Review: How the University of California built the Golden State and fractured it
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Set us as preferred “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.Book ReviewCalifornia Dreams: The Making and Remaking of the University of CaliforniaBy Miriam Pawel Bloomsbury Publishing: 448 pages, $34If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.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: ...