Clark Kerr (May 17, 1911 – December 1, 2003) was an American economist and academic administrator. He was the first chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, and twelfth president of the University of California.

Early life and education

Kerr was born in Stony Creek, Pennsylvania, to Samuel William and Caroline (Clark) Kerr. He was raised on rural farms outside of Reading, Pennsylvania, first in the Stony Creek area and then in the Oley Valley after age 10. Even after Kerr became one of the most prominent academic administrators of his generation, he always regarded himself as a "Pennsylvania farm boy" and expressed frustration with intellectuals who showed condescension towards agriculture.

Kerr was the co-author of the article "Putting the Unemployed at Productive Labor" with economist Paul S Taylor in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1934, while working with Taylor documenting migrant conditions in 1933-34.

Kerr earned his A.B. from Swarthmore College in 1932, an M.A. in economics from Stanford University in 1933, and a Ph.D. in economics from UC Berkeley in 1939. In 1940 he was a UC Newton Booth Fellow studying at the London School of Economics. In 1945, he became an associate professor of industrial relations and was the founding director of the UC Berkeley Institute of Industrial Relations.

Career

UC Berkeley

In 1949, soon after the beginning of the McCarthy era, the Regents of the University of California adopted an anti-communist loyalty oath to be signed by all University of California employees. Kerr signed the oath, but fought against the firing of those who refused to sign. Kerr gained respect from his stance and was named University of California, Berkeley's first chancellor when that position was created in 1952. As chancellor, Kerr oversaw the construction of 12 high-rise dormitories. In September 1953, then U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed him to the Commission on Intergovernmental Relations.

University of California president

In October 1957, Kerr was the Board of Regents' unanimous choice to lead the entire university system. Raymond B. Allen had been widely expected to succeed Robert Gordon Sproul as systemwide president, but Allen's tenure as UCLA's first chancellor was marred by athletics scandals, poor campus planning, and the perception among the southern regents that he had not put up enough resistance—especially in comparison to Kerr—to Sproul's stubborn refusal to delegate anything to the campus chancellors. Therefore, when Sproul finally announced his retirement in 1957, Allen was passed over in favor of Kerr. Kerr's reforms included delegating to the chancellors the full range of powers, privileges, and responsibilities which Sproul had previously denied them.

In 1959, Kerr along with Chancellor Glenn T. Seaborg helped found the Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory.

Student protests

On March 22, 1961, at the invitation of SLATE, Frank Wilkinson gave a speech at the Berkeley campus, and in response to the ensuing controversy, Kerr defended the importance of freedom of speech: "The University is not engaged in making ideas safe for students. It is engaged in making students safe for ideas." Kerr was criticized both by students, for not agreeing to their demands, and by conservative UC Regent Edwin Pauley and others, for responding too leniently to the student unrest.

Blacklisting

In late 1964, President Lyndon Johnson picked Kerr to become secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. He later withdrew the nomination after the FBI background check on Kerr included damaging information the agency knew to be false. Almost 40 years later, in 2002, the FBI released documents used to blacklist Kerr as part of a government campaign to suppress subversive viewpoints at the university. This information had been classified by the FBI and was released only after a fifteen-year legal battle that the FBI repeatedly appealed up to the Supreme Court, but agreed to settle before the Supreme Court decided on hearing the matter.

Edwin Pauley approached John McCone, a Berkeley alum and associate, at the CIA for assistance. McCone in turn met with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover agreed to supply Pauley with confidential FBI information on "ultra-liberal" regents, faculty members, and students, and to assist in removing Kerr. Pauley received dozens of briefings from the FBI to this end. The FBI assisted Pauley and Ronald Reagan in painting Kerr as a dangerous "liberal".

<gallery class="center" style="center">

File:McCone-Hoover, UC Berkeley 1965.gif|CIA's McCone, at Pauley's request, asks Hoover to target anti-war protests at UC Berkeley.

File:Reagan-Hoover_UCB_memo1.gif|1969 FBI memo re: Ronald Reagan's purge of UC Berkeley, p.&nbsp;1

File:Reagan-Hoover_UCB_memo2.gif|1969 FBI memo re: Ronald Reagan's purge of UC Berkeley, p.&nbsp;2

File:Reagan-Hoover_UCB_memo3.gif|1969 FBI memo re: Ronald Reagan's purge of UC Berkeley, p.&nbsp;3

</gallery>

Dismissal

During his successful campaign in the 1966 California gubernatorial election, Reagan repeatedly promised to "clean up the mess at Berkeley." In 1987, Lyn Nofziger revealed to Kerr that Reagan actually did not know much about UC at the beginning of his campaign, but had tacked right in order to prevail in the Republican primary against George Christopher, and started focusing on the "student revolt at Berkeley" after a poll determined that it was a priority of Republican voters. Kerr knew what was coming and did not actively fight it in the sense of actively lobbying individual regents. At the dedication ceremony Kerr stated that he had left the presidency of the university just as he had entered it: "fired with enthusiasm".

Personal life

Kerr was married to Catherine "Kay" Spaulding on Christmas Day, 1934. Kay, along with friends, founded the Save San Francisco Bay Association in 1961, which became Save the Bay. The couple had three children; Clark E., Jr., Alexander, and Caroline Gage.

Kerr died on December 1, 2003, in El Cerrito, California, following complications from a fall.

Legacy and honors

There are Kerr Halls on the Davis, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz campuses. At UC Berkeley the Clark Kerr Campus is a 50-acre student residence complex.

The Clark Kerr Award is named in his honor. Since 1968, it has been awarded annually by the UC Berkeley Academic Senate to recognize an individual who has made an extraordinary and distinguished contribution to the advancement of higher education. Kerr himself was the first recipient of the award.

Bibliography

  • Charles Burress "The Long, Hard Years at Berkeley; Second Volume of Clark Kerr's Memoir Covers Politics and 'Blunders, San Francisco Chronicle, February 9, 2003, Sunday Review, p.&nbsp;1.
  • Arthur Levine (ed., 1993). Higher Learning in America. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • Seth Rosenfeld Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.
  • Schrum, Ethan, "Clark Kerr's Early Career, Social Science, and the American University", Perspectives on the History of Higher Education 28 (2011), 193–222.
  • Schrum, Ethan. The Instrumental University: Education in Service of the National Agenda after World War II. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019.

Primary sources

  • Clark Kerr The Gold and the Blue: A Personal Memoir of the University of California, 1949–1967
  • Clark Kerr The Uses of the University, 5th edition. 1963; Harvard University Press, 2001.
  • Clark Kerr, John T. Dunlop, Frederick H. Harbison, and Charles A. Myers, Industrialism and Industrial Man: The Problem of Labor and Management in Economic Growth. Harvard University Press, 1960.
  • "UC Won't Expel Sit-in Students", Los Angeles Times, May 6, 1964, p.&nbsp;8.
  • "The Arrests at Berkeley", The New York Times, December 5, 1964, p.&nbsp;30.

References

  • U.C. Berkeley news release of his death in 2003 (archived 2004): "Former UC President Clark Kerr, a national leader in higher education, dies at 92."
  • San Francisco Chronicle, "Reagan, Hoover, and the UC Red Scare" (archived 2006), June 9, 2002.

:Account of secret files of the FBI from SFGate on Kerr, and Kerr's ouster.

  • Clark Kerr 1911-2003: UC's great president, education pioneer from San Francisco Chronicle
  • Educator Clark Kerr Dies at 92 – All Things Considered from NPR
  • In Memoriam of Clark Kerr (archived 2011) from the University of California.