The Dream Is Over: The Crisis of Clark Kerr’s California Idea of Higher Education

Front matter

THE DREAM IS OVER

SIMON MARGINSON

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Contents

List of Figures and Tables xi

Preface PART ONE. A CITY UPON A HILL: CLARK KERR AND THE CALIFORNIA IDEA OF HIGHER EDUCATION 1. An Extraordinary Time 2. Clark Kerr 3. Clark Kerr and the California Idea 4. The Uses of the University Martin Trow: Higher Education and Its Growth 6. Bob Clark: The Academic Heartland 7. Whither the California Idea of Higher Education?

wa

Part Three. Bringing It All Back Home: The California Idea Contents

IN A MORE UNEQUAL AMERICA

17. 18.

Higher Education after Clark Kerr The Impossibility of Public Good The Impossibility of Taxation Economic and Social Inequality Unequal Opportunity

Epilogue: After the Dream Notes

Index

121 126 132 143 152 168

193 201

14.1.

14.2.

22.1.

22.2.

22.3.

8.1.

9.1. 10.1. 10.2. 14.1.

14.2.

FIGURES AND TABLES

FIGURES

R & D expenditures as a proportion of GDP, East Asia and the United States, 2000-2013 105

Annual production of published science papers, United States, China, and other East Asia, 1995-2011 107

Social inequality in bachelor’s degree attainment, United States, 1970 and 2013 179

Gross tertiary enrolment ratio and gross graduation ratio, United States, 1999-2012 180

Enrollment in postsecondary institutions and for-profit institutions, United States, 1970-2012 182

TABLES University of California campuses in Shanghai ARWU and Leiden research rankings 43 A means of Californization: Indicators used in the Shanghai ARWU 53 From elite to mass to universal participation, 1972-2012 57 Annual output of published journal papers in science, 1995-2011 69 Fastest-growing national science systems, by country, 1995-2011 70 Student achievement in PISA reading, science, and mathematics at age 15, 2012 101 Economy and population, East Asia, United States, and United Kingdom, 2013 104 x FIGURES AND TABLES

18.1. Student enrollment in public higher education and state and local government financial support, California, 1960-2010 136

19.1. Income shares of top 1 percent and bottom 50 percent, United States and Europe 147

Preface

The Dream Is Over: The Crisis of Clark Kerr’s California Idea of Higher Education is a longer version of the three Clark Kerr Lectures on Higher Education delivered on September 30, October 2, and October 7, 2014, at the University of California Berkeley. I hope that the book is a more considered and evidenced version of the argument made in the fifty-minute lecture format. The Dream Is Over, which is first of all about the sixty-year trajectory of higher education in California and the United States, was written from another country but within an early-twenty-first-century global higher education order shaped in a number of ways by public higher education in California. California is where American higher education reaches its high point, and the United States has dominated worldwide higher education since World War II: only now is the rest of the world just starting to catch up. Most of the world’s top twenty universities are American, and a number are located in California. All of us who work in higher education in some sense live in California, identifying with its goals and drawing from its fecund freedoms, its vision of growth and opportunity. In examining higher education in California, we reflect on our own deeper beliefs and ideals.

The development of the California Idea of higher education was long in coming. It had its roots in the larger “California Idea; the recurring movements of California Progressives and their agenda for democratic prosperity, as outlined by John Douglass in his account of the century leading up to the 1960 Master Plan. Douglass's clear historical account,' which is recommended to all readers, has been one of the foundations of this book. When it came to the systematic implementation of the “California Idea” in higher education, the process was led by University of California president Clark Kerr, the main architect of the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education, the most important American university president since World War II, and a thinker and writer on higher education whose work is still widely xi xii PREFACE read. The Dream Is Over considers where Clark Kerr’s notions about the public research university (the “multiversity”) and his commitment to a socially inclusive higher education system, dedicated to equality of opportunity and excellence at the same time, continue to be relevant—and where these notions might have become tarnished or rendered obsolete by time. It will argue that while the California Idea of higher education, like all policy-oriented forms, has flaws and limitations, it also contains virtues that have been allowed to deteriorate.

The Dream Is Over argues in part 3 that public higher education in California has become trapped within a high individualist politics that ignores and negates the social conditions in which individual freedoms are nurtured and expressed. These conditions include the role of government, which ought to be (and often is) a positive and not a negative influence in society. But in today’s California and United States, as elsewhere in the English-speaking world, many regard taxation as a form of theft, markets are used to value the public good in the social sectors, and wealth and educational power are rapidly concentrating at the top, without regard to those in the middle and at the bottom. The imagined society of the early 1960s, that of a higher education-led meritocracy grounded in equality of opportunity, serving enterprise and justice in equal measure, is over. Hence the bracing title. To find a way forward, we must first acknowledge the situation as it is. The book considers future developments in the circumstances, both rich with possibilities (especially at global level) and troubled in values, in which Californian and American public higher education now find themselves located.

The book has been organized in three parts, each an expansion of one of the Kerr lectures. Part 1 reviews Clark Kerr and the 1960 Master Plan in their time; discusses scholarly works by Clark Kerr, Martin Trow, and Bob Clark that are part of the Californian contribution to worldwide higher education; and opens discussion of the trajectory of the California Idea of higher education within California. Part 2 explores the passage of the California Idea across the world, in the spread of educational capacity and research science in the last two decades, and the rise of new university powers, especially in China and other parts of East Asia. Though the university has many national variations, all local and national institutions are part of a global research system and common patterns of higher education. The imprint of Clark Kerr's multiversity is visible everywhere. The more plural higher education world also poses challenges and opportunities for American institutions. Part 3 brings the discussion back to California and the United States (while remembering that what happens in the United States has global implications). Remarkably, the California Idea of higher education has had a great effect across the world but is losing traction at home. Part 3 reviews the rise of the antistate and antitax politics in California, Proposition 13 and the consequences for the Master Plan, the growth of social and economic inequality in the United States, the “steeper” vertical stratification of higher education, the weakening of equality of

PREFACE xiii opportunity, problems in the relationship between higher education and the labor markets, and the limits on social mobility in American (and English-speaking) society. The epilogue more briefly considers the future: briefly, because we do not know the future, and social science engages in prediction at its peril. Yet this openness, and the scope it gives us for agency, is always our best hope.

The Clark Kerr lecture series is a settling challenge to those of us asked to participate. It invites us to consider our words with more than the usual care and to summon whatever it is, if anything, that might be distinctive in what we say. My concern was always to be worthy of the invitation—and its name. It was an honor and a pleasure to spend time at the University of California, and I now understand a little better the lifelong hold that it exerts on some of my friends. I have benefited from the generous hosting, counseling, and continued collaboration of a group of people in and around the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) at Berkeley. The weeks at Berkeley were full of good talk and fine stone buildings. Above all I sincerely thank Jud King, who has been a fine adviser and a productive colleague, Sheldon Rothblatt, for his generous engagement with the draft materials, and also Carol Christ, John Douglass, Patricia Pelfrey, and Neil Smelser, Richard Atkinson at San Diego, and Wyatt R. “Rory” Hume. Most of those named. read one or more parts of the text. So did Mike Shattock in the United Kingdom. Iam very grateful for all comments, while carrying sole responsibility for the narrative and interpretations herein. I also thank Diana Baltodano, Meg Griffith, and Christine Herd, who kindly helped with the visit in 2014. It was good to spend time at CSHE.

The Dream Is Over was developed in several disciplines and draws on many theories and experiences, bodies of commentary, reflective scholarship, and empirical research, as indicated in the bibliography. The book is a synthesis. It is sustained by its own assumptions, organization, and judgment, while working also with the writings of many others: sometimes integrating their insights into the synthetic picture and sometimes bouncing off them in disagreement (the book continues a lifelong preoccupation with the critique of public choice theory). I deeply appreciate the opportunity to engage with this range of scholarship. Again, none of the many scholars cited or quoted in this book are responsible for what is stated here. At least some will disagree with my interpretation of their words and findings, though I trust the text is accurate in matters requiring the “impartial spectator,” to use Adam Smith’s phrase. Much of the recent research on the political economy of inequality and on social stratification in the United States and China—we need to bring studies of China into the core of social science, given the long-term global importance of that country—was new to me when I began preparing the Kerr Lectures. Research on social stratification, combining sociology and political economy and using both quantitative and qualitative techniques, constitutes a useful direction for higher education studies.

xiv PREFACE

Preparation of The Dream Is Over was also informed by conversation with Glyn Davis, a Berkeley alumnus, who is vice-chancellor at the University of Melbourne in Australia, where I worked until 2013, and by the ongoing discussion with my father, Ray Marginson. As vice-principal at Melbourne from 1966 to 1988, Ray Marginson was another of the builders of public higher education, in Australian higher education in the 1960s and 1970s when the world was wide, public investment increased at a rate never seen before or since, and the first system of mass higher education, with broad-based research capacity, was established. The world is still wide but the main arc of creation in higher education has swung to China, South Korea, and Singapore—and maybe to Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, India, and the Middle East (though new things can happen anywhere). In these zones, not coincidentally, states are in the forefront. When Anglo-American societies rediscover their states as constructive instruments, rather than seeing their public officials as people working behind the back of the common good for solely selfish ends (as public choice theory sees it), those societies will again move forward. The modern Anglo-American higher education systems were mostly formed in 1955-1980, when democratic society charged government, not markets, with the erection of public infrastructure and better systems of institutional provision. The systems, especially, broke new ground. Both the infrastructure and the systems will last much longer than the 1960s dreams that inspired them. If the task had been left to markets, we would be still waiting. We work within the halls built by the postwar generation, first in their heads and then in the world. Clark Kerr was the foremost of the builders. There were many others.

Writing the book had its golden moments. It is a pleasure to work with the rhythm of words in this way, assembling a lattice of thought, testing it against observation and reading and memory and inner synthesis, while one’s sense of the world inches slowly forward. Mostly the outcome on the page falls short of the thing we glimpse at the edge of imagination. Sometimes it all springs into view. The weeks on the last third of the draft were good, as months of preparation began to bear fruit. However, it has been difficult to create a book-length study of higher education at the desired level of originality, amid other demands, and at a time of transition and loss. I thank colleagues at the University College London Institute of Education for their forbearance, particularly during the main writing in mid 2014. I am deeply grateful to my wife, Anna Smolentseva, and family. At the time of the Clark Kerr lectures, Ana Rosa began a fulfilling humanities degree at Goldsmiths College in London. I dedicate The Dream Is Over to her with love and respect and wish her more great university years.

Part One

A City upon a Hill Clark Kerr and the California Idea of Higher Education

Today the eyes of all people are truly upon us—and our governments, in every branch, at every level, national, state and local, must be as a city upon a hill—constructed and inhabited by men aware of their great trust and their great responsibilities.

—JOHN F. KENNEDY, JANUARY 9, 1961, ADDRESS TO THE GENERAL COURT OF MASSACHUSETTS, JUST BEFORE FORMALLY ASSUMING THE PRESIDENCY

An Extraordinary Time

The later 1950s and the 1960s were an extraordinary time, especially in the United States. The period climaxed in the explosion of ideas, identities, popular culture, and political rebellion in the second half of the 1960s. That great outpouring of civil energy in America, brilliant and sustained, has tended to block from view the decade before, which was marked by rising expectations and all-round creativity in many spheres, including universities, research, ideas, and government itself. State action did not carry the stigma it later acquired. The memory of World War II was still green, helping to maintain the potential for ambitious collective solutions. American society was on a highway somewhere between, on one hand, the war years with their sleeves-up common commitments, improvised plans, and governmental management of resources and population and, on the other hand, the emerging social movements, higher aspirations, and larger personalities breaking out in many quarters. It was the time of the civil rights movement and the time of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Both government and critics wanted to make a better world. Both believed that this was possible. In higher education there was the 1960 Master Plan in California. Something of the same optimism and faith in common and constructed solutions was evident in Europe and Britain—for example, in the 1963 Robbins Report, which called for a major expansion in British higher education. As Sheldon Rothblatt puts it, “the period was one in which the very idea of planning in itself was held in high esteem.”

In his historical account of economic and social inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014), Thomas Piketty shows that special circumstances after 1945 opened the way to greater social mobility and a larger role for social allocation in higher education in the industrialized countries in the United States,

United Kingdom, Western Europe, and Japan. Before World War I, inherited wealth and capital incomes had retarded the potential for upward social mobility through work and education, especially in Europe and the United Kingdom but also in the United States. However, the world wars and the 1930s depression evacuated many of the great fortunes, and this partial emptying out of the upper echelon of society provided more space for social mobility after 1945. Progressive income tax, capital taxes, and inheritance taxes, which had been used to mobilize resources for the war effort, continued into the postwar era, reducing intergenerational transfer and creating more room for the expansion of the middle class. The top tax rate was high and managers salaries were restrained. Until the 1970s, savings from labor were the main source of wealth, rather than capital incomes, which facilitated the spread of home ownership by what Piketty calls the “patrimonial middle class.” There was more room at the top and (partly because of that) more room in the middle of society, while the long thirty years of economic growth between 1945 and 1975 further enlarged the scope for merit. This brought higher education into a more central place in American society. It was the pristine source of science and technology. It was the way of the future for families, the economy, and the nation. It was the great engine room of the growing middle class.

Nowhere in the world was higher education practiced on a larger scale and with more original thought and far-reaching innovation than in the fast growing state of California, which had moved to the front rank of American development. The central figure in the fashioning of higher education in California was Clark Kerr, chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley from 1952 to 1957 and president of the multicampus University of California from 1958 to 1967. Kerr was the principal architect of the 1960 Master Plan, the best known of all blueprints for system organization, one that helped to shape higher education across the country and across the world, and the author of perhaps the most influential book on modern research universities, The Uses of the University (2001/1963). Stories of individuals can tell us much about history when those stories are at the heart of the time. Kerr’s life and work help to open up the motives and methods of the generation of postwar leaders that used public programs for the common good, establishing institutions of lasting value—institutions that were enabling and ennobling of a modern democratic community: the “city upon a hill,” as John F. Kennedy called it prior to his inauguration in 1961, when reflecting on the high potentials of public service.*

It is with the emblematic figure of Clark Kerr, whose work peaked in building the California Idea of higher education in the world, that The Dream Is Over begins.

Clark Kerr

Who was Clark Kerr (1911-2003), what did he accomplish, and what was in his mind that still survives? Kerr’s physical memorial is visible from Berkeley to San Diego, and his memory remains green. He was fortunate in his friends and colleagues. They consider themselves to be especially fortunate in him. Those who worked directly with Kerr repeatedly said, and continue to say, fine things about his personal and intellectual qualities. According to Sheldon Rothblatt, citing Matthew Arnold, Clark Kerr saw life clearly and saw it whole. He “read widely, was learned and had a wonderful capacity” to ask good questions and find the right answers.’ “His observations were compelling, and he spoke with clarity and direction in sentences often pithy”? For Christina Gonzalez, Kerr was “intensely interested in ideas Neil Smelser emphasizes his “ability always to grasp the big picture.” At the same time he was down-to-earth, his visions embedded “in the realities of social, political and economic life.’* Kerr himself said that he was an “American pragmatist”

As a university president and then the head of the leading think tank on higher education, Clark Kerr never stopped being a social scientist. For Patricia Pelfrey, he had “a singular ability to look at mountains of information and discern patterns and trends where others saw only a jumble of unrelated facts and statistics”; and “he was a particularly acute observer of higher education‘ He grasped the detail, but he was not a specialist. He saw the world whole and in its many parts at the same time. Kerr was a masterly synthesizer. Rothblatt remarks that although he “possessed the social scientist’s inclination to anticipate the future” and his solutions tended towards the structural—he eschewed talk about the inspirational dimension of leadership—he was a humanist rather than a calculator, and he never lost sight of human freedom. Thus like many social scientists that seek to understand change in modern societies, Kerr was acutely aware of the structure/agency dilemma. While he could readily imagine the long trends and the forces of history, he found a place for agency within them.’ Prophetically, and rightly, Kerr forecast that within industrial societies, the scope for individualism and personal liberty would increase. As a leader he valued talented people and wanted them to be free to do whatever they could do.’ His own life showed that one person could achieve much when the conditions were right and the will was there.

In Clark Kerr’s time the dominant intellectual force in the practical social sciences was John Maynard Keynes, whose General Theory of Employment Interest and Money (1936) argued that the state should induce economic growth by stimulating aggregate demand, pointing the way out of the 1930s Depression. Kerr's mode of thought recalls Keynes's account of his method: “profound economic intuition and an unusual combination of keeping an open mind to the shifting picture of experience and of constantly applying to its interpretation the principles of formal thought?” In common with his teacher Alfred Marshall (who also influenced Kerr), Keynes used not just abstract reasoning but “trained common sense” to interrogate complex material, and he varied his interpretations to fit the context." Like Keynes, Kerr was big on common sense and contextual sensitivity, though in his case the intuition was that of a sociologically minded political scientist, not an economist. His method of achieving understanding was to apply his wide-ranging perception to the scene he was observing, to apply the principles of formal thought by posing contrasting poles of interpretation of those observations, and then find his way to a summary judgment that was mostly in the middle ground. The method was akin to the dialectical.

Rothblatt makes the telling comment that Kerr saw the world in terms of inbetweens rather than absolutes.” One example is his comment that the multiversity was both public and private and something more.” By moving beyond the dualism, without discarding it as an analytical tool, he could see things that the dualism alone would not have permitted him to see. He was an intellectual pluralist as well as a political pluralist. He wanted to encompass the complexity of the world rather than reduce it. Thus in his concept of the multiversity, multiplicity enables an inclusive, many-sided idea of the university. Likewise, while Kerr had beliefs and moral concerns, the simplifications of the ideologue were outside his frame of reference.

Kerr’s mode of leadership paralleled his in-between intellectual method. As University of California president and later as head of the Carnegie Commission, he led inclusively, by consensus. Drawing from his research in industrial relations and his own experience as a mediator in labor disputes, in the Godkin Lectures Kerr argued that mediation was the supreme function of leaders (note that the text reflects the male domination of both the lexicon and the university presidency in 1963).

CLARK KERR 7

The president in the multiversity is leader, educator, creator, initiator, wielder of power, pump; he is also office-holder, caretaker, inheritor, consensus-seeker, persuader, bottleneck. But he is mostly a mediator."°

Crucially, however, the role of the mediator was not to find the midpoint between the contending parties or reaffirm the status quo. Rather it was to find a higher level of synthetic agreement, a solution that contained everyone’s ideas or concerns and that all could endorse. This might be called transformative mediation. For Kerr, moving a plural group or institution to a higher level of agreement, and in doing so bringing the common enterprise forward, was a lifelong skill.” Arthur Levine, who worked with him at the Carnegie Commission, states that many times he saw Kerr perform “an almost magic trick”:

He would preside over a meeting in which there was a heated discussion with participants, saying black, white, red, blue and on through the rainbow. At some point, the conversation would wind down, and Clark would turn to the group and respond, “I think I heard you saying magenta.” The usual response was nodding of heads around the table."*

There was more to this than the capacity to see several moves ahead. Kerr knew that it was important that all parties not only own the solution but also share the common interest that it was designed to address. Everyone had a contribution to make, to something larger than themselves. He had been an active Quaker in his youth and took from that the belief that “there is that of good in every person” (though he noted that this adage came under strain when he was a university leader).

These ways of thinking and operating translated into an individual political style, based in keen and continuous observation, that was inclusive, responsive, and practical. One of Kerr’s methodological assets was a capacity to step back and analyze dispassionately events in which he himself was involved. Smelser calls this ability to secure distance, the attribute of the social scientist, Kerr’s “power of objectification.” It rendered him a reliable witness when describing tumultuous events. Likewise, Kerr mistrusted slogans and symbolic political actions and instinctively rejected extremes. He supported the advance of liberty in the movements for racial and sexual equality and decolonization, and he saw higher education as “a great force in the liberation of the human spirit?” But he did not like the “aggressive politicization” of academic life. It disturbed both the tranquility of scholarship and “the public acceptance of academic institutions?” He believed, rather to his cost amid the student unrest of 1964, that any political problem, especially one in his immediate setting, could be addressed by negotiation and persuasion. However, as Neil Smelser points out, “these were years of ideological confrontation, not pursuit of practical interests.” Not everyone wanted to make peace.”

CLARK KERR AND POLITICS

At the levels of society and nation, Kerr’s political perspective was nuanced and moderate. Like almost everyone in his environment, he was a nationalist rather than a globalist, and he was a moderately spoken American exceptionalist. He shared the growing optimism of the 1950s and 1960s, the hopes that something special could be made in the United States and that its civilizing influence in the world was (or at least could be) benign. He was a patriot but not jingoistic. He was conscious of the dangers to freedom that lay in jingoism, as he famously showed in his liberal and conciliatory stance in the loyalty oath controversy. This helped bring him the Berkeley chancellorship* and earned him the long-term suspicion and surveillance of the FBI. Kerr signed the loyalty oath and supported the University of California (UC) regents’ 1949 ban on the employment of Communist Party members. “I was totally opposed to communism—to its emphasis on total monopoly by one party over all political and economic life, and its reliance on force to assert its will” At the same time he did not think that communism was a serious internal threat. As Berkeley chancellor and later as UC president, he “refused to act against alleged communists without full proof?”

An in-between in politics and an in-between in his social vision, Kerr was an unabashed modernist. He saw industrialization as both transformative and inevitable, and technology as largely beneficial. He also placed markets at the center of the economy. Nevertheless, he had little faith in neoclassical theories about pure markets, as Rothblatt notes.” He was a critical supporter of capitalism, which he saw in terms of in-between, as an amalgam of pluses and minuses. As a young man in the early 1930s Kerr railed against social injustice. He enrolled in a master’s degree program at Stanford to work for “a better social and economic and political order?” His 1939 doctoral dissertation focused on workers’ cooperatives for the unemployed in California during the Depression.” In its subject matter, the work had something in common with John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath, about migrant workers in California, which was published in the same year. Kerr believed the world could be made a fairer and a kinder place, somewhere “in between free markets and a command economy.” For Kerr, government was a necessary part of the mix.” He did not share the idea from public choice theory, published in 1962, the year before Kerr’s The Uses of the University, that politics necessarily turns on self-interest and that there is no such thing as the general welfare or social altruism distinct from private interests. Kerr was more high-minded. He saw the public good as more than the aggregation of private goods. “The university ought to remain a neutral agency devoted to the public welfare, not private welfare, he stated in 2001, meaning that the university was a common resource in which the private interest of one person or corporation should not be privileged over others.” Likewise, he believed that much could be expected of government, though little could be assumed. The experience of the Depres-

CLARK KERR 9 sion made him a Roosevelt New Dealer in politics and a Keynesian in economics. He respected Nordic social democracy. He advocated public planning though he knew that legislatures were not always reliable and governments could be overbearing, especially in relation to higher education. Universities had to hold to their missions, despite the tendency of government to know best and the seductions offered by market interests.” Kerr’s position will seem contrary for those for whom politics turns on an absolute polarity between market and state or for whom the state is absolutely subordinated to the freedom to trade in the market, but it was a classical liberal position, one shared by many in higher education today. Transported into the present, it is likely that Kerr, the 1940s-1960s New Dealer, would be uneasy with today’s neoliberal eclipse of a broad-based notion of the public good, especially in economic policy and universal regulation on the basis of financial values. He would probably blanch at today’s level of economic inequality. One of his aphorisms was that while money was not the root of all evil, it was the root of some.” He might also criticize military engagement in such theatres as Iraq and Afghanistan. Kerr had attended student peace conferences as a young man in the 1930s.3+ Later he opposed the American intervention in Vietnam: “a bad war for Americans to be in? He became national chair of the Committee for a Political Settlement in Vietnam, which he described as “an antiwar but pro-American group” Yet at one stage Lyndon Johnson had Kerr under consideration for the posts of American ambassador to South Vietnam and director of the CIA, so compelling were his credentials.