"Building a Culture of Aspiration." John Aubrey Douglass. Preface, The California Idea and American Higher Education: 1850 to the 1960 Master Plan Chinese Edition (April 2007)

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Abstract: Although the scale is hugely different, and there are major cultural and institutional contrasts, both China and California share the opportunities and challenges of long-term enrollment growth and expansion of their higher education systems. And like much of the world, governments and university leaders in each country must struggle with the twin goals of both expanding access to higher education and enhancing the quality of their institutions.

In the United States, the most important unit of analysis for understanding how higher education has grown in enrolment, management, productivity and quality, and for deciphering its overarching role in society, is at the state level. The federal government in Washington DC has played a central role in providing bursts of funding that shaped the great diversity of institutional types in the United States and bolstered basic science research. But it has been at the state level of government that public higher education–which now enrolls nearly 80 percent of all students in the nation – has been structured and managed, thus providing broad policy mandates for access and governance while affording significant autonomy to individual institutions.

The following book, The California Idea, traces how and why California developed its pioneering higher education system—the first coherent system of institutions built around the innovation of the 2-year community college, a set of regional colleges, and a high quality multi-campus research university. It is a story of policymaking and institution building that has arguably resulted in one of the most influential higher education models in the world. As told in the following pages, it is also a political story that links the ideas and actions of individuals with the larger political and cultural world in which they functioned.

California was not the only state to pioneer the idea of mass higher education or to pursue the ideal of the public university as a central social and economic force for regional and national development, but clearly California was and remains a leader that remains a focal point of interest to nations throughout the world.