The Big, Big C

When the University of California regents set out last year to pick a replacement for retiring President Robert Gordon Sproul, they polled the nation's top educators for opinions, got a nearly unanimous consensus: "You already have Clark Kerr at Berkeley.'' This month, slight, balding Labor Economist Kerr, Berkeley's chancellor since 1952, took over the presidency. He found himself saddle-high on a job that is probably the biggest in U.S. education, and is destined to grow a lot bigger. Today California has eight campuses and 42,114 students (the country's second largest university: Minnesota, with 35,000 students). Three more campuses are planned, and a fourth is talked of; by 1970 the university is expected to be educating an awesome 108,300 students. Clark Kerr's university includes:

Berkeley. With 18,981 students registered last fall and a solid ranking among the top schools in the U.S., Berkeley is the biggest and juiciest chunk of the California orange. Berkeley's trees have had time to grow, and its faculty, mature and luminous, includes six Nobel laureates (among them: Radiation Laboratory Physicists Ernest Lawrence and Edwin McMillan, Chemist Glenn Seaborg). Partisans compare Berkeley, not always defensively, with Harvard, fairly assess their school as stronger in the physical sciences, less impressive in the humanities.

U.C.L.A. Once "not a branch of Berkeley, but a twig," in the recollection of one educator, the University of California at Los Angeles has begun to catch up with Berkeley in capacity (16,081 students last fall). In some areas, U.C.L.A. Chancellor Raymond B. Allen declares, his school surpasses Berkeley in academic excellence. Added to the university in 1919, 46 years after Berkeley started classes, the school has a less finished look, a bigger parking problem and a less famed faculty, jealously compares honors won (1958 Guggenheims: eleven for U.C.L.A., 19 for Berkeley).

Davis. A onetime cow college, fattened since 1951 by the addition of a college of letters and science. Davis has a collection of bright young Ph.D.s, a small-town cohesiveness rare in the university complex, and 3,000 acres for 2.320 students.

Santa Barbara. A state teachers college until California took it over in 1944. the campus is half built but rising fast, has a fine academic reputation in spite of distractions, e.g., a mile and a half of college-owned ocean beach. The 2,480 students get burned and learned at the same time, and some of them work their way through school skindiving for abalone.

San Francisco. A medical studies center, growing like other university branches, it should rise from last year's 1,367 students to 2,200 in 1970.

Riverside. A small (843 students) liberal arts college started in the desert six years ago at the site of the university's citrus experimental station 75 miles east of Los Angeles, Riverside this year sent an impressive 50% of its seniors on to graduate schools.

Scripps Institution of Oceanography. With 25 faculty members (six of whom belong to the National Academy of Sciences), exclusive Scripps has some 50 grad students and a fleet of blue-and-gold, ocean-exploring tugs.

Mount Hamilton. The noted Lick Observatory, and a campus only by courtesy, has six faculty members, a handful of graduate students.

Three new campuses are planned in the areas of La Jolla, southeast Los Angeles and south of San Francisco. By 1970 the new schools should be educating some 35,000 students. A fourth new campus, for 5,000 students, may be built in the San Joaquin Valley.

Pennsylvania-born President Kerr, 47, spent his undergraduate years at Swarthmore, took his Ph.D. in economics at Berkeley, brought his Quaker's instincts for peacemaking to a series of stints as mediator in West Coast labor-management wars. His most notable effort: a long, painful arbitration during 1946-47 between longshoremen and shipowners. Says the dockers' boss, hard-mouthed Harry Bridges: "The assignment was not an easy one. He performed it with fairness and courage."

In 1949, four years after Kerr began teaching industrial relations at Berkeley, the University of California regents outraged the faculty by requiring loyalty oaths. Kerr signed, as most members of the embittered faculty did eventually, but as head of the faculty privilege and tenure committee, he fought regents' attempts to fire nonsigners (by 1951, 26 had been fired, 37 had resigned). When a faculty committee was asked to nominate a chancellor for Berkeley, Kerr's fight was remembered. In his inaugural address, he made pointed distinction between "the honest heretic and the conspirator."

Scholar Kerr continued to teach and write learned articles during his term as chancellor, optimistically plans to do the same as president. One activity he has abandoned for the moment: sandlot athletics with his children (Clark, 15, Alexander, 12, Caroline, 6) and neighbor kids, halted when he broke a tibia recently in a soccer game. He is up at 6 a.m. on working days, commutes from one campus to another by plane, sometimes takes a grocery carton full of documents home at night.

The president's task at the University of California is awesome: to build a towering structure on a huge and varied foundation, and to make it habitable for scholarship. While coping with faculty committees, regents' mandates and a legislature as lobby-larded as any in the nation (one lobby by no means friendly to the university: that of the state teachers colleges), Kerr must spy out the special problems of bigness. One of them: the necessity for another 5,000 teachers by 1970.

To get them, Kerr must raid the source of supply--the faculties at Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Michigan, et al., with promises of blue skies, expansion-pushed advancement and high salaries ($12,900 top). A less obvious necessity: by choice, of site, of faculty minds and of educational specialty, each uncreated campus must be given a strong, distinctive character of its own. In the meantime, new-hatched President Kerr has another problem: "It's hard enough to be installed on one campus. I have to be installed on seven."

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