Education: Levelheaded Individualist

• Share

In the 15 months since hearty, hail-fellow Robert Gordon Sproul, 66, announced that he would retire as president of the University of California in July 1958, the university's board of regents has scoured the entire nation for a successor. Last week they looked in their own backyard−and picked balding, mild-mannered Clark Kerr, 46, since 1952 the able and popular chancellor of the campus at Berkeley.

A graduate of Swarthmore, with a Ph.D. from California, Kerr joined the faculty in 1945 as head of the Institute of Industrial Relations. He quickly became one of the state's top labor arbiters, held a long string of Government posts. During the university's bitter battle over the loyalty oath (TIME, June 27, 1949 et seq.), he proved himself every inch the mediator. As a member of the faculty committee on privilege and tenure, he was largely responsible for protecting facultymen from unfair persecution and dismissal, but he went about his job in so levelheaded a manner that he was able to placate even the most diehard conservatives on the board and in the legislature. By the time the American Association of University Professors got ready to censure the university, he was able to declare the move "unjustified and singularly inappropriate." He angered some alumni by refusing to give large subsidies to athletes ("hired gladiators," he called them), but for five years he managed to keep his big (19,000) campus prosperous and happy. As president, Kerr will not only head the university's present eight campuses, but will supervise the building of two more, which the regents approved last week. He will have to make provisions for an expected enrollment of 90,000 by 1970. But more important to his scattered facultymen is the kind of person Clark Kerr is−a constant critic of the Organization Man, of the cult of "factory sociology," of all those who would place security and serenity above free enterprise, whether economic or academic. "Freedom," he once wrote, "has some costs, it is true, but in our eagerness to eliminate these costs we can eliminate freedom itself. What we must realize is that freedom requires conflict−conflict within the rules of the game −but conflict nonetheless."