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Skill & Courage. Going in for labor economics, a new field then. Kerr taught a year each at Antioch and Stanford, five years (1940-45) at the University of Washington in Seattle. When the operating engineers and the Pacific Coast Coal Co. stalemated on wage increases, they heard that there was a labor professor over at the university, asked him to arbitrate. He got both sides together in short order, launched a highly successful sideline. Until he became Cal's president. Kerr was the busiest arbitrator on the West Coast, became noted as "tough, fair and expensive" (fee: $200 a day). He deliberately picked the toughest industries, gave himself remorselessly and settled as fast as possible. His most notable effort: a long, painful arbitration in 1946-47 between longshoremen and shipowners. Said usually intractable Dock Boss Harry Bridges: "The assignment was not an easy one. He performed it with skill and courage."
Heretic & Conspirator. Kerr's courage became well known at Berkeley in 1949, four years after he returned to set up the Industrial Relations Institute. That was the memorable year when the university regents outraged the faculty by threatening to fire anyone who refused to sign a loyalty oath. Professor Kerr signed, as did most members of the embittered faculty eventually. But he got himself elected to the hottest spot on campus—the Academic Senate's privilege and tenure committee. When the committee went before the angry regents, Kerr delivered the first and strongest blast at the notion of firing nonsigners of the oath (26 were fired; 37 resigned). He won facultywide respect for this act (later he won back pay for the expelled). When a faculty committee was asked to nominate Berkeley's first chancellor in 1952, he was the man. In his inaugural speech, he made sharp distinction between "the honest heretic and the conspirator."
Commonwealth. During five years in the chancellorship, while also teaching and writing, Kerr gave some cohesion to the sprawling Berkeley campus. He built eight new dormitories and a student union, proposed a clear plan to junk vocational departments and use the space for research. When Bob Sproul announced retirement in 1957, U.C.L.A.'s football-puffing Chancellor Raymond E. Allen seemed to have the inside track to the presidency. The regents polled the nation's top educators for other candidates, and opinion was nearly unanimous: "You already have Clark Kerr at Berkeley."
President Kerr runs the University of California on green ink, inner logic and hope. These days he has too little time for his children (Clark, 18; Alexander, 14; Caroline, 9). Each night of his go-hour week he sends home a 14-in.-thick stack of letters in a grocery carton. Each morning he rises at 6:30 and pens answers for three hours in a tiny green-ink scrawl. The notes spread like green scripture throughout the empire: Decentralize, make the big small, use your own small head. If the inner logic of the Master Plan is really working, freeing Cal from state-college competition, he expects by 1975 to have a mighty commonwealth of universities. Cal's growth plan: