THE DREAM IS OVER The CRISIS of CLARK KERR’S CALIFORNIA IDEA of HIGHER EDUCATION S I M O N M A R G I N S O N Luminos is the open access monograph publishing program from UC Press. Luminos provides a framework for preserving and rein- vigorating monograph publishing for the future and increases the reach and visibility of important scholarly work. Titles published in the UC Press Luminos model are published with the same high standards for selection, peer review, production, and marketing as those in our traditional program. www.luminosoa.org The Dream Is Over THE CLARK KERR LECTURES ON THE ROLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN SO CIET Y 1. The American Research University from World War II to World Wide Web: Governments, the Private Sector, and the Emerging Meta-University, by Charles M. Vest 2. Searching for Utopia: Universities and Their Histories, by Hanna Holborn Gray 3. Dynamics of the Contemporary University: Growth, Accretion, and Conflict, by Neil J. Smelser 4. The Dream Is Over: The Crisis of Clark Kerr’s California Idea of Higher Education, by Simon Marginson The Dream Is Over The Crisis of Clark Kerr’s California Idea of Higher Education Simon Marginson UNIVERSIT Y OF CALIFORNIA PRESS The Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, is a multidisciplinary research and policy center on higher education oriented to California, the nation, and comparative international issues. CSHE promotes discussion among university leaders, government officials, and academics; assists policy making by providing a neutral forum for airing contentious issues; and keeps the higher education world informed of new initiatives and proposals. The Center’s research aims to inform current debate about higher education policy and practice. University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advanc- ing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2016 by Simon Marginson This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY license. To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses. Suggested citation: Marginson, Simon. The Dream is Over: The Crisis of Clark Kerr’s California Idea of Higher Education . Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. doi: http://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.17 Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress. isbn 978–0-520–29284–0 (pbk. : alk. paper) | isbn 978–0-520–96620–8 (ebook) Manufactured in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To my daughter, Ana Rosa, who is much loved List of Figures and Tables ix Preface xi PART ONE. A CITY UPON A HILL: CLARK KERR AND THE CALIFORNIA IDEA OF HIGHER EDUCATION 1. An Extraordinary Time 3 2. Clark Kerr 5 3. Clark Kerr and the California Idea 11 4. The Uses of the University 21 5. Martin Trow: Higher Education and Its Growth 28 6. Bob Clark: The Academic Heartland 36 7. Whither the California Idea of Higher Education? 40 PART TWO. CROSSING THE WATERS: THE CALIFORNIA IDEA IN THE WORLD 8. The Idea Spreads 51 9. Participation without Limit 56 10. The Spread of Science 65 11. The Global Multiversity 71 12. Systems and Stratification 81 13. American Universities in the Global Space 91 C ontents viii Contents 14. Enter the Dragon 96 15. Higher Education in China and the United States 110 PART THREE. BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME: THE CALIFORNIA IDEA IN A MORE UNEQUAL AMERICA 16. Higher Education after Clark Kerr 121 17. The Impossibility of Public Good 126 18. The Impossibility of Taxation 132 19. Economic and Social Inequality 143 20. Unequal Opportunity 152 21. Higher Education and the Economy 168 22. Higher Education and Society 178 Epilogue: After the Dream 193 Notes 201 References 223 Index 239 ix F IG U R E S 14.1. R & D expenditures as a proportion of GDP, East Asia and the United States, 2000–2013 105 14.2. Annual production of published science papers, United States, China, and other East Asia, 1995–2011 107 22.1. Social inequality in bachelor’s degree attainment, United States, 1970 and 2013 179 22.2. Gross tertiary enrolment ratio and gross graduation ratio, United States, 1999–2012 180 22.3. Enrollment in postsecondary institutions and for-profit institutions, United States, 1970–2012 182 TA B L E S 7.1. University of California campuses in Shanghai ARWU and Leiden research rankings 43 8.1. A means of Californization: Indicators used in the Shanghai ARWU 53 9.1. From elite to mass to universal participation, 1972–2012 57 10.1. Annual output of published journal papers in science, 1995–2011 69 10.2. Fastest-growing national science systems, by country, 1995–2011 70 14.1. Student achievement in PISA reading, science, and mathematics at age 15, 2012 101 14.2. Economy and population, East Asia, United States, and United Kingdom, 2013 104 Figures and Tables x Figures and Tables 18.1. Student enrollment in public higher education and state and local govern- ment financial support, California, 1960–2010 136 19.1. Income shares of top 1 percent and bottom 50 percent, United States and Europe 147 xi The Dream Is Over: The Crisis of Clark Kerr’s California Idea of Higher Education is a longer version of the three Clark Kerr Lectures on Higher Education delivered on September 30, October 2, and October 7, 2014, at the University of California Berkeley. I hope that the book is a more considered and evidenced version of the argument made in the fifty-minute lecture format. The Dream Is Over, which is first of all about the sixty-year trajectory of higher education in California and the United States, was written from another country but within an early-twenty- first-century global higher education order shaped in a number of ways by public higher education in California. California is where American higher education reaches its high point, and the United States has dominated worldwide higher edu- cation since World War II: only now is the rest of the world just starting to catch up. Most of the world’s top twenty universities are American, and a number are located in California. All of us who work in higher education in some sense live in California, identifying with its goals and drawing from its fecund freedoms, its vision of growth and opportunity. In examining higher education in California, we reflect on our own deeper beliefs and ideals. The development of the California Idea of higher education was long in com- ing. It had its roots in the larger “California Idea,” the recurring movements of California Progressives and their agenda for democratic prosperity, as outlined by John Douglass in his account of the century leading up to the 1960 Master Plan. Douglass’s clear historical account, 1 which is recommended to all readers, has been one of the foundations of this book. When it came to the systematic implementa- tion of the “California Idea” in higher education, the process was led by University of California president Clark Kerr, the main architect of the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education, the most important American university president since World War II, and a thinker and writer on higher education whose work is still widely Preface xii Preface read. The Dream Is Over considers where Clark Kerr’s notions about the public research university (the “multiversity”) and his commitment to a socially inclusive higher education system, dedicated to equality of opportunity and excellence at the same time, continue to be relevant—and where these notions might have become tarnished or rendered obsolete by time. It will argue that while the California Idea of higher education, like all policy-oriented forms, has flaws and limitations, it also contains virtues that have been allowed to deteriorate. The Dream Is Over argues in part 3 that public higher education in California has become trapped within a high individualist politics that ignores and negates the social conditions in which individual freedoms are nurtured and expressed. These conditions include the role of government, which ought to be (and often is) a positive and not a negative influence in society. But in today’s California and United States, as elsewhere in the English-speaking world, many regard taxation as a form of theft, markets are used to value the public good in the social sectors, and wealth and educational power are rapidly concentrating at the top, without regard to those in the middle and at the bottom. The imagined society of the early 1960s, that of a higher education–led meritocracy grounded in equality of opportunity, serving enterprise and justice in equal measure, is over. Hence the bracing title. To find a way forward, we must first acknowledge the situation as it is. The book con- siders future developments in the circumstances, both rich with possibilities (es- pecially at global level) and troubled in values, in which Californian and American public higher education now find themselves located. The book has been organized in three parts, each an expansion of one of the Kerr lectures. Part 1 reviews Clark Kerr and the 1960 Master Plan in their time; discusses scholarly works by Clark Kerr, Martin Trow, and Bob Clark that are part of the Californian contribution to worldwide higher education; and opens discus- sion of the trajectory of the California Idea of higher education within California. Part 2 explores the passage of the California Idea across the world, in the spread of educational capacity and research science in the last two decades, and the rise of new university powers, especially in China and other parts of East Asia. Though the university has many national variations, all local and national institutions are part of a global research system and common patterns of higher education. The imprint of Clark Kerr’s multiversity is visible everywhere. The more plural higher education world also poses challenges and opportunities for American institu- tions. Part 3 brings the discussion back to California and the United States (while remembering that what happens in the United States has global implications). Re- markably, the California Idea of higher education has had a great effect across the world but is losing traction at home. Part 3 reviews the rise of the antistate and antitax politics in California, Proposition 13 and the consequences for the Mas- ter Plan, the growth of social and economic inequality in the United States, the “steeper” vertical stratification of higher education, the weakening of equality of Preface xiii opportunity, problems in the relationship between higher education and the labor markets, and the limits on social mobility in American (and English-speaking) society. The epilogue more briefly considers the future: briefly, because we do not know the future, and social science engages in prediction at its peril. Yet this open- ness, and the scope it gives us for agency, is always our best hope. The Clark Kerr lecture series is a settling challenge to those of us asked to par- ticipate. It invites us to consider our words with more than the usual care and to summon whatever it is, if anything, that might be distinctive in what we say. My concern was always to be worthy of the invitation—and its name. It was an honor and a pleasure to spend time at the University of California, and I now understand a little better the lifelong hold that it exerts on some of my friends. I have benefited from the generous hosting, counseling, and continued collaboration of a group of people in and around the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) at Berkeley. The weeks at Berkeley were full of good talk and fine stone buildings. Above all I sincerely thank Jud King, who has been a fine adviser and a produc- tive colleague, Sheldon Rothblatt, for his generous engagement with the draft ma- terials, and also Carol Christ, John Douglass, Patricia Pelfrey, and Neil Smelser, Richard Atkinson at San Diego, and Wyatt R. “Rory” Hume. Most of those named read one or more parts of the text. So did Mike Shattock in the United Kingdom. I am very grateful for all comments, while carrying sole responsibility for the nar- rative and interpretations herein. I also thank Diana Baltodano, Meg Griffith, and Christine Herd, who kindly helped with the visit in 2014. It was good to spend time at CSHE. The Dream Is Over was developed in several disciplines and draws on many the- ories and experiences, bodies of commentary, reflective scholarship, and empirical research, as indicated in the bibliography. The book is a synthesis. It is sustained by its own assumptions, organization, and judgment, while working also with the writings of many others: sometimes integrating their insights into the synthetic picture and sometimes bouncing off them in disagreement (the book continues a lifelong preoccupation with the critique of public choice theory). I deeply ap- preciate the opportunity to engage with this range of scholarship. Again, none of the many scholars cited or quoted in this book are responsible for what is stated here. At least some will disagree with my interpretation of their words and findings, though I trust the text is accurate in matters requiring the “impartial spectator,” to use Adam Smith’s phrase. Much of the recent research on the political economy of inequality and on social stratification in the United States and China—we need to bring studies of China into the core of social science, given the long-term global importance of that country—was new to me when I began preparing the Kerr Lec- tures. Research on social stratification, combining sociology and political economy and using both quantitative and qualitative techniques, constitutes a useful direc- tion for higher education studies. xiv Preface Preparation of The Dream Is Over was also informed by conversation with Glyn Davis, a Berkeley alumnus, who is vice-chancellor at the University of Melbourne in Australia, where I worked until 2013, and by the ongoing discussion with my father, Ray Marginson. As vice-principal at Melbourne from 1966 to 1988, Ray Marginson was another of the builders of public higher education, in Australian higher education in the 1960s and 1970s when the world was wide, public invest- ment increased at a rate never seen before or since, and the first system of mass higher education, with broad-based research capacity, was established. The world is still wide but the main arc of creation in higher education has swung to China, South Korea, and Singapore—and maybe to Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, India, and the Middle East (though new things can happen anywhere). In these zones, not coincidentally, states are in the forefront. When Anglo-American societies rediscover their states as constructive instruments, rather than seeing their public officials as people working behind the back of the common good for solely selfish ends (as public choice theory sees it), those societies will again move forward. The modern Anglo-American higher education systems were mostly formed in 1955–1980, when democratic society charged government, not markets, with the erection of public infrastructure and better systems of institutional provi- sion. The systems, especially, broke new ground. Both the infrastructure and the systems will last much longer than the 1960s dreams that inspired them. If the task had been left to markets, we would be still waiting. We work within the halls built by the postwar generation, first in their heads and then in the world. Clark Kerr was the foremost of the builders. There were many others. Writing the book had its golden moments. It is a pleasure to work with the rhythm of words in this way, assembling a lattice of thought, testing it against observation and reading and memory and inner synthesis, while one’s sense of the world inches slowly forward. Mostly the outcome on the page falls short of the thing we glimpse at the edge of imagination. Sometimes it all springs into view. The weeks on the last third of the draft were good, as months of preparation began to bear fruit. However, it has been difficult to create a book-length study of higher education at the desired level of originality, amid other demands, and at a time of transition and loss. I thank colleagues at the University College London Institute of Education for their forbearance, particularly during the main writing in mid 2014. I am deeply grateful to my wife, Anna Smolentseva, and family. At the time of the Clark Kerr lectures, Ana Rosa began a fulfilling humanities degree at Goldsmiths College in London. I dedicate The Dream Is Over to her with love and respect and wish her more great university years. PART ONE A City upon a Hill Clark Kerr and the California Idea of Higher Education Today the eyes of all people are truly upon us—and our governments, in every branch, at every level, national, state and local, must be as a city upon a hill—constructed and inhabited by men aware of their great trust and their great responsibilities. — John F. Kennedy, January 9, 1961, address to the General Court of Massachusetts, just before formally assuming the presidency 3 The later 1950s and the 1960s were an extraordinary time, especially in the United States. The period climaxed in the explosion of ideas, identities, popular culture, and political rebellion in the second half of the 1960s. That great outpouring of civil energy in America, brilliant and sustained, has tended to block from view the decade before, which was marked by rising expectations and all-round cre- ativity in many spheres, including universities, research, ideas, and government itself. State action did not carry the stigma it later acquired. The memory of World War II was still green, helping to maintain the potential for ambitious collective solutions. American society was on a highway somewhere between, on one hand, the war years with their sleeves-up common commitments, improvised plans, and governmental management of resources and population and, on the other hand, the emerging social movements, higher aspirations, and larger personalities breaking out in many quarters. It was the time of the civil rights movement and the time of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Both government and critics wanted to make a better world. Both believed that this was possible. In higher education there was the 1960 Master Plan in California. Something of the same optimism and faith in common and constructed solutions was evident in Europe and Brit- ain—for example, in the 1963 Robbins Report, which called for a major expansion in British higher education. 1 As Sheldon Rothblatt puts it, “the period was one in which the very idea of planning in itself was held in high esteem.” 2 In his historical account of economic and social inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014), Thomas Piketty shows that special circumstances after 1945 opened the way to greater social mobility and a larger role for social al- location in higher education in the industrialized countries in the United States, 1 An Extraordinary Time