Clark Kerr

Clark Kerr, President of the University of California and this year's Godkin lecturer, last came to Harvard in 1958, when he was awarded an honorary degree at Commencement. Kerr remembers the experience with considerable amusement: "I nearly fell flat on my face in front of the audience. I was on crutches, and I momentarily stumbled on the wooden platform." The crutches were to protect a broken ankle, Kerr recalls, an injury he had received the previous Sunday while playing a vigorous game of soccer with his two sons.

The role of family man was, in fact, one of the "many faces" of the ideal university president whom Kerr described in his first Godkin lecture Tuesday night. Kerr's "multi-versed" president was also an administrator, educator, mediator, speaker, and public clown. It is not surprising that the mask Kerr most enjoys donning is that of mediation.

Until he became Chancellor of the Berkeley campus in 1952, Kerr was one of the most active and most successful labor arbitrators on the West Coast. He still enjoys what he calls "keeping the peace."

Kerr considers as one of his most challenging experiences one that required just this sort of mediation--his attempt in 1959 to "educate" the Board of Regents of the University, the state-wide body which retains ultimate control over the institution.

Kerr became impatient with the petty quarrels of the Board, and eventually united the Regents into a more purposeful body. The task of reconciling such factions required tactics learned not from Robert's Rules but from Harry Bridges.

Yet as the head of eight campuses and some 50,000 students, Kerr is willing to compromise only so far. He appears more than ready to assert a very sharp rebuff to anyone who threatens University prerogatives.

During last year's gubernatorial campaign in California, for example, Richard Nixon frequently pledged that, if elected, he would prohibit the appearance of any "subversive speaker" on state campuses. Kerr's acid reaction was to comment that "we will certainly consider Mr. Nixon's requests...but we will do exactly as we please."

Whether compromising or resisting, Kerr remains slightly surprised at the pleasure he gets out of his current job. "I never intended to become a university administrator. But after I gave a strong speech against the Regents in the 1951 Oath Fight, I suddenly found myself appointed Chancellor at Berkeley. I still consider myself at least partially a faculty man."

Kerr spent, in fact, 13 years on the faculties of various West Coast universities before his appointment as Chancellor. In his years at Berkeley, he combined arbitration with teaching and research at the well-known Institute of Industrial Relations.

Kerr's experience in labor arbitration has left him convinced that a "blueprint" of educational policy is not the proper approach to directing a university. Instead, Kerr feels, the administrator must follow "a compromise of ideas."

California's Master Plan for State Education, which was approved by the Legislature in 1960, bears the stamp of Kerr's knack for mediation. Faced with the task of uniting California's vast network of universities, state and junior colleges, Kerr saw "that there would have to be an agreement sometime," and forged what has since been hailed as California's most alluring asset.

Despite the universal acceptance of the Master Plan, Kerr still feels that three crucial problems face the huge program of development which the University must undertake in the next ten years.

Most important, Kerr says, is the difficult problem of providing a more personal and intimate environment for what will appear as "an even less significant" undergraduate. Kerr hopes, for example, that the new campus planned at Santa Cruz, to be divided into small House-like colleges of 600-800 students apiece, will help solve this problem.

As a second problem, Kerr is concerned with the difficulty of maintaining a uniformly high quality among a faculty which will become almost hopelessly large. Added to this, Kerr will face the third problem of financing a sprawling state university which will contain about 100,000 students by 1970.

All three of these problems, and so many others which will plague California's teeming student population, will undoubtedly require the compromise of many plans and the resolution of many conflicting ambitions. Kerr quite obviously looks forward to these problems with considerable relish.