At Berkeley in the Sixties: The Making of an Activist

Notes

Notes 1. The Train to Berkeley 1. The “Master Plan for Higher Education in California,” as codi¤ed in the Donahoe Act of 1960, organized one of the world’s largest systems of public higher education into three tiers. The University of California grew from ¤ve undergraduate campuses in 1961 to eight in 1965, plus separate medical and law schools in San Francisco. The middle tier of state colleges, open to the top third of California high school graduates, numbered eighteen in 1961 and nineteen in 1965 (and twenty-one in 1990). In 1972 some of the colleges became universities, and in 1982 the system was renamed The California State University. The third tier of 73 public junior (community ) colleges was open to any high school graduate. Thus, any Californian with a high school diploma could get a publicly ¤nanced higher education. Those who did well in junior college could transfer to a four-year school for their bachelor’s degree. 2. Fees could be charged only for services not related to teaching; Coons 1968, 129. Student fees were 4 percent of university income in 1960; 28 percent came from the state legislature and over half from the federal government; Otten 1970, 128. Free higher education for California residents was mandated by the university’s 1868 charter ; Douglass 1999, 395. 3. This was a liberalization of Stanford’s quota on women. In 1899, alarmed by the number of girls in the student body, founder Jane Lathrop Stanford speci¤ed that no more than 500 women could ever attend Leland Stanford Junior University at one time. This quota was enlarged in 1933, but it took a 1972 act of Congress and a 1973 court order to remove it; Jensen and Lothrop 1987, 51. 2. Cal 1. Education at Berkeley describes the varieties of students as of fall 1965; 1966, 13, 16–17, and 218–221. 2. Stadtman 1970, 394–398. Harry R. Wellman’s 1976 oral history describes the various ways in which Kerr decentralized administration (126–137) and the 1952 reorganization which created the chancellorship (75). Taylor (2000) devotes chapter 5 of Speaking Freely to “Clark Kerr’s University”; Rowland 1978, 46. Otten 1970, 160, describes the different style Kerr brought to the of¤ce of president, supported by cites to Kerr’s 1963 book. He observed that the university had been moving “away from personalized paternalism toward an impersonal, rational, bureaucratic pattern of control ” for some time (131). Sproul was not an academic; he moved into the presidency after serving as the university’s comptroller. Kerr was a faculty member. 287 3. Politics and the University 1. Stadtman 1970, chapter 6 on the 1870s. Article IX, § 9 of the California constitution of 1879 was intended to protect the university from becoming a creature of the legislature. 2. Heirich 1971, 68. The ex of¤cio Regents were the governor, lieutenant governor , speaker of the assembly, state superintendent of public instruction, president of the state board of agriculture, president of the mechanics institute, president of the alumni association, and the president of the university. In the early 1960s, three of the appointed Regents were women, all wives of important men. Dorothy Chandler and Catherine Hearst married into newspaper dynasties. Elinor Heller was a Democratic Party activist appointed to replace her husband as Regent when he died in 1961. 3. Heirich and Kaplan 1965, 12–18; Cohen 1993, xiv–xvi, 93–94, 100–101,¤rst quote on 124; Stadtman 1970, 293–297, second quote on 297; “Police Chief Was Music Major, Now Calls Legal Tune for Students,” Daily Californian, January 8, 1952. 4. Otten 1970, 129, 139–144, quote on 139; Hugh M. Burns oral history, 1981, 48. Rowland 1978, chapter 1, describes how the 1940 Yorty Committee evolved into the Tenney Committee. Both men were left-wing Democrats who became anticommunists after the CP organized against them. Tenney, a professional piano player and of¤cer in the musicians’ union, was elected to the assembly in 1936. After defeat for reelection as union president in 1939 he began his investigative career, taking his committee with him when elected to the state senate, representing Los Angeles County, in 1942. He also switched parties, running for vice president on the Christian Nationalist ticket in 1952 while serving in the senate as a Republican. The Los Angeles County Republican Central Committee refused to endorse him when he ran for reelection in 1954; he was defeated in the primary by Mildred Younger; Mildred Younger oral history...