This volume consists of original essays by academic leaders and scholars connected to Clark Kerr’s life and work. He was arguably America’s most significant higher education thinker and public policy analyst in the last 50 years of the 20th century and renowned globally. However, little thoughtful attention has been devoted to assessing the whole of his work. Some commentators misunderstand the man as well as his ideas. The California Master Plan for Higher Education of 1960 was one of his famous undertakings, as was his part in shaping the multi-campus University of California towards global eminence. He coined the word “multiversity” to describe what he called the “uses” of the university, but began to think it had become much too “multi”. Some of his most important work was as director of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education and the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education, which laid the foundation for sophisticated policy-making. The contributors honor the achievements of a remarkable man and provide portraits of him, but of equal importance are their critical discussions of the sources of his thinking, his attempts to balance access and merit in mass higher education circumstances, the policy issues that he confronted and the success of their resolution. For many of the contributors, Kerr’s work is the starting point for understanding policy issues in varying regional and national contexts. Often thought to be a social scientist eager to keep abreast of trends, Kerr was actually au fond a moralist and surprisingly old-fashioned in his personal values.

As we approach the end of the twentieth century and enter the twenty-first, the nation's system of colleges and universities, as well as higher education around the world, will face some enduring conflicts and contradictions—the basic challenges that must be confronted and solved again and again in every generation. These include nationalization versus internationalization in higher education, merit in academic pursuits versus equality of treatment, the preservation of the past versus improvement of the present or changes in the future, differentiation of functions among higher education institutions versus their homogenization in a world of mass access, and commitment to ethical conduct in the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge versus exploitation of the process for individual gain. This book outlines possible solutions to these dilemmas that will enable higher education to continue to serve its own imperatives as well as contribute to the quality of life around the world in the coming years and decades.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. The Dream Is Over tells the extraordinary story of the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education in California, created by visionary University of California President Clark Kerr and his contemporaries. The Master Plan’s equality of opportunity policy brought college within reach of millions of American families for the first time and fashioned the world’s leading system of public research universities. The California idea became the leading model for higher education across the world and has had great influence in the rapid growth of universities in China and East Asia. Yet, remarkably, the political conditions supporting the California idea in California itself have evaporated. Universal access is faltering, public tuition is rising, the great research universities face new challenges, and educational participation in California, once the national leader, lags far behind. Can the social values embodied in Kerr’s vision be renewed?

This new edition explores current issues of central importance to the academy: leadership, accountability, access, finance, technology, academic freedom, the canon, governance, and race. Chapters also deal with key constituencies -- students and faculty -- in the context of a changing academic environment.

This volume provides an intellectual history of Kerr's vision of the multiversity, as expressed in his most famous work, The Uses of the University, and in his greatest administrative accomplishment, the California Master Plan for Higher Education. Building upon Kerr's use of the visionary hedgehog/shrewd fox dichotomy, the book explains the rise of the University of California as due to the articulation and implementation of the hedgehog concept of systemic excellence that underpins the master plan.Arguing that the university's recent problems flow from a fox culture, characterized by a free-for-all approach to management, including excessive executive compensation, this is a call for a new vision for the university—and for public higher education in general. In particular, it advocates re-funding and re-democratizing public higher education and renewing its leadership through thoughtful succession planning, with a special emphasis on diversity.Gonzalez's work follows the ups and downs of women and minorities in higher education, showing that university advances often have resulted in the further marginalization of these groups. Clark Kerr's University of California is about American public higher education at the crossroads and will be of interest to those concerned with the future of the public university as an institution, as well as those interested in issues relating to leadership, diversity, and succession planning.

Clark Kerr, former President of the University of California and a leader in higher education policymaking, offers his views of the turbulent decades when colleges and universities scrambled to provide faculty and facilities for the burgeoning student population, only to be faced later with economic depression and subsequent conservatism. From his unique vantage point, Kerr offers insights into the role of higher education--its performance under pressure, its changing climate, its efforts to serve the multiplicity of demands made upon it, and its success or failure in meeting those demands.

Also included is a thought-provoking section on the dominant connection between higher education and the economy that evaluates how well the test of service to the labor market has been met and counters the charge that our educational system is to blame for the nation's decline in economic productivity and lack of international competitiveness.