Golden Ambitions: A People and Their University | Miriam Pawel | California Dreams

Introduction: Golden Ambitions

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 0:02

Hello and welcome to the Clio Dialogues, the podcast that links history with the present to help us better understand the world we live in today. I am your host, Jennifer Robin Terry.

Guest, Miriam Pawel 0:14

It's an incredibly resilient institution. It has gone through, you know, major fiscal crises, it has gone through major political crises, it has gone through major academic crises, and it emerges from each one of them sort of changed but intact.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 0:30

My guest today is Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, journalist, and historian Miriam Pawel. She is the author of California Dreams: The Making and Remaking of the University of California, published by Bloomsbury Publishing. Welcome, Miriam. It's so great to see you again. I'm really glad you could join me here on the Clio Dialogues.

Guest, Miriam Pawel 0:50

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 0:52

I really enjoyed reading your book, California Dreams, and I think that anyone who was hired at the University of California should read this book. I was a grad student at Berkeley and I also taught at Berkeley. If at any time somebody had given me this book and I had read it, I think it would have contextualized my experience so much better. The university should just gift people this book because it really defines well the purpose and the intent of the University of California. I think people should understand that and understand the historical tradition that they're joining when they join the university.

Guest, Miriam Pawel 1:27

Yeah, I'm glad you took that away from it.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 1:29

Your

The University as a Mirror of California

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 1:30

book is history of the University of California. But as I was reading it, I was struck by how much it's actually also a history of the state of California. And I wondered, did you do that intentionally from the start, or did that just develop over time?

Guest, Miriam Pawel 1:45

You know, very intentionally from the start. And for me, I mean, part of the reason to write the book was to explain things about the university and how unusual it is and what its mission is and how well or it is or isn't meeting that mission. But it also was, to me, a way to just write a history of California by using the university as a lens through which to sort of trace that narrative arc of the state. You know, the state joins the union in 1850, the university is founded in 1868, so it really mirrors almost the entire history of the state. And I was just struck in thinking about the university by how much all of the social, demographic, political, economic, cultural changes that transformed California over the decades and centuries, all of them play out on the campuses. The university also helps to shape the state. So that was very intentional from the start.

From Gold Rush to Public University

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 2:41

I really love that. Can you take us back to the beginning, to 1868? Tell us a little bit about the University of California's founders as far as what did they envision for this university and how did those ambitions kind of shape the development of education in California?

Guest, Miriam Pawel 2:58

There's a few key factors that shaped the development in those early years. This is the post-gold rush era. There are now people pouring in to take advantage of the people who went to prospect for gold and of the money that has been raised by the gold diggers. For example, and the first person that I write about, her family founded one of the early nurseries in California because people needed food. They were importing all of their food. And it's really the beginning of the agricultural industry that becomes so important in California. You know, starts in those post-gold rush years. One of the other things that happens is that all of the different denominations send ministers to San Francisco to minister to the gold rush era inhabitants. And each of those denominations establishes themselves in different ways and in different places, but the congregationalists are particularly focused on education and on higher education. And so the first roots of the University of California are actually something called the College of California, which was founded by congregationalist ministers as a private university. And at the same time in 1862, in the middle of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln signs what becomes known as the Morrill Act, which is the first federal intervention into funding higher education. And it offers states money, land, actually, too that they can sell in exchange for establishing colleges of mining and agriculture, specifically those disciplines. The College of California agrees to give its name and property to the state of California so that California can qualify for Morrill Act money. They agree on the condition that it be not just a school of agriculture and mining, but also a general liberal arts and sciences college. That becomes really important because it shapes the trajectory of UC, that it's not a trade school, it's not an ag school exclusively, although agriculture isn't a really important part of its early years and an important part throughout its history. The second sort of important thing about those early ministers and founders is that they begin the school in Oakland. And before they even sell the College of California, they are looking for a new site to expand. And they look to the north of Oakland, to this barren land where there is almost nothing existing at the time, and buy acres and acres of what becomes Berkeley. And in fact, they name Berkeley after George Berkeley, who was an Irish philosopher. And they purchased that land, and so that becomes also part of the gift to the state of California. And what we now think of as Berkeley, the campus, begins to admit the first students in 1873 with two buildings, the North Hall and South Hall. And that is the genesis of the university.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 5:51

So Berkeley, the city, is named for the university, not the other way around.

Guest, Miriam Pawel 5:56

That's right. Yeah.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 5:57

That's so interesting.

Guest, Miriam Pawel 5:58

Exactly. And the other thing that is important about shaping those the university in the early years is that many of the founders come from Yale. And the colors blue and gold, which are adopted in, I think, 1873, the gold is obviously from the Golden Hills and Gold in California. And the blue is Yale blue. That's how significant Yale was in the early years.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 6:22

These men from Yale, did their experience at Yale shape how they viewed what they wanted to do with the University of California?

Guest, Miriam Pawel 6:31

I think it did in that sense of being an elite, exceptional, and well-rounded university. There are fights in the early years. As the agricultural interests become important in California, they want an ag school and they make the argument that the money that founded the school was supposed to be dedicated to agricultural education. And there actually is a really interesting and I think significant debate that goes on about well, what does that mean to educate the future farmers? Does it mean that they should be tradespeople and learn, you know, the agricultural skills, or does it mean that they should have a liberal arts education? And fortunately, I think the latter view prevails. And there are some really eloquent quotes from during the early debates about the future of the university, where people are saying, what farmer would want their son to be a hewer of wood and nothing more? So there is that sense early on that really shapes a lot of the university through its development that agriculture is an important field of study as well as a practical vocation.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 7:39

And the

A University for the People: Women and Free Tuition

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 7:40

University of California was open to all California residents in the early days, is that right?

Guest, Miriam Pawel 7:45

It was, including women, which was very unusual. They admitted women in 1870, two years after they opened, they admitted women, and they were very proud of that, actually, that unlike elite schools on the East Coast, some of which admitted women but had separate courses, like Harvard had Radcliffe as a women's school, that California was going to do it differently from the start.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 8:08

How much was tuition when it first opened?

Guest, Miriam Pawel 8:10

It was free, and it was a commitment in the Constitution that it should be free. And many people still hearken back to that, to the good old days when it was free. It continues to be free until the 1960s, basically, although there are there are fees, and then the fees become increased.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 8:27

That's pretty amazing that it went almost a hundred years with no tuition. And is that because of the support from the state legislature? Correct.

Guest, Miriam Pawel 8:37

So I mean one of the things that makes California unusual is its public commitment to higher education and the degree to which early on, there's a one of the early battles in 1889 in drafting what becomes the California Constitution is whether the university will be a constitutionally independent entity, which is to say it's a public trust, which means the state legislature cannot tell it what to do. And big battles over that. And ultimately those who really saw that as important won the day. So it has that degree of independence as a result of that and the public support that it enjoyed. For many years, it received the majority of its funding from the state. That begins to change. And as we know, that's certainly no longer the case. It does rely almost exclusively in the early years on public subsidies. There are philanthropists who are instrumental in especially the public buildings. So, you know, the Sather Tower and the Sather Gate on the Berkeley campus and Phoebe Hearst. I mean, there are individuals who commit significant resources, but the core funding is always through the state in those early years.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 9:46

One of the

Academic Excellence vs. Public Access

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 9:47

tensions that runs through the entire book is this relationship between academic excellence and high achievement, but preserving broad public access. How has that relationship evolved over the history of the university?

Guest, Miriam Pawel 10:02

That's absolutely right. It's a central tension throughout the history. The changes in the nature of that tension reflect the changes in California as it grows. From the beginning, Daniel Coit Gilman, who was the second president, came from Yale, very influential, has a quote in his inaugural address that gets repeated over the decades because it's so core to what people see as the mission of the university, which is this shall be a university for the people of California. It is not the University of New Haven, it is not the University of Berlin, it is the University of California. The obstacles to access are seen as primarily geographic. We end up getting a multi-campus university, which also is a first, because as Southern California grows, the pressures for access from people who are not living in the Bay Area spark really the growth of the university in its sort of second phase. So some of the access is financial, but as we've said, tuition is free. There is a cost of living for people, obviously, who have to leave home. But primarily access is defined as an as a geographic problem. And then as the demographics of California change over the years, access becomes something very different. And it becomes a question also of what high schools people come from. And as we zoom into the 20th century, California develops into a state that has an incredibly inequitable system of K-12 education. And so then access becomes a question of what is the university's responsibility to be accessible to students who, through no fault of their own, are in schools that don't offer advanced placement courses or don't offer honors courses, and therefore those students are automatically sort of shut out and are not qualifying. So access becomes a very central question as it continues to be today.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 11:55

And related

The 1960 Master Plan and Campus Expansion

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 11:56

to Californians' access to education is the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education. Can you explain this master plan? Because it really sets up the system that's still in place today that many Californians have benefited from.

Guest, Miriam Pawel 12:11

Right. So again, mirroring the growth in the state of California in those post-World War II years, the population of California just explodes, both because of the baby boom generation and also the military becomes such an important presence in California. So many people end up coming in and out of California during the war and wanting to come back here. So there's enormous growth, and that is creating both pressure on the institutions of higher education in general and demand for the university. And then also a lot of confusion because you have the three systems, the community colleges, what become the Cal State Universities, which were then called state schools and normal schools and begin as teacher colleges, and then the university campuses, which are at that point really LA, Berkeley, a little bit Santa Barbara, and some agricultural stations in Riverside and Davis. So there's both increased demand, but also there is a sort of a chaotic situation developing because every politician and every state legislator wants a college campus in their district. The question becomes: how are you going to impose some system that makes sense of all of this? And Clark Kerr becomes the principal negotiator on what becomes the master plan, which is really such a masterful feat of negotiation that no one has been able to undo it or untangle it ever since, even though it's subtitled 1960 to 1975. So it was really envisioned as something that was going to last for 15 years and we are, you know, still living with it today. What it does really significantly is define the jurisdictions of the three systems. It also establishes for the first time for any state the commitment to universal access and the idea that anyone who wants to go to higher education, there should be a place for them, and the community colleges are therefore accessible to anyone, that the Cal State systems are available for the top third of the graduating high school population, and the university campuses will be available to the top eighth. So it sets those out and also preserves for the UC system what they refer to as the crown jewels, which is the ability to grant advanced degrees and the professional degrees, something that is being contested even as we speak today. Some of the Cal states are pushing for the ability to give PhD programs. But under the master plan, it defined what the research universities will become. And then as part of that, you get the tremendous expansion of the system where three new campuses in San Diego, Santa Cruz, and Irvine are all created virtually overnight. Within two to three years, the sites are chosen and they're built in in ways that are really hard to fathom how quickly that happened in the world that we live in today, where it would take decades for that to happen.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 15:04

It did take decades for Merced.

Guest, Miriam Pawel 15:06

Literally 20 years for Merced. So when we come to the 21st century, and Merced is the first 21st century research university to open in the country and one of the fastest to reach R1 status, which is the highest designation. So it's been a real success in a lot of ways, but it took 20 years to just open. Whereas Irvine, UC Irvine was created so quickly that it was called the Instant University. And also, of course, there were no environmental laws then, and land was so much more available. So the Irvine Company owned like a third of Orange County that was just grazing land. And the idea was that the city of Irvine would be built around the university, which in fact is what happened.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 15:48

Yeah, I love the part where you're talking about Clark Kerr drawing this inner circle and that the university actually expands from there. It's a circle, it's a circular campus. That was very interesting.

Guest, Miriam Pawel 15:59

Yeah, it has this very large park area in the center. The architecture has changed and it's expanded in different ways, but it does still resemble very much his original drawing.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 16:09

And each individual campus in the University of California has a different focus and personality, would you say?

Guest, Miriam Pawel 16:17

Yes, I think that's also a very important thing that Clark Kerr did. There's no single person more responsible for the university as we know it today than Clark Kerr because he was just so influential during his tenure there. One of the things that he made a priority was the idea that each campus should have an individual identity. They should share certain centralized functions and certain standards of excellence, but each should develop its own personality. And I was really struck the more that I visited campuses by how much that is true today. They all reflect their communities, they've all shaped their communities. It's also an interesting facet of the California system that is not like any other state, that there is no single flagship campus. Although I know that there are people in a certain Northern California city who consider themselves to be the flagship campus, but at least on paper, you know, there is no flagship. Whereas in Texas, Illinois, you know, there's always a central campus and then the others.

Berkeley vs. UCLA: California's Campus Rivalries

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 17:18

One thing that I was surprised at was the campus in Berkeley did not want the campus in LA to open.

Guest, Miriam Pawel 17:25

Very much so. I mean, all of the North-South tensions, which I think are still true today, can be traced back to those earliest days. As water comes to LA around 1913, the economy in LA starts to explode, and you get a wealthy business class, and they want their own branch of the University of California. Not only is there a lot of opposition from the leadership in what was Cal, I mean, for 50 years the university was Berkeley, right? So there's a lot of concern by the regents and by the administration that, first of all, I think they regard Southern California as kind of a barbarian, uncivilized land. LA tries to get its own teachers' summer program for training teachers. And the response is like, wouldn't they rather come up here and enjoy all the benefits of being in Berkeley, you know, as opposed to being in LA? So there's a lot of snobbish feelings about LA and a fear that they will dilute resources and dilute money. And that again gets replicated every time there are new campuses. The older campuses are worried that they're going to somehow lose out because of that expansion. But there also is a lot of opposition from the existing private universities in Southern California because higher ed develops very differently in Southern California. You have a series of private schools, each really affiliated with a different denomination, Occidental and Whittier, and the big power player there is USC. And the USC lobbies very strongly and very publicly against an expansion of the University of California to LA, saying it will be a waste of taxpayer resources and it's unnecessary and they can handle everything fine. Thank you very much. But the supporters prevail, and in 1919, what was the two-year teacher training school becomes the Southern branch of the University of California and then gradually adds a third and fourth year and then expands how quickly that it needs more space and they move to Westwood.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 19:31

The

Ronald Reagan and the Politics of Higher Education

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 19:32

University of California was never a stranger to politics and political pressure. I wonder if you could just focus a little bit on the University of California during Ronald Reagan's governorship and tell our audiences a little bit about that period and how politics factored in.

Guest, Miriam Pawel 19:49

I think that's a very significant inflection point for the university in a lot of ways and for the state of California. The idea behind having the regents be appointed and appointed to first 16 and then ultimately 12-year terms was to shield the university from political interference. And there is an extent to which that is true, and particularly because of the constitutional independence. But obviously, just by nature, the fact that the regents are appointees, the party in power has a lot to do with shaping who's on the board. Berkeley, of course, is the home of the free speech movement and that which begins in 1964, and the images of all of the protests and the students and students who occupied Sproul Hall being dragged out over their, you know, bounced over the steps, and all of that becomes a significant campaign issue for Ronald Reagan, a little known actor running for governor in 1966. And the university becomes a target for him, not so much because he has anything against it per se, but because all of their focus groups show that he's running to clean up the mess at Berkeley, that that is his most popular campaign slogan. And so, you know, he follows up on that. He's not the sole reason that Clark Kerr is fired, but Clark Kerr is fired with the definite help and assistance of Reagan and his appointees in January of 67. It's one of the first significant events of Reagan's tenure. And that's a real loss, obviously, to the university in terms of its vision and leadership. But it's also really was very striking to me reading through -- Kerr kept like amazing files. He's sort of a historian and an archivist's dream. I mean, he just kept everything. From the letters he sent home when he was a student, first arriving in California, he wrote weekly letters to his father. To when he's fired, he kept all of the letters that were sent to him by other people. And they're just folders and folders of letters that people sent. And in reading through them, one of the things that was really striking to me was how people saw this not only as, you know, a major turning point for the university itself, but that this reflected a real shift in the politics of California. And that people who had embraced the university were really turning on it. And that plays out in a loss of financial support for the university over the following really 16 years. So Reagan certainly politicized the university in ways that made it a political fight in ways that it had been before, but in different circumstances. There was a very public political fight over the loyalty oath back in the 50s, but that is more an issue of academic freedom and less an issue of the public support of the university per se.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 22:50

Do you see any parallels with the politics that the university is having to engage with today, with the current federal administration?

Guest, Miriam Pawel 22:58

Very much so. I mean, we're certainly in a time when higher education in general and public higher education specifically is very much under assault. And there are political leaders certainly in Washington and some in California as well, who are attacking the funding mechanisms for education and the value of it, I think we're seeing a repeat of a lot of those arguments and issues.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 23:20

This book

A University That Endures: Crisis and Resilience

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 23:21

is beautifully written. You're such a wonderful storyteller. It's being released right now in this time of political tension, people questioning the value of education. And yet you end the book on a high note, a very optimistic note. What in the history of the University of California helps you to end on that high note?

Guest, Miriam Pawel 23:40

Yeah, I do. I mean, I'm not that much of an optimist by nature, but I am fairly optimistic about the university in terms of its ultimate survival. And I feel that way because I think when you look at the history, it is demonstrated over and over again that it's an incredibly resilient institution, that it has gone through, you know, major fiscal crises, it has gone through major political crises, it has gone through major academic crises. And it emerges from each one of them sort of changed, but intact. Sometimes changed for the better, sometimes changed for the worse. You know, the affirmative action crisis that it went through when in 1995 affirmative action was banned by the regents before it was banned in the state of California in general. And that created a whole different kind of crisis and an access crisis. The university responded in ways that reflected the greatest commitment to outreach that it ever made, because it was forced to wrestle with that question of what is the university's responsibility when we live in a state that has, you know, the premier system of public higher education in the country, without a doubt, and yet has, you know, a very weak and extremely inequitable system of K through 12 education. And that continues to be a crisis that the university grapples with. So some of these crises wax and wane, but I think overall it is resilient, and it is resilient in part because people in California really care about the University of California. They feel a sense of ownership in a way that you do not see in other states. I puzzled a lot over sort of why that is. People feel a connection. They love it, they hate it, even if their kids get rejected, they still think highly of it. I mean, it just, it's a complicated relationship that people have, but you know, it's hard sometimes to you can almost start a conversation with anyone and they have some connection. So it's so omnipresent and in people's lives. I don't deal in the book with the hospitals and the in the health services centers, which are an enormous piece of the university, also, and for many people where they encounter it. There's a quote from Joan Didion, which I'll paraphrase, but it's basically that the University of California is California's most coherent idea of itself, perhaps the only coherent idea. It is an institution that works. I mean, sometimes it works better than other times, but it is hard to think of other public institutions, certainly none of the scope and size that it has that have continuously functioned for all of these decades. So I'm quite confident it will continue to function.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 26:22

To learn more about this and any book featured on the Clio Dialogues, read Clio's book reviews at www.cliodialogues.com. This has been the Clio Dialogues. Please like, follow, and subscribe, and join me again next time because history isn't finished with us.