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As Sproul cheered on the physical sciences, so Clark Kerr has pushed social sciences. In 1945 he started Berkeley's Institute of Industrial Relations to mesh socio-economic studies. As chancellor, he boosted the sociology department to first rank. He also went on teaching and writing. His second book, Industrialism and Industrial Man (Harvard University Press), will be out next week; his bibliography is now 13 pages long. As president, he goes on refining his hopeful world theory of "industrial pluralism" (that high technology in time tears down dictatorships instead of strengthening them). Some day, he wants to quit administering and teach again.
Apples & Greek. Scholar Kerr first reached Berkeley in 1934 as a doctoral student. He had grown up on a Pennsylvania farm near Reading, gone to a one-room school. Clark's farmer father had an academic bent himself. First of his Scots-Irish line to go to college (Franklin and Marshall), Samuel Kerr spoke Latin, Greek, German, French and owned a master's degree from the University of Berlin. He spent his life raising apples, and his afterhours stimulating and roiling young minds. Recalls Clark: "He believed that nothing should be unanimous. If he found everybody else for something, he'd be against it on principle."
At Swarthmore ('32), recalls Kerr, "I was a green country kid with a lot of people who had gone to private schools." He learned some social graces, became captain of the debating team, president of the student body, a Phi Beta Kappa and a Quaker. He never learned to drink; only years later did he first taste liquor. "As a negotiator, I learned that whisky was a tool of my trade. You use it like a plumber uses a wrench." He can still barely stand the stuff.
With his new-found Quakerism, Kerr found a social conscience, in the '30s preached peace on street corners for the American Friends Service Committee during Swarthmore vacations. Kerr took his master's at Stanford, went on to Berkeley for his Ph.D. (thesis: "Productive Enterprises of the Unemployed"). One day he attended a student congress near U.C.L.A., sat beside a striking auburn-haired girl named Catherine Spaulding, an engineer's daughter and a Stanford graduate. As they silently watched some party-liners dominate the meeting, Kay scribbled a note: "Are you a Communist?" Clark scribbled back: "No." She scribbled: "I'm not either." Eight months later, having found other attributes in common, on Christmas Day Kay and Clark were married.