The Gold and the Blue Volume 1: Academic Triumphs

Reviewed by John R. Thelin

When it comes to higher education, Clark Kerr both makes history and writes it. That combination makes The Gold and the Blue magnetic, but also signals readers to evaluate the volume cautiously. Kerr, the former president of the University of California and an elder sage of the American university, is great, but hardly infallible, and even his interpretations of events can be colored by personal bias.

Kerr's account of the history of the University of California gains context when read in concert with other sources on the same topic: W. J. Rorabaugh's Berkeley at War (1990), Nicholas Lemann's The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (1999), and John Aubrey Douglass's The California Idea and American Higher Education: 1850 to the 1960 Master Plan (2000). John Kenneth Galbraith's twenty-page memoir of being a graduate student at Berkeley in the 1930s, in Irving Stone's 1969 anthology And There Was Light, also captures much that Kerr tries to describe in a much longer narrative. Above all, Kerr's memoir provides a good excuse to reread his own 1963 classic, The Uses of the University.

The Gold and the Blue details the administrative and political history of a great university in the mid-twentieth century, and presents the events and intrigues—including decisions of Kerr's own that went awry—associated with the University of California becoming a complex, multicampus system in an important state. Kerr is the consummate insider who knows the memos, the budgets, the power sources, and the personalities that figure in the history. He is also a charismatic, thoughtful individual and ultimately the book's most intriguing character. A quiet mystery man who exudes wisdom without ostentation, Kerr started his career as professor at UC Berkeley, became chancellor of Berkeley, and finally president of the whole UC system. One insight into Kerr's personality comes from a November 2001 article about him in the Berkeley alumni magazine. At age 91, his photograph shows, he has opted to grow sideburns. Perhaps his motto should be "better late than never" as finally he gets in step with the styles of student life in the 1960s. Is he demonstrating his 1963 insight that universities (and their presidents) are liberal in their recommendations for society, yet slow to change in their own conduct?

In shifting from administrator to author, Kerr has made certain that his recollections are central in the public forum. In the decade preceding the publication of The Gold and the Blue, Kerr published three other books about higher education, and he has now written no fewer than four postscripts to The Uses of the University. Each time Kerr has changed his mind about the past, he has had an opportunity to amend the historical record.

Kerr's work at the University of California was a heroic mix of triumph and trauma. At best, his genius for inspirational coordination earned him praise and cover stories in such national magazines as Time and Life. At worst, the disruptions caused by student discontent made Berkeley synonymous with the ills of mass higher education.

Given the tensions that pervade faculty-administration relations on all campuses, whether in the twentieth or the twenty-first century, it is an important feature of Kerr's memoir that he always acknowledges faculty contributions to institutional governance. When all is said and done, he truly appreciates faculty teaching and scholarship. All too often, the current generation of university presidents fails to share this appreciation.

Some of the most interesting sections of Kerr's history take place outside the campuses of Berkeley and the University of California, Los Angeles, which, despite their prominence, are not the whole story of California's vigorous economic and educational ascent after World War II. Kerr's account of the quiet success stories of UC Davis and UC Santa Barbara is novel and refreshing. Each institution gradually but persistently built nationally acclaimed records of faculty achievement and graduate program productivity, illustrating how Kerr hoped the entire UC system would ascend. Their records and rising reputations are congruent with the surprising findings of the late historian Hugh Graham and political scientist Nancy Diamond in their 1997 book The Rise of American Research Universities: Elites and Challengers in the Postwar Era; studying per-capita research productivity, Graham and Diamond found that larger institutions did not necessarily have more successful research programs. Kerr gives generous tribute to the sustained good values and work of chancellors who have received little attention from historians of higher education: Emil Mrak at Davis and Vernon Cheadle at Santa Barbara.

The writing style that served Kerr well as UC president—namely, staccato messages, concise memos, insightful marginal comments-works less well in an extended narrative, and the volume is repetitive from one chapter to another, as if he had stitched together self-contained essays. Some of his familiar explanations lean toward liturgy and lore. He frequently invokes, for example, the importance of his childhood farm life, Quaker roots, and small liberal arts college experience. Perhaps these experiences were important, but they are not as determinative as Kerr implies. After all, Richard Nixon proclaimed a comparable farm and Quaker childhood and collegiate legacy with a different outcome in his adult life.

Readers would be wise to supplement Kerr's compelling autobiography with other accounts of the same institutions and years by characters to whom Kerr alludes, especially in episodes dealing with the heralded Master Plan, which designated distinct missions for each segment of California's public higher education system. Kerr, a former president of the University of California with strong ties to Berkeley, writes in sympathy with the university's predilection to guard its primacy in doctoral programs and advanced research. But who can blame UCLA chancellors and Los Angeles citizens for being ambitious and impatient with Berkeley's hegemony? Why shouldn't the chancellors and presidents of California's other public higher education system, the network of state colleges, have pushed for their piece of the California pie against Kerr's beloved, established University of California system?

Kerr has earned respect, praise, and deference. He is also mortal. Yet he has the depth to be a hero without hagiography. The ultimate challenge in reading this insightful memoir is to figure out how those in higher education in the twenty-first century can honor Kerr and his work without turning a blind eye to the limits as well as the accomplishments of his vision.

John R. Thelin is University Research Professor at the University of Kentucky. He grew up in California during the Kerr years and holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

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