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If much "research" is not all it might be. and is sometimes at the mundane level that most impresses state legislators, there are signs of improvement. With huge budgets, state universities can lure and equip more top researchers. With lower tuition than private schools, they attract more graduate students. At the University of Michigan, 40% of the enrollment is graduate students. At Cal, it is 43%. Many state universities are moving in the direction of the exclusively graduate institution that the rest of the world calls a university—even though they will always have undergraduates.
Fandango. No public campus in the country has moved faster in that direction than California's Berkeley, the Buckingham Palace of Clark Kerr's empire, across the bay from San Francisco. Few campuses boast an odder beginning. Berkeley's impecunious parent was a Congregationalist academy launched in 1853 by a Yale clergyman from Massachusetts. The campus was a fandango dance hall, but Founder Henry Durant in a letter home glowed over the "beauty and salubrity" of the place. He hoped to educate gold miners, and believed in looking on the bright side.
Later the Rev. Mr. Durant bought 160 acres out on Strawberry Creek, named it after Philosopher George Berkeley, the poetic Irish bishop of Cloyne ("Westward the course of empire takes its way"). The westward course was a poor one until Governor Frederick Low put tax and land-grant money into the campus, and 92 years ago started the University of California.*
Berkeley's salubrious beginnings were not to everyone's taste. Politicians complained that it neglected such useful arts as carpentry and blacksmithing. But it had the enormous defense of constitutional autonomy. The regents were also temporarily tamed by tempestuous President (1899-1919) Benjamin Ide Wheeler, a white-mustached autocrat who wore cavalry boots and galloped about campus on a white charger. Wheeler unintentionally created another freedom. His highhanded ways provoked a faculty revolt in 1919 that established the strong Academic Senate.
Neck & Neck. When Robert Sproul took over in 1929, he gave the faculty the best of academic prizes: prestige. Sproul raised cash for young Physicist Ernest O. Lawrence to build the first cyclotron, and Berkeley was suddenly the nucleonics hotspot of the world. Uplifted by its physics stars, the faculty began raiding other faculties across the country. Cal now has eight Nobel prizewinners (seven at Berkeley, including the chancellor, Chemist Glenn Seaborg) and more Guggenheims than any other U.S. university (1960 crop: 33).
The only other U.S. campus Cal cares to be compared with is Harvard. In one important rating of the academic world-memberships in the National Academy of Sciences—Cal and Harvard are neck and neck (63 to 63). In astronomy, German, physics, and Romance languages, Cal's departments are tops. In humanities, it is far behind. Bob Sproul figured that few legislators read Milton or Shelley. He sold them on science instead.