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Freeze & Pry. Californians are proud of their university network, and well they might be. It is huge, young, brilliant, aggressive, progressive. It colonizes everything from the atom to outer space. At the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, Cal's physicists run one of the world's famed atom smashers. At the Lick Observatory at Mount Hamilton, Cal astronomers scan the galaxies. Thanks to Cal's engineers, California's farms are the most mechanized in the U.S. The university runs the atom-bomb city of Los Alamos, N. Mex. It owns ranches, apartment buildings, forests, hospitals, vineyards, movie studios and seven oceangoing ships. On its 25,877 acres, a man can freeze or fry without leaving the premises. The university employs 3,000 professors, parks 19,200 cars and offers 7,900 courses. This year Cal will cost $360 million to run—and it is only the beginning.
By 1975 Cal expects to add three new campuses and to educate 118,900 students. To do this, it must spend $700 million to build three times as much physical plant in the next 15 years as it has in the last 90. With awe, Harvard's President Nathan M. Pusey calls Kerr's job "one of the most difficult and exacting posts in the whole history of higher education."
Collision. The job of running the biggest university in the country involves a lot more than mailing a budget to Sacramento. In no other state is there such hot competition among so many public campuses. In no other state is there such need for coordination among them. California has a good record in this respect. But ascetic, Pennsylvania-born Economist Kerr has made it better. This year's top education news in California is the "Master Plan"—an academic armistice largely fashioned by onetime Labor Mediator Kerr, who in 500 major labor negotiations developed the subtle skill that makes aides call him "the Machiavellian Quaker."
The armistice came after a head-on collision between Cal (with its seven campuses) and the 15 state colleges, which are also state-supported but owe no allegiance to Cal. State colleges used to concentrate on teacher training, but California's exploding technology has given them a whole new direction—vocational training on an enormous scale. They now teach, besides teaching itself, everything from judo and fly-tying to aeronautics, electronics, semantics, penology and oenology (wine growing).
Growing at a dizzy rate, the state colleges have added eight new campuses since 1946 and more than quadrupled enrollment. They now have 68,000 students, more than Cal itself. Example: San Fernando Valley State opened in 1956 with 700 students, now has 3,415. By 1973 it expects 20,000.
Admission at these state colleges is lenient (the upper 44% of California high school graduates), though many who go there are among the upper 15% in their class, and are eligible for the university. They go to state colleges because the campuses are close to home and because they think Cal is too big for learning and too devoted to research. Also, state colleges cost as little as $66 a year. And they are far from backwoods institutions. The top three: