CLARK KERR AND THE CALIFORNIAN MODEL OF HIGHER EDUCATION

Fifty years on, Clark Kerr’s multiversity and the Californian Master Plan for Higher Education stand as signal high points in the building of not just great public institutions but high participation modern human society. Key features of the Californian Model have become a universal template for research universities and system design. Seminal ideas and practices of higher education developed by Clark Kerr, Martin Trow, Burton Clark and others continue to colonize the thinking of policy makers, scientists, scholars, students and citizens, with profound effects not just in the United States but in every country. Yet the Californian Model of higher education - which long appeared everywhere else to be ahead of its time – was also specific to its own time and place. The conditions in which it was born, and which nurtured its flourishing, have changed. This is the first of three Clark Kerr Lectures on the Role of Higher Education in Society by Simon Marginson and organized and hosted by the Center for Studies in Higher Education with the generous support of the UC Office of the President and the Carnegie Corporation and delivered on September 30, 2014 at the David Brower Center, Berkeley. Previous Kerr Lecturers include Harold Shapiro, Charles Vest, Donald Kennedy, Hanna Holborn Gray, and Neil Smelser.