Earning My Degree: Memoirs of an American University President

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Not long after my retirement as president of the University of California in 1992, Ann Lage of the Regional Oral History Project at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library asked if I would be willing to be interviewed for my oral history . I agreed but asked that the interviews be scheduled after two or three years had lapsed. The resulting interviews were conducted in 1995 and 1996 and published by the Regional Oral History Office in 1997. When Jim Clark, then the long-serving director of the University of California Press, read the oral history, he asked if I would be willing to redo the history in book form, as he believed the UC Press would wish to publish it. This would, he added, be the first such oral history by a former UC president to be reborn in book form and published by the press. I agreed to do so and undertook the work in 1997. Nearly six years have passed in the preparation of these memoirs, and another one will be required by the press to ready them for publication. While I did almost all of my own research and all of the writing for these memoirs, I remain forever indebted to those who helped me in this endeavor. Their encouragement, criticism, advice, and personal and professional help have been indispensable. The memoirs are more accurate, more sensitive, more inclusive, more salient, and more interestingly written than they would otherwise have been without the aid I so much needed and was so generously and helpfully offered. My research relied on the official records of the University of Utah and XVII the University of California; documents in my possession or in the hands of friends and colleagues, such as those involved in the work of the National Commission on Excellence in Education; the oral history of several regents, university officers, faculty, staff, and students conducted by Berkeley’s Regional Oral History Office (see appendix 4); the archives at the University of California and the University of Utah; accounts in newspapers and journals in both California and Utah, as well as national publications; published and unpublished documents of many kinds available from private and institutional sources, including my own files; and my own memory, when documents did not exist and I could not check my version of events with that of others who had been involved. In all of this, I received every consideration and possible assistance from the archivists at Utah and UC Santa Barbara; from William Roberts, Berkeley ’s just retired and long-serving archivist, and from David Farrell, his acting successor; from the secretary of the regents, Leigh Trivette, and her very helpful and able staff, especially Anne Shaw and Erica Nietfeld; from Connie Williams of the Office of Executive Records; from others in the Office of the President, especially Pat Pelfrey and Cecile Cuttitta; and, of course, from the university’s immediate past president, Richard Atkinson, who not only encouraged me in this effort but helped in innumerable ways throughout. In addition, I received the unqualified support of the staff at UC Berkeley ’s Center for Studies in Higher Education, especially from its late director , Professor Arnold Leiman, and from several colleagues there, including John Douglass and Marian Gade. The staff of the main libraries at Utah, Berkeley, and Santa Barbara were similarly helpful, as were several friends and colleagues who fleshed out or corrected my recollection of events included in these memoirs. Ann Hinckley, my research assistant at Utah, and friends Professors Tony Morgan and R. J. Snow, also of Utah, were helpful and encouraging throughout my research. The manuscript in its early, middle, and even later drafts was read variously and critically by President Emeritus Clark Kerr, UC’s president from 1958 to 1967 and Berkeley’s first chancellor from 1952 to 1958; President Emeritus Jack Peltason, UC’s president from 1992 to 1995 and former chancellor at UC Irvine from 1984 to 1992; Marian Gade, Kerr’s very capable associate of many years and a sometime Kerr coauthor; and Professor Emeritus Burton Clark of UCLA. The critical assistance of University Professor of Sociology Emeritus Neil Smelser and of Professor of Public Policy Emeritus Martin Trow, both of Berkeley, was simply indispensable. Their multiple readings of my several drafts of the manuscript were telling and deeply appreciated , and their straightforward criticisms were not noticeably influenced by our many years of friendship. I am forever in their...