The California Idea and American Higher Education: 1850 to the 1960 Master Plan (review)

This book offers a persuasive and in many ways unprecedented history of the policy debates that gave California one of the most comprehensive and influential public university systems in the world. The "California idea," put most generously, expressed a Progressive belief that quality and inclusion were compatible. California's Progressives held that a system of mass higher education could also produce the most competitive research. They also held that capitalism could benefit everyone, and that higher education could nurture business while constantly upgrading its workforce. Douglass's book is a study of a historically crucial form of enlightened self-interest, one that is currently under siege.

Douglass describes the political alignments and conflicts that produced four major waves of Progressive educational development. The first inaugurated the university not long after the Anglo conquest of California with a version of the Morrill Act's ideal of service to agriculture and industry. The second rode the wave of increased democratic accountability associated with the Progressive electoral victories of the 1910s. The third immediately followed World War II, which, among other things, greatly expanded undergraduate enrollments. And the fourth began with Edmund G. "Pat" Brown's gubernatorial victory in 1956, which kicked off the most rapid educational growth in the state's history and led to the vaunted "Master Plan for Higher Education" of 1960.

Without ignoring ongoing conflicts, Douglass interprets the Master Plan as a successful reconciliation of colliding constituencies. There is much reason for this. The Plan instituted some form of higher education for every Californian regardless of ability to pay. Its crucial feature was a three-tier hierarchy of multicampus university systems. Community colleges could offer open admission in every corner of the state and support local economies in ways town and local legislators had long demanded. The California State University would admit the top third of high school graduates and would focus on undergraduate instruction; the University of California would admit the top eighth of high school graduates and would retain a near-monopoly on high-end research. The Plan sought to synthesize mass and elite education, democracy and meritocracy. Everyone would find a place somewhere in a structure that ranged from the vocationally oriented community colleges, which now had regularized and expanded funding, to the "flagship" UC campuses, which now could protect their elite research missions from funding competition from a larger number of miscellaneous local campuses.

Douglass details the continuous conflicts among political and educational leaders and, to a lesser extent, the conflicts within "the California idea" itself. These are clearest in the history of the upper tier of the system, the University of California. From the beginning, UC leaders attributed its quality to an unusual constitutional independence from popular legislative control. They thought in terms of an Anglo California that never reflected the actual working population of the state. They sought the support of political elites by arguing that the university research and training underwrote large-scale, high-tech economic growth: every UC President since Wheeler in 1900 has promised business a "new economy." UC's later success depended heavily on extraordinary population growth and Cold War concerns about national security. UC leaders generally opposed the expansion of higher education into local communities, and they may have seen business rather than the general public as their main constituency. In sum, the Master Plan did not so much synthesize excellence and inclusion as it gave each a separate place at opposite ends of a formally hierarchical educational system. Although this had clear educational as well as political advantages, the Plan tended to reinforce an elitist rather than a democratic conception of excellence and merit, one consistent with the highly concentrated direction of an "inclusive" economy that has been a constant of California history. The Plan reflected antidemocratic as well as democratic sentiment. [End Page 197...