The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  Jerry Brown moved into I-House in the spring term of 1960. He knew about the dorm from his sister Barbara, who had lived there when she took classes for her teaching credential and enjoyed the intellectual camaraderie. Although he aspired to become a psychiatrist, Jerry enrolled as a classics major because his prior course work dovetailed with requirements, giving him standing as a second semester junior. He benefited from his status as the governor’s son, though he hid rather than flaunted his connections and often seemed oblivious to the implications. Reunited with Marc Poché, the senior adviser on Jerry’s floor at Santa Clara who was now a law student at Berkeley, Jerry expressed to Poché surprise that despite his late arrival at an appointment with the registrar, all his requests were pleasantly accommodated.

  Jerry plunged from one extreme to another, from the cloistered world of the seminary with restricted reading lists and banned books into the cultural ferment of Berkeley. He read Camus. He ate chop suey and rice at Robbie’s on Telegraph and thought, this is where Allen Ginsberg hung out when he wrote “Howl.” Jerry studied Yeats, Conrad, Foster, and Joyce with the literary critic Mark Schorer, who had been a star witness for the defense a few years earlier when police confiscated copies of “Howl” and charged poet and City Lights bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti with selling obscenity. The lengthy trial and acquittal had brought national attention to the Beats.

  Schorer was one of three professors who made a lasting impression on Jerry. Intellectual historian Carl Schorske was another. Schorske had turned down Cal3 a few years earlier because of lingering concerns about the loyalty oath controversy. After guest lecturing, he was so taken with the electric environment that he changed his mind. Unlike the elite East Coast schools, Cal drew students from a wide range of social, economic, and religious backgrounds. The diversity was visible in their dress, everything from ties to jeans. The community was intellectually and socially open and welcoming. Schorske thought Berkeley the nearest thing to a European university in America. California reminded him of Thuringia, a series of German towns including Weimar, a volatile mix of creativity and instability.

  Schorske gained an appreciation of teaching as a vocation from the junior political science professor who became his close friend and Jerry’s third influential teacher, Sheldon Wolin. Wolin’s book Politics and Vision had recently catapulted him into the ranks of significant political theorists. He was credited with resuscitating the then declining field of political philosophy by showing the relevance of history in analyzing the present, and the limits and possibilities of popular democracy. Five decades later, Jerry would still ponder his answer to the blue book exam question in Wolin’s Political Science 116B: Explain the Marxian theory of power.

  “Fine boy but too intense,”4 Pat wrote in his diary after spending a March Sunday morning on campus with his son. “I wish he were closer to home.”

  The turmoil that would make Berkeley a household name was still a few years away, but Jerry’s three semesters there coincided with a quieter tumult that had equally profound consequences— a debate over the future of not only Cal, but all public colleges and universities in California. The political and educational deliberations set in motion far-reaching changes for the country’s largest system of public higher education. Ultimately, the resolution augured a national embrace of universal access to college.

  “I knew exactly what I wanted to do,”5 Pat Brown wrote to a friend a decade later, describing his commitment to the agreement known as the Master Plan for higher education. “I realized that in the next 20 years people would continue to come to California and there was absolutely no way to stop it. I gave the highest priority to education, because I felt the greatness of California would depend upon an educated people.”

  California had been growing by about half a million people a year, almost two thirds of the increase newcomers lured by the weather and lifestyle, the strong economy and booming defense industry, and the start of a technology industry near Stanford University, encroaching on the lush agricultural fields of the Santa Clara Valley. The migration, coupled with the postwar baby boom, meant more students of all ages. During the 1950s, the state needed to open the equivalent of one high school a week. The patchwork system of public colleges and universities was overloaded and poorly aligned to meet demands that would only increase.

  California’s commitment to free higher education dated from the first constitutional convention in 1849, at which delegates expressed the desire to establish a public university. Not quite two decades later, on March 23, 1868, the governor signed a charter that established the University of California, run by a constitutionally autonomous Board of Regents. “In the most quiet and unobtrusive manner possible, an event took place yesterday destined, we trust, to exercise an incalculable influence upon the future of this State,” reported the newspaper Alta California in September 1869. “The University of California commenced its functions.” The first classes met in Oakland, and the campus moved to Berkeley in 1873. Tuition was free for all Californians.

  From the start, the openness and commitment to access distinguished the University of California from the prestigious East Coast schools it would soon consider intellectual rivals. While Cal modeled itself in part on Yale, the university admitted its first seventeen women in 1870, almost a century before Yale became coeducational. Phoebe Apperson Hearst,6 whose husband, George, had made a fortune in mining, endowed scholarships to help women support themselves while in college. Hearst was the first woman Regent, serving from 1897 until her death twenty-two years later. She financed an international design competition for the Berkeley campus, raised money for cultural activities, and founded the museum of anthropology.

  The university achieved a series of firsts in the early decades of the twentieth century. In 1923, the year before Bernice Layne arrived, enrollment topped fourteen thousand, making Cal the largest university in the world. In 1929, Ernest Lawrence became the school’s first Nobel laureate for his invention of the cyclotron. In 1930, the university became the first with multiple campuses, adding an agricultural school in Davis and a “Southern Branch” in Los Angeles.

  When the Regents decided the schools needed individual leaders, Clark Kerr was named chancellor of the Berkeley campus in 1952. Six years later, the balding, bespectacled Quaker took over as president of the whole university, a few months before Pat was elected governor. Kerr would craft a blueprint that gave Californians an unparalleled system of public higher education, which in turn became a model for modern research universities across the country. Pat Brown would embrace the plan and use his political weight to shepherd it through the legislature and Regents.

  Kerr was a few years younger than Pat, born in 1911 on a Pennsylvania farm and educated in a one-room school. The town was so small that when someone died, the church bell tolled once for each year; by counting the rings, it was said, people knew whom to mourn. Kerr became part of the 5 percent of his generation who attended college. President of the student government at Swarthmore, he planned to attend Columbia Law School until a summer Quaker program in California set him on a different path. He enrolled in graduate school at Stanford in labor economics, then transferred to Cal to work with Paul Taylor, an expert on farm labor and the husband of photographer Dorothea Lange. Taylor sent Kerr to the Central Valley cotton fields to interview workers during a violent 1933 strike. Kerr finished his studies, found a job at the University of Washington, and wistfully left the Berkeley hills where he and his wife would watch the morning fog rise through the eucalyptus trees. In 1945, Governor Warren, concerned about postwar labor strife, created an institute on industrial relations at Cal, his alma mater. Kerr became the first director. It was his dream job.

  Kerr gained prominence on campus during the controversy over the Regents’ demand that faculty sign a loyalty oath. He signed, but became the leader of faculty opposition. He was chosen as chancellor partly on the strength of his role in persuading the Regents to rescind the oath requirement. The
Berkeley campus was still more commuter school than intellectual community when Kerr took over in 1952, in the midst of a transition from teaching institution to research university. Student life centered on fraternities. Kerr initiated a shift to the “English model,” adding more dorms, a student union, cultural facilities, and walking paths. Fraternities and sororities receded in importance, ROTC became optional, study abroad programs began. By 1959, a liberal student group had wrested the leadership of the Associated Student Union Council away from fraternities and sororities for the first time. Students began to press the university to take positions on nuclear disarmament and the recognition of Cuba. The Regents adopted a nondiscrimination policy for student housing and activities. A prestigious faculty grew stronger as Kerr lured top humanities scholars to complement the esteemed science faculty. Instead of vying for top rank among public universities, Cal began to view its competition as the Ivy League.

  As demand grew, the university held to its commitment to provide a free undergraduate education to any California resident who qualified for admission. For tens of thousands of Californians from working families, that meant a passport to upward mobility. A 1959 survey7 found that 45 percent of the undergraduates came from families with limited income. Almost one third of the students at Cal reported they were self-supporting. Californians didn’t need statistics to know that the university helped determine social position and earning power. Cal was the place to go to make connections that lasted long past graduation. Loyalty to Cal became a way of life and a family tradition.

  By the time Jerry enrolled at Cal in 1960, the University of California had about fifty thousand students spread out over seven campuses, including an agricultural college at Davis that had evolved from the University Farm, a small liberal arts school in Riverside that developed around the world-famous Citrus Experiment Station, and a teachers’ college for women in Santa Barbara. Overcrowding at the two premier campuses had become so severe that Kerr proposed to cap enrollment at Cal. At UCLA, the chancellor warned8 that the school’s growth without adequate dorms—from seventy-five hundred students two decades earlier to more than twenty thousand—triggered complaints from neighbors and parking nightmares: ten thousand cars vied each day for seventy-eight hundred parking spots. Yet UCLA chancellor Raymond Bernard Allen found the school remarkable. “Never have I been on a campus where more dreams were being dreamed, more plans under way, more projects in the works.”

  Tensions grew between the campuses. Berkeley was still and always would be Cal, from the days when it was the university. As the university had absorbed existing schools around the state, those campuses chafed at their lesser status and wanted independent identities. The problem was particularly acute in Los Angeles, where UCLA’s position as stepchild to Cal clashed with the rising political power of Southern California and caused conflict on the Board of Regents. The majority of the Regents were appointed by the governor, and many of the positions went to wealthy supporters. By 1958, half the Regents came from Southern California.

  On top of the intrauniversity rivalries came friction with the state colleges, a separate system that reported to the state Board of Education. They, too, had grown rapidly, far beyond their original mission as teacher training schools opened in the 1850s in San Francisco and San Jose. The colleges lobbied for status as research schools that could grant graduate degrees and operate with autonomy comparable to that of the universities.

  The third tier of the system, the two-year community colleges, remained under the jurisdiction of local K-12 school districts, uncoordinated with the four-year institutions that their graduates increasingly wanted to attend. Together the three systems educated about 80 percent of the college students in California.

  Kerr became principal architect of a study that evolved into the California Master Plan, which guided future development of public higher education for decades. A process that began as a desperate attempt to cope with a deluge of students and competing demands ended up as a grand vision. “The master plan was a product of stark necessity,9 of political calculations, and of pragmatic transactions,” Kerr wrote in his autobiography. The crafters were not thinking of achieving the California dream, he wrote, but of avoiding a nightmare. Yet the Master Plan that Pat Brown signed into law on April 26, 1960, expressed a vision for the state as much as for the university, a commitment to increased economic and social mobility for young people, to a higher quality of academic research, and to broader access to higher education. The Master Plan effectively made California the first state to guarantee universal access to higher education, an idea beginning to gain popular acceptance.

  “Californians are proud of their university network, and well they might be. It is huge, young, brilliant, aggressive, progressive,” reported Time in an October 17, 1960, story that landed Clark Kerr on the cover of the national magazine.

  For the University of California, the Master Plan was a commitment to multiple flagship campuses, each with its own identity and specialties. The university became more selective, admitting only those high school seniors in the top 12.5 percent of their class.

  Research and doctorates remained the purview of the university, but state colleges would report to a new Board of Trustees. Four campuses were slated to join the existing fifteen, and the colleges would admit students in the top third of their graduating class.

  Community colleges would expand from 63 to 85 campuses, maintain open admissions, and guarantee that their graduates could transfer to a four-year public college.

  “What the railroads did for the second half of the last century and the automobile for the first half of this century may be done for the second half of this century by the knowledge industry,”10 Kerr said in a 1963 talk at Harvard in which he traced the development of what he dubbed the multiversity. “Knowledge is now central to society. It is wanted, even demanded, by more people and institutions than ever before.”

  Pat’s self-consciousness about his lack of higher education only deepened his boosterism for the university, particularly Cal, his wife’s alma mater. He was committed to provide access to a commodity he had missed. He loved to hear reports of accomplishments at Regents meetings and beamed when other governors told him they envied what he called “my university.”11

  From 1962 to 1966, California voters authorized nearly a billion dollars in bonds for construction of colleges and universities. Each new state college cost about $120 million, and the university campuses twice as much—about the prices, respectively, of a nuclear submarine and an aircraft carrier. Kerr oversaw the planning, design, and conceptual framework of three campuses, each with a different intellectual focus and a physical design to match its setting. San Diego’s La Jolla campus added an undergraduate college to the existing graduate science programs built around the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Santa Cruz featured twenty small residential colleges on a redwood-lined campus that overlooked a crescent of Monterey Bay. Irvine was designed as the center of a new city for two hundred thousand people in Orange County, built on ninety thousand acres of the Irvine Company ranch that had been citrus groves and grazing land for sheep and cattle.

  “This is perhaps the most striking introduction to democracy12 in California: that the free state university takes for a new campus (and can afford to take) some of the best and most desirable land in the state,” wrote sociologist Nathan Glazer. Dissenting from his Eastern intellectual colleagues’ disdain for Southern California, Glazer marveled at the vitality of a place shaped by people who had chosen to make it their home.

  Over the next decade, enrollment in the state’s public schools would more than double, to more than 100,000 students at the universities, 210,000 at the colleges, and 665,000 at the two-year schools. No other state offered free tuition—only the City University of New York. “Only in California13 can a young man or woman who has ability go from kindergarten through graduate school without paying one cent in tuition,” Pat wrote.

  In the spring of 1961, Pa
t’s son was completing his studies on the Berkeley campus, not entirely enamored by his experience. He found the university big, impersonal, and bureaucratic. He did not like the rules at Berkeley any better than he had at St. Brendan, St. Ignatius, or Sacred Heart.

  After taking a chemistry lab, Jerry had ruled out psychiatry as a profession. (Bart Lally, a medical student in St. Louis, was bemused when his friend called and said he had left the seminary and wanted to become a doctor. Lally could not envision Jerry sitting through the years of grinding work in classes and laboratories.) When Jerry expressed interest in clinical psychology, his mother suggested Pat set up visits to state institutions. Jerry visited psychologists at San Quentin and Vacaville prisons and state facilities for youth. “I was very impressed14 with his modesty, sensitivity and keen social awareness, traits not often found in young men today,” psychologist Robert G. Kaplan wrote Pat after meeting with Jerry. “I’m not too sure what kind of impression we made on your boy. I think he saw a different aspect of professional psychologists than he sees in the classroom of the university, perhaps the human side sans ivy towers.”

  What Jerry saw pushed him away from psychology and toward the law. Bernice, aware that her husband would love nothing better, admonished Pat not to push law school too hard for fear that his typical strong approach would backfire. Instead she soft-pedaled the idea to Jerry, pointing out that law had proved to be a good career for his father, uncles, and brothers-in-law and merited consideration.

  Jerry turned for advice to his father’s friend Mathew Tobriner, now a judge on the appellate court. “I know you will be pleased to hear that I’ve had some fine talks15 with Jerry,” Tobriner wrote to Pat after taking Jerry to lunch with two California Supreme Court justices. “We were truly impressed with his modesty, charm and his probing, searching mind.” Tobriner regretted his own choice of Harvard Law School and promoted Yale as smaller, more socially conscious, and oriented toward the relationship of law to social science and philosophy.