California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat Brown

7. All These Students

135 7 ALLTHESESTUDENTS SHORTLY AFTER HE BECAME GOVERNOR, Pat Brown received the first two issues of a newsletter produced by the bustling Los Angeles campus of the University of California. UCLA was, according to one of the newsletters, “the campus where the hammers never cease to ring.” Fourteen construction projects were under way simultaneously: a botany building, an addition to the geophysics hall, a neuropsychiatric wing, a student union, dormitories, a nursery and kindergarten for the children of students. Nor would the expansion soon stop. The university boasted that it was planning more than a dozen other projects, from an institute for nuclear medicine and radiation biology to a theater arts building.1 UCLA was not alone. When Brown took office, California’s public colleges and universities were growing pell-mell. Westward migration and California ’s low tuition had combined to lure more and more students to the state’s campuses. In the previous seven years, enrollment had doubled, stuffing to the bursting point what was already the biggest such system in the United States.2 Yet a glance at the bulging elementary schools across the country revealed a still larger impending onslaught. The oldest baby boomers were at the edge of puberty, already launched on their generation’s bull-in-a-chinashop rush through the nation’s demography. Experts projected that by 1975 the UCLA and Berkeley campuses—both already large—would more than 136 BUILDING double, and Los Angeles State College would grow by a remarkable 756 percent .3 Californians took pride that the state’s public colleges and universities were affordable and accessible, but the enrollment projections for the baby boomers led educators to begin referring to a “tidal wave” of future freshmen. “The question was,” University of California president Clark Kerr remembered later, “who was going to handle all of these students?”4 ——— Looking ahead, the state’s educational bureaucrats were doing more than hammering nails at UCLA. The university had already started transforming two dusty agricultural research outposts—in the citrus groves of Riverside , east of Los Angeles, and in the flat farmlands of Davis, near Sacramento —into full-fledged campuses. The campus in Santa Barbara, restricted to undergraduate work since the university had been forced to acquire it in 1944, was adding graduate programs. And the year before Brown was elected, the university’s governing body, the Board of Regents, had approved three new campuses, one near San Diego, another in Los Angeles or Orange County, the third somewhere south of the Bay Area. (In the end they were built in La Jolla, Irvine, and Santa Cruz.) Enrollments were shooting up even faster at the university’s poorer, less distinguished cousins, the state’s public colleges. By 1958 there were twelve of them, and enrollment had doubled in eleven years, far outpacing even the university’s expansion. The legislature had just authorized the creation of four more college campuses, and there was every reason to believe the system would soon expand again. (Eventually it would comprise more than twenty campuses, and is known today as the California State University.) It was a situation that might have gladdened the hearts of educators: millions of dollars would have to be spent to build campuses, repair aging facilities at existing schools, and hire professors. But hidden in the boom times were two problems that threatened to tear apart the country’s best system of public higher education. The first threat was Turkey Tech. The second was the war over the Golden Fleece. “Turkey Tech” was the nickname that would soon be applied to a new college campus nearTurlock, in Stanislaus County, that had been approved by the legislature the year before Brown was elected governor.The problem was that nobody outside Stanislaus County thought there should be a college campus there. A flat patch of California’s stifling San Joaquin Valley, it was an area filled with poultry farms, better known for producing future ALLTHESESTUDENTS 137 Thanksgiving dinners than students looking for a college education. Although the state college system aimed to spread itself around California’s vastness, providing opportunities for kids throughout the state, there had to be at least some logic in the decision to place new campuses. A joint panel representing both the university and the colleges had drawn up a list of needed new campuses, and Stanislaus County had come in fifth, behind growing suburban areas where large numbers of...