The Gold and the Blue Volume 2: Political Turmoil

Reviewed by Roger Geiger

The second volume of The Gold and the Blue recounts the crucial years of perhaps the most consequential career in higher education of the twentieth century, and it stands as both history and document. Its author, former University of California president Clark Kerr, relies not on memory but on extensive research. He quotes liberally from the oral histories of his con-temporaries and has compiled publicly available documents to substantiate his case. Consequently, the volume is essential to understanding both the development of the University of California and the university's actions in the first campus battle of the new left, the free speech movement.

The three greatest administrative blunders in the history of the University of California, Kerr writes, were the 1949 loyalty oath proposed by UC Berkeley president Robert Sproul, the decision by Berkeley chancellor Edward Strong to forbid political activity in a campus entryway long used for this purpose, and Kerr's own failure as president to rescind Strong's decision immediately. The latter pair of blunders provoked the free speech movement, to which Kerr devotes two-thirds of this volume.

The oath controversy occurred at the height of anticommunist paranoia. At Sproul's request, the UC Board of Regents adopted a requirement that university employees sign an anticommunist oath; those who refused lost their jobs. Kerr, then a faculty member, opposed the oath but did sign it, and he treats his role in the controversy fairly lightly. The pall of ignorant anticommunism was present throughout Kerr's years at the University of California. Kerr, who had had direct experience with communists as a labor mediator, realized that communists posed no threat to the internal security of the United States, but also abhorred their beliefs and tactics. Yet regents and legislators accused Kerr of being a virtual fellow traveler—even after campus radicals vilified him as a tool of capitalism. He cites a declassified Federal Bureau of Investigation file in which a regent and a faculty member denounce him to agents, and one in which FBI director J. Edgar Hoover scribbled, "I know Kerr is no good."

Kerr kept silent about his role in the conflict over the free speech movement for nearly forty years, although the experience obviously burned in his memory. His memoirs have been long awaited, and do not disappoint. He recounts the tangle of events following Strong's controversial decision from multiple angles, and furnishes numerous new details, revising the historical record on the initial decision, the escalation, and the denouement of the conflict.

The conflict started in September 1964 when chancellor Strong prohibited political activity on a small strip of campus where students set up tables and distributed leaflets. Strong and some in his administration found these activities objectionable, and may have feared exposure by the conservative Oakland Tribune for tolerating them.

Kerr suggests that the prohibition was deliberately rushed through on the day before he returned from two months of travel, and writes that he immediately recognized it as a great mistake—he now calls it "morally wrong . . . politically unwise . . . [and] administratively stupid." Kerr believed in consultation and consensus, and he valued the strip as a safety valve for keeping advocacy off the rest of the campus. But when Kerr asked that the order be withdrawn, Strong refused, fearing that such a move would undermine his own and the university's authority. The refusal left Kerr perplex-ed. He was a proponent of decentralized campus governance, and to overrule his chancellor would subvert his own policy and invite criticism. He did not even consider nullifying the order, as he later concluded he should have.

Following Strong's prohibition, a crisis arose and quickly escalated beyond the control of moderates, including Kerr, who sought to negotiate a compromise. Events were driven by intransigent elements on both extremes. On the left emerged the radical elements of the free speech movement, emboldened and legitimized by the civil rights movement. This group, led by student and civil rights activist Mario Savio, denounced the nature of the university and sabotaged possible resolutions with new provocations. On the right was Strong, who now believed that the university was resisting a communist plot. Committed to punishing miscreants and countering civil disobedience with force, he, too, undermined attempts at conciliation.

Kerr believed that all types of speakers, including communists, should be allowed on campus with proper academic sponsorship. However, he also thought that the university should insulate itself from controversy and attack by keeping overt advocacy off campus. The right to engage in political activity became the cause of the free speech movement, which Kerr argues was about free advocacy rather than free speech.

In early December, the Berkeley division of UC's Academic Senate broke the impasse by largely endorsing the position of the free speech movement on political speech on campus. As subsequently qualified by the university's regents, the new policy proved a victory for the moderate center. While Kerr remained uncomfortable about permitting political advocacy on campus, the extremists were more discomfited. Strong was forced out as Berkeley chancellor, and Savio withdrew from the free speech movement, which soon dissolved.

Kerr's description of the denouement of this crisis is largely positive, but it reveals the damage that was done to his presidency. Although the crisis was not of his making, Kerr was unable to control events, and although he played an important role in the final settlement, the faculty and regents ultimately had to resolve the issues. Kerr's support weakened among the regents, where an anti-Kerr faction had always existed. Soon thereafter, the "filthy speech movement," in which students advocated for the right to display profanity on campus, damaged it further. Kerr describes the Berkeley campus as relatively quiescent in the aftermath of the free speech movement, but by 1966 antiwar protests were swelling toward far greater disturbances. Inevitably, Kerr became the lightning rod for these troubles.

Despite Kerr's enormous accomplishments, described in the first volume of The Gold and the Blue, his position was precarious when Ronald Reagan ran for governor of California, promising to "clean up the mess at Berkeley." The final section of the memoir depicts the end game in depressing detail. Reagan personally had neither knowledge of nor animus toward the university, but with the enthusiastic help of conservative regents, he fulfilled his campaign promise by unceremoniously ousting Kerr from the presidency.

In addition to providing new insight and detail about the free speech movement, the two volumes of The Gold and the Blue are also compelling reading as case studies of presidential leadership. Kerr has been an assiduous student of university governance throughout his career, and he unsparingly examines the pivotal decisions of the tumultuous years of his presidency from both an administrative and a moral perspective. His steadfast moral sense and charity toward others, the products of a Quaker background, ought to provide inspiration to those living in an age notably lacking in such qualities.

Roger Geiger is Distinguished Professor of Higher Education at Pennsylvania State University and the author of Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities Since World War II and Knowledge and Money: Research Universities and the Paradox of the Marketplace.

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