CALIFORNIA DREAMS

The roiling history of a “multiversity.”

Drawing on extensive archival sources, memoirs, and interviews, Pawel (The Crusades of Cesar Chavez, 2014) recounts the birth, rise, and ongoing transformations of the “ten campuses, six health centers, three national laboratories, and hundreds of programs and research centers” that comprise the University of California. Begun as the College of California in an area named for the Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley, the tuition-free university, created by a federal land grant program, was open to both men and women. The mission that has guided its evolution was pronounced by Daniel Coit Gilman at his inauguration as its president in 1872: “It must be adapted to this people, to their public and private schools, to their peculiar geographical position, to the requirements of their new society and their undeveloped resources.” Pawel’s abundantly populated narrative focuses primarily on men and women whose lives were indelibly changed by their association with the university. Among them was Milicent Washurn Shinn, who enrolled in 1874, encouraged by her high school English teacher, and who became one of the university’s first professors. Nearly 100 years later, David Masumoto followed her example: A third-generation Japanese Sansei whose parents had been interred during World War II, he came to the Berkeley campus desperate to leave his father’s farm. Pawel examines, too, influential university presidents, notably Clark Kerr, known as “the Machiavellian Quaker” who became president in 1958. Author of the “Master Plan for Higher Education,” he expounded on “the realities of the new ‘multiversity’”—including student activism, budget cuts, and controversy over affirmative action— “and the immense influence the federal government exerted on higher education through unprecedented investments in research.” Recent assaults on higher education make California’s story newly relevant.

A timely, sweeping examination of a major institution of higher education.