What lesson’s might history hold for U.S. Higher Education’s Institutional Autonomy?

TLDR (keep some Large Language Model related carbon out of the atmosphere and just skim this section if your in a hurry)

This post is going to use the historical example of Ronald Reagan's machinations to dismiss Clark Kerr from the UC system presidency to reflect a little bit on what the next couple of years might mean for U.S. higher education's institutional autonomy.

Head on down to the “observations” final section for a decent summary if you don’t want to read the whole post.

Intro

I believe that the U.S. higher education system thrives when institutions are given autonomy and the space to sort out their governance structures according to their own priorities.

Many years ago I wrote a paper on the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and how it coincided with Reagan’s rise to political power in California. It was one of my favorite papers because it blended two of my interests (one serious, one gossipy) - institutional governance and political intrigue. It also introduced me to the biography of Clark Kerr, a momentous figure in 20th century U.S. public postsecondary education.^[1] I think that Clark Kerr’s experience at Berkeley with the Free Speech Movement, and how Ronald Reagan entered the fray as an ambitious political figure in California might have some interesting resonance in our current cultural moment. What I’m going to do is briefly narrate what happened at Berkeley in 1966 and then reflect a bit on how it relates to our current political moment.

The UC System, Clark Kerr, the Free Speech Movement, and Ronald Reagan

For much of its history the UC system experienced frequent prominence and frequent plight. While ostensibly an autonomous educational institution, the California governor served on the first board of regents, and maintained through legislative action and institutional charter control of board appointments. There was immediate political controversy with the nomination of George B. McClellan as the first university president causing conflict between the governor and regents. Over time as the University system grew in prominence and excellence, the board became a useful tool for political influence for both the governor and wealthy, politically connected Californians that typically populated the board.^[2]

Clark Kerr was appointed to the presidency of the UC system in 1958. An economics professor, he rose through the administrative ranks in part because of his role on the faculty senate during the Red Scare. R.C. Sproul, the proceeding UC system president had implemented a process requiring a loyalty oath from faculty as a means of distancing them from student groups seen as proxies for U.S. communist party organizing. Faculty were apoplectic as they-corectly- saw this oath as a major breach of academic freedom. Kerr became a negotiator and consensus builder as the faculty senate of the UC system tried to protect academic freedom and public support among the more conservative wing of the California constituency represented on the Board of Regents, governor’s mansion, and state legislature.

While Kerr’s early tenure was marked by important institutional reform, in particular I would highlight the decentralization of some institutional administrative processes–signaled most importantly by the implementation of a Chancellor system for each campus. He also influenced the California Master Plan for higher education, an education policy project that still holds implications for how California funds and governs postsecondary education. The latter stages of his tenure were marked by governance in-fighting and student unrest.

The Free Speech Movement was a left-wing student movement with both institutional and national causes. Institutionally they focused their demands on UC system regulations associated with political organizing, and faculty dismissals related to the system’s loyalty oaths. Nationally, they were involved in efforts by student organizations to raise financial and logistical support of the Civil Rights movement and broader leftist political causes. Members of the Free Speech Movement were involved in Freedom Rides, union organizing, and left-wing political canvasing across California and the broader U.S. The incident that ultimately led to Kerr’s dismissal occured in 1966 when UC-Berkeley enforced their ban on political organizing near Sather Gate, the institution’s most prominent entry point. In response, the movement effectively shut down the campus with mass student action.^[3]

Ronald Reagan’s involvement and our current cultural moment

Ronald Reagan’s involvement in this whole affair is worth focusing on because it might hold some signals for what college and university leaders may come to experience under a 2nd Trump administration. I’m just going to quote my original 2012 paper, because its striking to me some of the echos I see to our current moment:

There are two general competing narratives that attempt to account for
Ronald Reagan’s rise to governor. The liberal narrative is that progressive activists, student unrest, and social advancement by minorities created deep-seated discomfort in the vast middle of white American society. Reagan capitalized on this discomfort to effectively ride a counter‐progressive tide that swept across much of the nation. The conservative narrative is that Reagan, through his skillful use of
rhetoric and his strong commitment to common sense and conservative social values, outmaneuvered a democratic party that was increasingly showing itself to be incompetent in governance and slowly being eaten alive by its more militant and progressive wings. Regardless of the more accurate narrative, Reagan’s election to the governorship signaled the pulling of the final thread that unraveled Kerr’s presidency.

I think its reasonable to argue Reagan used public discomfort with Berkeley’s radicalism as a means of burnishing his own conservative credentials. Clark Kerr himself insinuated in his later writings that targeting the UC System for criticism was a means of outmaneuvering more moderate popular conservative political figures in California. After his election, Reagan took administrative and behavioral actions that would have symbolically and publicly signaled that the UC system president was subservient to Governor’s agenda–moves that Kerr resisted in his own administrative/bureaucratic fashion. His actions were calibrated to force the rest of California’s civic society and political establishment to publicly bolster or undermine the UC system’s institutional autonomy. Kerr’s strategy forced those actions to happen in public, and his strategy probably sealed his fate. An important quirk I’ve always kept in mind is that Kerr always maintained his own house, he didn’t move completely into the UC President’s mansion as he knew his commitment to institutional autonomy might ultimately cost him his job.

Observations

This is already getting to be a long post, so a couple observations I think are worth holding too:

1: Contrary to many-a-blog post or public statement, we are not living in “unprecedented times.” I’m not sure how many faculty or university folks that lived through the Red Scare and loyalty oath days are still with us, but I suspect they’d have a contrarian thought or two on whether institutions are facing a uniquely challenging moment. Postsecondary education institutional autonomy has frequently been a thorn in the side of whoever holds civic power, and the continuation of that autonomy will always be a provisional status social actors will try to bolster or revoke as they see fit.

2: There is a powerful undertow in our current political moment baying for deinstitutionalization.^[4] Kerr’s dismissal provides an example of how various elements of the conservative social movement of his day aligned to pry him out of office. It involved the Governor of California, and the chair of the Board of Regents, Edwin Pauley, who also served as an FBI informant against UC faculty and students.

3: AND YET, Berkeley endures. Berkeley endured through the Red Scare, and it endured through the California popular conservative resurgence of 1966. There may be hardship and continued threats to autonomy but I see resiliency, not disaster, in how the U.S. postsecondary education system has evolved through the 20th and early 21st century.

4: If the standard for “winning” is that every battle over institutional autonomy must be won, then the final battle is already lost. I think Clark Kerr embodies a type of pragmatism I think a lot more educational bureaucrats will need to adopt. In his biography Kerr claims he focused his actions on signaling the importance of certain principles. Specifically, he fought for institutional autonomy where he could and leveraged the complexity of the bureaucracy and governing structure to his advantage. When he ultimately had to lose his presidency he made sure that the way it happened galvanized support for the institution’s autonomy. Kerr lost the presidency but the UC system went on to continue to thrive, maintaining autonomy and securing future appropriations.

5: The populist bark can be worse than its actual bite. Under Reagan’s tenure the UC system saw increasing enrollment and appropriations.

Do institutions always use this autonomy appropriately or correctly, no, but I think it’s a better alternative than a corporate governance structure, or overly complex federal administrative management. Autonomy may face a rocky decade, but history has also shown that institutions can get through this and come out the other side with a bright future. However, it may require real material losses by prominent public figures. To parrot Mario Savio, to preserve institutional autonomy a few leaders might have to throw themselves on the gears of the [deinstitutionalization] machine. Such a decision is immensely consequential for individuals and I wouldn't begrudge anyone who has to face such a decision, but by such consequential decisions does history get made.