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San Francisco State (12,000 students), a flourishing liberal arts school, boasts a $1,000,000 theater for drama students, a $2,000,000 science building, the championship football team of the Far Western Conference and 300 foreign students. S.F. teaches everything from engineering to skindiving. Most impressive feature: a topflight creative writing department including Novelist Walter van Tilburg (The Oxbow Incident) Clark. Another noted facultyman: Semanticist S. I. Hayakawa.
San Diego State (8,191), strong in science and math, is geared to the area's aviation-electronics complex (Ryan Aeronautical, General Dynamics). S. D. boasts 26 major labs, hopes to get a nuclear reactor. Last year it had half the physics majors in the state-college system. The average freshman IQ: 120-125. The faculty Ph.D. rate: 63%. By 1970 S.D. expects 25,000 students. Says President Malcolm Love, onetime boss of the University of Nevada: "Though we are called a college, we are in deed and in fact a university."
San Jose State (18,000), another feeder for the aviation-electronics industry (Ampex, G.E., Lockheed). S.J. has a $4,000,000 industrial-arts building, an expanding $9,000,000 engineering center. Highly "diversified," it has 108 majors, from psychiatric technology to a full four-year course for policemen. (This is supposedly why San Jose cops are so "gentlemanly.") Biggest and oldest (1857) college-in the system, S.J. is growing so fast that it is now the nation's 25th biggest institution of higher learning.
Pecking Order. In so vast a barnyard, the academic pecking order is inevitably at work. Academicians rarely believe that doing a topflight job on a less prestigious level is sufficiently rewarding. All of the schools want to rise higher. Junior colleges want to be four-year colleges. State colleges want to be universities. Since all must battle for a dwindling share of the tax dollar, competition can be vicious. And with so many separate claimants, state legislators come to think with their scissors, and budgets end in ribbons.
This would be more alarming if the pride were not there. "Brother, you're talking about the greatest system of public education in the world," cries one state official. In recent years, Californians themselves have loudly agreed, and politicians have listened. Into the hopper at one session of the Sacramento legislature went 18 bills for new state colleges. The state-colleges system threw rings around Cal's campuses—four colleges around U.C.L.A. alone.
As the new colleges multiplied. Cal's alumni among the state legislators (now 35 out of 177) tried to hold down their budgets by line-to-line scrutiny. Tempers flew. Already restive at being weakly administered by three different agencies, the state colleges in 1958 demanded Cal's kind of constitutional fiscal autonomy (which only six other state universities in the U.S. enjoy). They also demanded the right to confer doctorates—and to be universities.
At the time, Kerr had just stepped up from the chancellorship to the presidency at Berkeley. He has an entirely different style from his gregarious predecessor, Californian Robert Gordon Sproul. An able politician, Sproul wanted to pick off the state colleges one by one and make Cal campuses out of them (Cal got Santa Barbara that way in 1944).