Clark Kerr: From the industrial to the knowledge economy

American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century

Volumn , Issue , 2006, Pages 71-87

  Riley, Paddy ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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EID: 84895625977     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
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References (100)

1. Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 78. The book was originally presented as the Godkin Lectures at Harvard University in 1963. The Uses of the University reached its fifth edition in 2001.
2. This is even true of Kerr's own recent memoirs, which are focused on his role at the UC. See The Gold and the Blue: A Personal Memoir of the University of California, 1949-1967, 2 vols (Berkeley: University of Press, 2001, 2003).
3. See for instance W. J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War: The 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989)
4. Robert Cohen and Reginald E. Zelnik, eds., The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
5. For commentary focusing on Kerr's career in higher education, see, in addition to the works by Douglass and Geiger cited later in this essay, Mary Soo and Cathryn Carson, "Managing the Research University: Clark Kerr and the University of California", Minerva 42, 3 (September 2004):215-36.
6. Clark Kerr, The Gold and the Blue, vol. 1, Academic Triumphs, 14.
7. In addition, see Howard Brick, "Talcott Parson's 'Shift Away from Economics', 1937-1946" Journal of American History 87, 2 (September 2000):490-515.
8. Reviews of National Science Policy: The United States (Paris: OECD, 1968), Table 2, 32;
9. See also Herman Van der Wee, Prosperity and Upheaval: The World Economy, 1945-1980 (New York: Viking, 1986), chaps. 4 and 5.
10. For California numbers, see John Aubrey Douglass, The California Idea and American Higher Education 1850 to the 1960 Master Plan (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 1. A sense of the postwar growth in higher education can be seen in change in the percent of the population aged eighteen to twenty-four enrolled in college. In 1946 it was 12.5 percent, in 1960, 22.2 percent, in 1970, 32.1 percent.
11. Historical Statistics of the United States: From Colonial Times to 1970, vol. 2, 383, Series H 700-715. A number of economists began to write about "human capital" in relation to education in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including Theodore Schultz, Gary Becker, and Fritz Machlup. For a review of this literature
12. see Paul J. McNulty, The Origins and Development of Labor Economics: A Chapter in the History of Social Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980), 192-97.
13. See also David A. Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), especially chapter 8, "Science as a Weapon", for an incisive portrait of the liberal attraction to science and education in this period.
14. Daniel Bell, "Labor", Fortune, April 1958, 215-18.
15. See also Bell, "The Capitalism of the Proletariat: A Theory of American Trade-Unioinism", in The End of Ideology (1960; New York: Collier, 1962), 211-26;
16. Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 118-21, 176-77.
17. Howard Brick, "Optimism of the Mind: Imagining Postindustrial Society in the 1960s and 1970s", American Quarterly 44, 3 (September 1992):348-80.
18. Kerr, The Gold and the Blue, 1:3-15.
19. Another of Kerr's mentors, the labor historian Ira B. Cross, was also a student of Commons. For background on the development of labor economics in the U. S., see McNulty, The Origin and Development of Labor Economics.
20. For Taylor's ethnographic bent, see, for example, Paul Taylor, "Nonstatistical Notes from the Field", in Paul Taylor, On the Ground in the Thirties (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1983), 233
21. and his documentary work with Dorothea Lange, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1939).
22. "Beyond question", Carey McWilliams wrote in 1939, "the strikes of these years are without precedent in the history of labor in the United States. Never before had farm laborers organized on any such scale and never before had they conducted strikes of such magnitude and such far reaching social significance." Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (Boston: Little, Brown, 1939), 211. According to Kerr and Taylor, over 10, 000 workers were involved in the cotton-pickers strike.
23. The strike was eventually resolved when both sides submitted to an agreement worked out by a fact-finding committee chaired by Ira B. Cross. "Documentary History of the Strike of the Cotton Pickers in California 1933", in Taylor, On the Ground in the Thirties, 17-158, 19, 99-117.
24. Clark Kerr and Paul Taylor, "Uprisings on the Farms", Survey Graphic 24, 1 (January 1935):19-22, 44.
25. Other examples of Kerr's work with Taylor include "Whither Self-Help?" Survey Graphic 23, 7 (July 1934):328-31, 348
26. and "Putting the Unemployed at Productive Labor", Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 176(1934):104-11. The full version of Kerr and Taylor's report on the strike, "Documentary History of the Strike of the Cotton Pickers", unpublished until 1940, was an excellent example of Taylor's "nonstatistical notes from the field." Containing only a bare skeleton of narrative structure, the report was a montage of interviews, press clippings, and brief commentary. The full report was first published by the LaFollette Committee in the Senate, as part of a series of investigations into the "Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor"
27. Clark Kerr, "Productive Enterprises of the Unemployed, 1931-1938", 4 vols. (Ph. D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1939), 1: v.
28. California contained by far the largest number of worker cooperatives throughout the depression (see 1:24, 31, 33). For a study of the California cooperatives based primarily on Kerr's dissertation, see Derek C. Jones and Donald J. Schneider, "Self-Help Production Cooperatives: Government-Administered Cooperatives During the Depression", in Worker's Cooperatives in America, ed. Robert Jackall and Harry Levin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 57-84.
29. George Bernard Noble, "Twelfth Regional War Labor Board, Seattle Washington. Termination Report." Termination Report of the N. W. L. B. (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1947), 2:80. According to Kerr, governmental work during the war led to later scholarly prominence-"Only a few others, without comparable wartime experience, made major contributions in the immediate postwar period"
30. Clark Kerr, The Balkanization of Labor Markets and Other Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 1.
31. James B. Atleson, Labor and the Wartime State: Labor Relations and Law During World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 46;
32. Kerr, Balkanization of Labor Markets, 3
33. "Opinion", "In the Matter of New Service Laundries, Inc., Eugene, Oregon and Laundry Workers International Union, Local #206, AFL", Case No. 111-1536-D, U. S. National War Labor Board, Region 12, Directive Order[s], vol. 3 (Seattle:, 1942-45; located in Main Library, University of California, Berkeley). Kerr has a few other opinions scattered throughout these volumes, which record the actions of the board on a series of cases. For more patriotic rhetoric, see his opinion on the board's decision, "In the Matter of Pacific Northwest Foundry Operators, Washington and Oregon, and International Molders and Foundry Workers' Union of North America" Case No. 12-5819, vol. 3. See also Atleson, Labor and the Wartime State, 113, for another example.
34. See Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)
35. esp. chap. 10 and Atleson, Labor and the Wartime State, chapter 6.
36. Atleson, Labor and the Wartime State, chap. 4. A similar voluntarist philosophy, Christopher Tomlins has shown, animated the work of William Leiserson at the National Labor Relations Board before the war.
37. Tomlins, The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880-1960. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), esp. chap. 6;
38. Katherine Van Wezel Stone, "The Post-War Paradigm in American Labor Law", Yale Law Journal 90, 7 (June 1981):1511-80, 1515.
39. On the declension from corporatism, see Nelson's Lichtenstein's classic "From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining: Organized Labor and the Eclipse of Social Democracy in the Postwar Era", in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 122-52.
40. See also Reuel Schiller, "From Group Rights to Individual Liberties: Post-War Labor Law, Liberalism, and the Waning of Union Strength", Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law 20 (Summer 1999)
41. for an especially good overview of how the assumption of unions as a "countervailing power" to management informed postwar labor case law, and Katherine Van Wezel Stone, "The Legacy of Industrial Pluralism: The Tension Between Individual Employment Rights and the New Deal Collective Bargaining System", University of Chicago Law Review 59, 2 (Spring 1992):575-644.
42. Numbers from Michael Goldfield, The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 10.
43. Robert Lancelot Clewett, "Industrial Relations Research Centers in American Universities", M. A. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1949;
44. see also Milton Derber, Research in Labor Problems in the United States (New York: Random House, 1967), 8-9. For the research and policy agenda of the Berkeley Institute, see University of California, Institute of Industrial Relations, Institute of Industrial Relations, 1946 and A Progress Report of the Institute of Industrial Relations, 1945-1952 (both at Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley).
45. The first annual meeting of the IRRA occurred the following year. Kerr was a member of the IRRA Organizing Committee, which included some of the more renowned labor economists of the 1930s, like Edwin Witte, Sumner Slichter, and George W. Taylor. Also on the committee were younger students of labor, like Kerr's colleague Frederick Harbison, and C. Wright Mills (vice-president of the IRRA for 1948; Mills seems to have left the association shortly thereafter). See Milton Derber and William H. McPherson, "The Formation and Development of the IRRA", Industrial Relations Research Association, Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting, 1947, 2-4. The IRRA was formed as an interdisciplinary association, but while it drew members from many social science fields, economists and industrial relations scholars were in the clear majority. The 1954 Membership Directory lists 307 "Academic" members affiliated with "Economics and Commerce" and 128 with "Industrial Relations" but only 23 law professors, 11 political scientists, 26 psychologists, and 23 sociologists. Industrial Relations Research Association, Membership Directory, 1954. On the interdisciplinary character of industrial relations
46. see McNulty, Origin and Development of Labor Economics, 197-200.
47. Edwin Witte, "Where We Are in Industrial Relations", IRRA, Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting, 1947, 6-20.
48. Lichtenstein, Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), esp. chap. 10;
49. Atleson, Labor and the Wartime State, chap. 6. On the pitfalls of arbitration, see Atleson, chap. 4;
50. Stone, "The Post-War Paradigm";
51. and Nelson Lichtenstein, "Great Expectations: The Promise of Industrial Jurisprudence and Its Demise, 1930-1960", in Industrial Democracy in America: The Ambiguous Promise, ed. Nelson Lichtenstein and Howell John Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 118-41.
52. See Myers, "Conclusions and Implications", 46-54.
53. Stone, "The Post-War Paradigm", 1513-14. According to Howell John Harris, the progressive managerial attitude described in Causes of Industrial Peace "simply failed to win the support of most nationally important firms"
54. Howell John Harris, The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 138-39.
55. See also Ronald Schatz, "From Commons to Dunlop: Rethinking the Theory and Field of Industrial Relations", in Lichtenstein and Harris, Industrial Democracy in America, 87-112.
56. Clark Kerr, "Industrial Relations and the Liberal Pluralist";
57. IRRA, Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Meeting, 1954, 10, 12-13.
58. "From one point of view", Kerr argued, "society is a huge mediation mechanism, a means for settling disagreements between rival claimants-taxpayers and recipients of benefits, buyers and sellers, proponents of opposing political ideologies-so that people may live together in some state of mutual tolerance.... Society in the large is the mediation machinery for industrial as well as other forms of conflict." Clark Kerr, "Industrial Conflict and its Mediation", American Journal of Sociology 60, 3 (November 1954):243.
59. See also Kerr, "An Effective and Democratic Organization of the Economy", in President's Commission on National Goals", Goals for Americans (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1960), 149-61.
60. See Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 12-13.
61. For a more extensive discussion of the relationship between pluralism and industrial pluralism, see Lichtenstein, State of the Union, 148-56.
62. For a narrative of the oath controversy, see David P. Gardner, The California Oath Controversy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). The dispute between the faculty and the Board of Regents was concerned not only with whether or not nonsigners should be reinstated, but whether or not the Committee on Privileges and Tenure even had the authority to determine the tenure rights of the nonsigners. Thus the dismissal of the nonsigners was also a demonstration of the regents' supremacy. Kerr thought such this course of action rash; he attempted to persuade the Board to seek an alternative solution (for Kerr's interchange with John Francis Neylan at a pivotal meeting of the Board, see Gardner, 188-89). Kerr's role in the controversy as an embattled mediator would become even more familiar in the 1950s and 1960s, as he contended with right-wing politicians in California, from Hugh Burns (Jack Tenney's successor on the Senate Un-American Activities Committee) to Ronald Reagan, while attempting to fend off the charges of radical students and faculty at the same time. This is the self-portrait he sketches in his memoirs, especially in vol. 2, which is focused on "political turmoil" on the UC campus (see vol. 2, chap. 2 for his narrative of the oath controversy, and chap. 3 for his encounters with the anticommunist right wing). Kerr argues that the oath controversy had a strong influence on the political culture of the University of California throughout the 1950s; the negative heritage of the controversy, he suggests, was not fully cast aside until, with his backing, the Regents formally approved lifetime tenure for all UC faculty in 1958. As it turned out, Kerr, who was fired as UC president in the winter of 1967, but retained his academic appointment, would become one of the first beneficiaries of the new tenure provision (The Gold and the Blue, vol. 1, chap. 9).
63. In 1952, the Levering Act oath was incorporated into the state constitution, an action that Kerr, in league with other Quakers, publicly opposed. See The Gold and the Blue, 1:130. While it did not specifically mention "communism", the Levering oath, Gardner argues, was "more offensive than the one they [the nonsigners] had fought earlier" (California Oath Controversy, 250). For more on the court's decision and the Levering Act, see Gardner, chaps. 7 and 8.
64. and Roger L. Geiger, Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities Since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 73-82.
65. Clark Kerr, "The University in a Progressive Society", Pacific Spectator 7, 3 (Summer 1953):268-77, 268, 276-77.
66. Kerr, "The University in a Progressive Society", 268.
67. See James L. Cochrane, Industrialism and Industrial Man in Retrospect: A Critical View of the Ford Foundation's Support for the Inter-University Study of Labor (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International, 1979), especially chapter 4. For the continuing emphasis on human resources, see also notes 41 and 42 below. The foundation's devotion to American education was evident in the establishment of the Fund for the Advancement of Education and the Fund for Adult Education in 1951 and the expenditure of close to $33 million on education by 1953.
68. Thomas C. Reeves, Freedom and the Foundation: The Fund for the Republic in the Era of McCarthyism (New York: Knopf, 1969), chap. 1. The foundation also supported a long term project at Columbia, the National Manpower Council, which produced a series of books concerning education and scientific manpower in the contemporary United States.
69. See National Manpower Council, Manpower Policies for a Democratic Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965).
70. For the Ford Foundation's support of international studies, see Robert A. McCaughey, International Studies and Academic Enterprise: A Chapter in the Enclosure of American Learning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), chap. 6.
71. See also Edward H. Berman, The Ideology of Philanthropy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), chap. 4. Here I focus on the major theoretical work of Kerr et al.'s project, Industrialism and Industrial Man, and mainly in the context of Kerr's shift from labor to education. There is much more to be said about the international dimension of the group's research agenda. A sense of the scope of the project can be seen in the bibliographies in Cochrane and in Kerr, Dunlop, Harbison, and Myers, Industrialism and Industrial Man Reconsidered (Princeton, N. J.: Inter-University Study of Human Resources in National Development, 1975). By 1975, foundation funding had supported the research behind 36 books and 43 articles. At one time or another, 95 scholars, in the U. S. and abroad, were affiliated with the study.
72. Clark Kerr with Abraham J. Siegel, "The Structuring of the Labor Force in Industrial Society: New Dimensions and New Questions", in Kerr, Labor and Management in Industrial Society (New York: Anchor Books, 1964), 304, 316, 327. This essay was originally published in Industrial and Labor Relations Review in January 1955. Cochrane notes that Kerr and Siegel first presented the essay as a paper at a Cornell University Conference in 1953.
73. Kerr with Siegel "The Structuring of the Labor Force", 321. Kerr and Siegel, as they noted at the beginning of their essay, were clearly borrowing from the social sciences in order to develop their interpretation of industrialization. Their debt to sociology especially was evident in the language of the essay, which was rife with abstractions like "structuring of the labor force", "organized instrumentality", the "strategies and tactics" of "contending groups" in a given "environmental context." This move towards social science was reflected in the Berkeley Institute as well. In 1946, the research staff included Kerr, Lloyd Fisher, and three research assistants. By 1953, when E. T. Grether took over as director of the institute, the research staff had expanded to twenty-four members.
74. While still dominated by labor economists, the staff included the sociologists Reinhard Bendix and Philip Selznick (soon to be joined by Seymour Martin Lipset), three psychologists, and two political scientists. A Progress Report of the Institute of Industrial Relations, 1945-1952, 48-49.
75. Clark Kerr, Frederick H. Harbison, John T. Dunlop, and Charles A. Myers, "The Labour Problem in Economic Development: A Framework for a Reappraisal, ". International Labour Review 71, 3 (March 1955):223-35, quotes 227, 231-32.
76. Frederick H. Harbison and Charles A. Myers, Management in the Industrial World: An International Analysis (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 16. This appreciation of management, however, didn't prevent Harbison and Myers from criticizing American business elites for their resistance to union representation and growth (see 376).
77. Kerr et al., "The Labour Problem in Economic Development", 231.
78. Harbison and Myers, Management in the Industrial World, 121.
79. Much of the argument about the importance of education was anticipated in J. Douglas Brown and Frederick Harbison, High-Talent Manpower for Science and Industry: An Appraisal of Policy at Home and Abroad (Princeton, N. J.: Industrial Relations Section, 1957).
80. Harbison and Myers would spend much of the remainder of their careers writing about the function of education in economic development. Their subsequent publications included Frederick H. Harbison and Charles A. Myers, Education, Manpower, and Economic Growth: Strategies of Human Resource Development (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964);
81. Harbison and Myers, eds., Manpower and Education: Country Studies in Economic Development (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965). Harbison published independently Educational Planning and Human Resource Development (Paris: UNESCO, 1967) and Human Resources as the Wealth of Nations (Oxford: UNESCO, 1973).
82. John T. Dunlop, Frederick H. Harbison, Clark Kerr, and Charles A. Myers, Industrialism and Industrial Man: The Problems of Labor and Management in Economic Growth (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1960), 36-37.
83. The significance of education was also reflected in two subsequent grants received by Kerr and his colleagues. In 1960, they accepted $200, 000 from the Carnegie Corporation to study the "role of education and high-level manpower in the modernization process", and in 1961 they received a terminal grant from the Ford Foundation ($250, 000) under the title "human resources in industrializing countries." The group had received one other small grant in 1955 ($50, 000) to finance research by Harbison in the Middle East. The total of all grants received, then, was $1, 050, 000 (Cochrane, Industrialism and Industrial Man in Retrospect, 2). On the change of the title, and the turn towards human resources and education
84. see also Dunlop, Harbison, Kerr, and Myers, Industrialism and Industrial Man Reconsidered, 1-5. The study ended up supporting a number of books focused on higher education in the United States and abroad, including the work of Harbison and Myers, a few books by the labor economist E. Wright Bakke and a comparative study by Seymour Martin Lipset.
85. Dunlop et al., Industrialism and Industrial Man, 10, 288.
86. Dunlop et al., Industrialism and Industrial Man, 289.
87. Dunlop et al., Industrialism and Industrial Man, 292-93.
88. Dunlop et al., Industrialism and Industrial Man, 286, 295.
89. Clark Kerr, "Education for a Free Society: The California Experience", in Writings and Addresses, vol. 3 (Bancroft Library). The dual nature of the plan-to provide universal access and preserve meritocracy-is obvious in the planned freshman acceptance rates of each segment of the system: UC, top 12.5 percent of high school graduates; state colleges, 33.33 percent; junior colleges, 100 percent.
90. See A Master Plan for Higher Education in California (Sacramento: California State Department of Education, 1960), chaps. 4 and 5. The story of the master plan is best told in Douglass, The California Idea and American Higher Education, chaps. 9-11. For a more critical view see Nicholas Lemann, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999) chaps. 10, 11, 14.
91. A good examination of the strains experienced by the Plan in operation is Neil J. Smelser, "Growth, Structural Change, and Conflict in California Higher Education, 1950-1970", in Public Higher Education in California, ed. Gabriel Almond and Neil J. Smelser (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).
92. "Master Planner", Time, October 17, 1960, 58-69; 59.
93. The Uses of the University, 22-30.
94. Clark Kerr, "Industrial Relations and University Relations", IRRA, Proceedings of the Twenty-First Annual Winter Meeting, 1968, 18.
95. Clark Kerr, "1984 Revisited", Commencement Address, Albright College, Reading, Pennsylvania, June 5, 1960, Writings and Addresses, vol. 6.
96. For contemporary coverage of the Kerr's battle with Reagan, see Time, January 20, 1967, 64, and January 27, 1967, 60, as well as Los Angeles Times, January 19, 20, 21, 22 1967.
97. See also Kerr's version in The Gold and the Blue, vol. 2, chaps. 15 and 16. On the state of the public university today, see, e.g.
98. David Hollinger, "Money and Academic Freedom a Half-Century After McCarthyism: Universities amid the Force Fields of Capital", in Unfettered Expression: Freedom in American Intellectual Life, ed. Peggie J. Hollingsworth (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 161-84;
99. Eyal Press and Jennifer Washburn, "The Kept University", Atlantic Monthly (March 2000):39-54;
100. Peter Schrag, Paradise Lost: California's Experience, America's Future (New York: New Press, 1998), 87-93.