Clark Kerr And The Californian Model Of Higher Education
Research & Occasional Paper Series: CSHE.12.14 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY http://cshe.berkeley.edu/ CLARK KERR AND THE CALIFORNIAN MODEL OF HIGHER EDUCATION November 2014 Simon Marginson Institute of Education, University of London ABSTRACT Copyright 2014 Simon Marginson and CSHE, all rights reserved. Fifty years on, Clark Kerr’s multiversity and the Californian Master Plan for Higher Education stand as signal high points in the building of not just great public institutions but high participation modern human society. Key features of the Californian Model have become a universal template for research universities and system design. Seminal ideas and practices of higher education developed by Clark Kerr, Martin Trow, Burton Clark and others continue to colonize the thinking of policy makers, scientists, scholars, students and citizens, with profound effects not just in the United States but in every country. Yet the Californian Model of higher education - which long appeared everywhere else to be ahead of its time – was also specific to its own time and place. The conditions in which it was born, and which nurtured its flourishing, have changed. This is the first of three Clark Kerr Lectures on the Role of Higher Education in Society by Simon Marginson and organized and hosted by the Center for Studies in Higher Education with the generous support of the UC Office of the President and the Carnegie Corporation and delivered on September 30, 2014 at the David Brower Center, Berkeley. Previous Kerr Lecturers include Harold Shapiro, Charles Vest, Donald Kennedy, Hanna Holborn Gray, and Neil Smelser. Keywords: California Higher Education Model, Clark Kerr, Martin Trow, Bob Clark This lecture series is a settling challenge to those invited to participate. It invites us to consider our words with more than the usual care, to summon whatever it is, if anything, that might be distinctive in what we say, and to synthesize and conclude our thought about higher education, a large enterprise populated by intelligent people of almost every description. Yet I accepted without hesitation. I had always liked very much the Uses of the University and saw Clark Kerr as an admirable man. The modern system and institution builders, those who created higher education in the thirty years after World War 2, deserve all our respect. That generation includes my father, Raymond Marginson, the principal executive administrator at the University of Melbourne for more than two decades, still alive and active in university meetings at the age of almost 91. We work within the halls that were built by that generation, first in their minds and then in the world. Clark Kerr was the foremost of the builders. For better knowledge of Clark Kerr and his works, I thank the scholars I have read in recent months, especially John Douglass, Sheldon Rothblatt, and Kerr himself. I begin by discussing the man in terms of the work. First the 1960 Master Plan, the embodiment of what might be called the Californian Model of Higher Education. Second, the 1963 Godkin lectures. Then I move to two other scholars from the University of California, who like Kerr brought Californian thinking to the whole higher education world: Martin Trow and Burton Clark, or Bob Clark as his colleagues call him. I did not meet Kerr but met Trow and knew Clark. Each produced one work that is constantly read and cited. Then I will open the apparent paradox that lurks at the back of all three lectures. The Californian Model, or different versions and aspects of it, has swept across America and the world, becoming installed—at least in the idea—as the modern higher education system norm, in which access and excellence are both secured through diverse provision. The ‘excellence’ component—Kerr’s Multiversity, the large comprehensive science university—is closely imitated in many countries. Yet in California the Californian Model has faltered and the Multiversity is travelling less well. It now seems too difficult to provide access and excellence on a common public basis. The conditions and drivers that sustained the 1960s Model have changed. The Model has changed less. Perhaps that is part of the problem. I will close by pointing the way to Lecture 2.
