I first encountered Clark Kerr in 1946. He was a new Assistant
Professor of Economics at Berkeley and I was a research assistant
in the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. Clark taught a very large
and popular class in Labor Economics. I was courting Sybil, now
my wife, then one of his students. I often accompanied her to
class so we could lunch together afterwards at the International
House. I came away with some knowledge about labor economics
and a strong impression of Kerr as an exceptional teacher.
In
1952 Clark was chosen as the first Chancellor at Berkeley.
Six years later he became President of the University of California.
During that same period, I became director of the Lawrence Livermore
Laboratory, then an appendage of the Berkeley campus and eventually
moved to Washington where I worked in the White House and the
Pentagon.
It was the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, that
took me east, and it was Sputnik and our scientific rivalry with
the
Soviet Union, that brought special urgency to Clark’s plans
for expanding the University. At the same time, the continuing
rapid growth of the California population made expansion of the
University necessary. Kerr welcomed all this as an opportunity.
Under his 1960 master plan, four of the six existing campuses,
Davis, Santa Barbara, Riverside and San Francisco were transformed,
and three new campuses were created in Irvine, Santa Cruz and
La Jolla.
Since San Diego was the third largest city in California,
it was inevitable that it would be one of the expansion sites
and
that the Scripps Institution of Oceanography would be the core
of the new campus. In addition, Roger Revelle, then director
of SIO, and his colleagues had their own independent aspirations,
hopes and plans for building a general campus here. The ideas
of the local leadership, and the ideas developed in Berkeley,
coincided in many important ways but differed in others.
Kerr
wanted another Berkeley. Revelle and the La Jolla faculty wanted
something more like Cal Tech, perhaps with an Occidental
College added. Kerr put weight on large size—27,500 students—with
lots of undergraduates as well as graduates. Local leaders put
their highest priority on research—including at the undergraduate
level. Kerr addressed this at one of the La Jolla faculty meetings
when he explained that what California needed here was a general
campus like Berkeley. Kerr vividly recalled someone responding, “Do
you mean you want us to stoop to Berkeley?” Kerr told me
this anecdote many times in the ensuing years.
From my perspective,
the biggest difference was that the local faculty wanted Roger
Revelle to be the first Chancellor here,
and President Kerr and Regent’s chairman Edmund Pauley
were unwilling to follow the La Jolla faculty’s clear and
well-known wishes.
The rest, as they say, is history. In 1960,
before the general election, I told Kerr I planned to leave Washington
and return
to the University in some appropriate capacity. Just a couple
of weeks later, to my surprise, he asked me to consider being
Chancellor at San Diego. I knew nothing about the issues described
above, and I welcomed the opportunity. I greatly admired Roger
personally, and I used many of his ideas about how to proceed
in building a world-class campus here, but at the same time I
followed Kerr’s vision of another Berkeley. Dealing with
the differences wasn’t always easy. But in the end it all
came out exceptionally well.
Clark Kerr had a cool exterior,
but his obvious great love for The University of California
broke through and inspired all of
us who joined him in this great enterprise of growth and innovation.
Throughout his presidency, Kerr favored La Jolla with extra
support: more funds, higher level faculty positions (including
over scale),
a brief delay in admitting undergraduates, and the immediate
establishment of a Medical School.
San Diego, the state of California and the world of higher
education are in his debt. 
Herbert York was UCSD’s
first chancellor from 1961-64 and acting chancellor from 1970-72.
Last October, he was awarded
the Clark Kerr Award for Distinguished Leadership in Higher Education. |
