How the University of California built the Golden State — and fractured it

“The university is not engaged in making ideas safe for students,” University of California President Clark Kerr famously said in 1961. “It is engaged in making students safe for ideas.” At the time, those words were a benign, almost bland sentiment about academic freedom. The words are literally institutionalized, engraved on a bell at the UC Santa Barbara campus.

Now, of course, they’re fighting words. Whose ideas? What kind of safety? In recent years, ongoing debates over trigger warnings and campus speakers have muddled the vision of a university as a genteel repository of ideas and good-faith debate. The current environment is in some ways more fraught than in the late ‘60s, when student protesters at UC Berkeley pressed university leaders over loyalty oaths and engagement in the Vietnam War. Today the campus is a proxy for wider culture wars.

Miriam Pawel’s sober, well-researched history of the UC system, “California Dreams: The Making and Remaking of the University of California,” out Sept. 29, is alert to that transformation. But her focus is on a different element of Kerr’s statement: Which students? Who gets access to the ideas and the safety, however defined? The system’s long-running ambition to admit students of all backgrounds has had, to say the least, an imperfect success rate.

Still, as the state and the entire country face an acute crisis over who belongs and who doesn’t, it’s a history that merits attention, because the state of the institution maps closely to the state of the state. As Pawel puts it: “Unravel any thread of modern California history, and eventually it leads back to the University.”

Berkeley’s founding in 1868 was California’s bid for civic and economic legitimacy, initially constructed on the federal government’s support of land-grant universities that taught agriculture and mining. But the university’s ambitions were wider, both in terms of its range of subjects and its students. Admission was free, and women were welcome in all departments. Squabbles began almost immediately: One critic in 1873 accused Berkeley of “teaching rich lawyers’ boys Greek with the farmers’ money.” But it unquestionably became a top-tier institution and lifeline for students who couldn’t afford East Coast learning.

This success makes the early chapters of “California Dreams” undramatic, at times dry, reading — the university’s chief challenge through the early 1900s was Cal’s first steps toward expansion via UCLA, originally called the Southern Branch. (Or, dismissively, “The Twig.”) But throughout the book, Pawel — a former Times editor and reporter who’s written acclaimed biographies of Cesar Chavez and the Brown political dynasty — enlivens the story by escaping the chancellor’s office and exploring the lives of people impacted by Cal’s open policies, starting with pioneering child psychologist Milicent Shinn, the first woman to receive a doctorate from the university, in 1898.

Shinn exemplified what a Cal education could deliver to marginalized groups. But that mandate had always been compromised; the school was as interested in developing a “ruling elite” that shaded white as it was in building a diverse student body. Black, Latino, and Filipino high-schoolers weren’t tracked to be Berkeley- or UCLA-bound, despite notable exceptions like Nobel-winning diplomat Ralph Bunche. In 1935, Berkeley had only five female professors.

The Red Scare and Ronald Reagan’s governorship only made those gestures toward diversity harder, and gives Pawel all the drama a historian can hope for. An anti-Communist loyalty oath, introduced in 1949, fragmented a faculty that had been promised academic freedom. Reagan’s election in 1967 ushered in an era of cost-cutting and demonization, as he glibly tossed red meat to conservatives by expressing his determination to investigate “Communism and blatant sexual misbehavior on the Berkeley campus.”

The university endured the faculty and student revolts that those moves sparked. But ever since, Pawel explains, it has served as a political football. Depending on who’s looking, it’s a valuable engine of economic growth, a breeding ground for liberal indoctrination, an institution so hungry for research dollars it’s neglected its mandate to serve undergraduates. It became a central figure in the ‘70s and ‘80s battles over affirmative action in admissions. Prop 13, which capped property taxes in 1978, forced the university to hike tuition, locking out marginalized students; Prop 187, which banned undocumented immigrants from public education in 1994, accelerated the division.

Nobody would mistake “California Dreams” for glossy college brochure-ware: Even her late-chapter examples of marginalized students, like Fresno-bred farmer and author David “Mas” Masumoto and pioneering Chicano scholar José Alamillo, are examples of success in the face of budget cuts and anti-DEI rhetoric. But Pawel wants to stress that the university system is still growing, and still testing out systems for figuring out who belongs. New schools like UC Merced and Cal State Channel Islands have been draws for Latino students who are often the first in their families to attend college.

“The University remained one of the few forces that transcended disparate regions and groups,” Pawel writes. Imperfectly, still: The student body in the UC system is less than a quarter Latino, in a state where Latinos are 40% of the population. Federal-level actions attacking diversity initiatives, pulling research funding, tuition hikes, and separating families won’t help. The system persists, but the system is fragile.

A regular contributor to The Times, Athitakis is a writer in Arizona and the author of “The New Midwest.”

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