elections, enrolled at UC Berkeley in January of 1967. An activist anti-war student, Camejo was expelled in December of the same year for improper demonstration.

“In general,” Camejo said, “the anti-war movement ... was very critical of Kerr for suppressing free speech.”

But among demonstrating students, “there was an awareness that he (Kerr) was somewhat better than what the Reagan administration and the regents were pushing for,” Camejo said.

If there was a battle for the UC between Reagan and Kerr in 1967, Reagan won. Questions about demonstration policy aside, Reagan was successful in cutting the UC’s budget and raising student fees.

Kerr saw Reagan’s policies as another negative political influence on the UC. And as he watched the UC develop after his tenure, he remained impressed but also critical.

Late in his life, Kerr’s concerns for his university went beyond admissions officers weighing AP classes or non-transferable community college courses. Kerr was critical of the quality of undergraduate education at campuses so dedicated to research. He also worried about how the UC would accommodate its current enrollment growth. And he wondered how universities would change with so many advancements in information technology. But he remained hopeful.

“It’s going to be an interesting period of time,” he said in The Bruin interview. “It’s going to be harder on older faculty members. ... I know I would find it really hard to adapt myself to the new (system).

“But then we pass away and a new generation comes along, and that one is going to depend on the young faculties of today.”

Kerr is survived by his wife, Catherine; two sons, Clark and Alexander; daughter Caroline Gage; and half-brother, William Kerr, and one great-grandchild.