The rise of the global university is often associated with the concomitant wave of late twentieth-century neoliberalism and privatization and correlated with universities embracing “corporate” models of governance. However, it is a phenomenon with roots in the earliest years of the Cold War that emerged out of a set of institutions and policies with diplomatic rather than explicitly economic aims. Notable among these were the programs aimed at bringing foreign students and scholars to the United States and exporting American-style educational experiences abroad. While only a fraction of these foreign visitors had the US government as their primary financial sponsor, they as a class became the object onto which political values of a particular era were projected, from the postwar internationalism of the Truman years to the Great Society liberalism of Lyndon B. Johnson to the free market ethos of Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The decentralized and privatized means by which policy makers administered these measures obscured the degree to which they influenced the shape of the higher education system and their wider impacts on the American economy and society. This article explores international educational exchange as a critical element of American universities’ evolving public identity during the Cold War and post–Cold War periods and as an example of the governmental use of the university as an agent of state power and as a tool of political ideology.

This article explores the intellectual and institutional contexts of the seminal ideas about the American research university expressed in Clark Kerr’s book The Uses of the University (1963). In particular, it suggests how Kerr’s relationship to the administrative science movement, an important thread of postwar American social science, shaped his concept of the university. It focuses special attention on an important yet little-known 1957 speech in which Kerr suggested that the university’s purpose was increasingly to “administer the present.” The article concludes by showing how the development of the University of California’s new campus at Irvine in the 1960s reflected his ideas about relating social science theory to administering the present.

It is now almost a half century since Clark Kerr (1911–2003) delivered the 1963 Edwin L. Godkin Lectures at Harvard University, presenting what was ultimately recognized as one of the most significant and influential ruminations on the nature of higher education in the United States. This sustained reflection on the modern evolution of the research university, ultimately published by Harvard University Press as The Uses of the University (1963), framed discussion and debate regarding the role of what Kerr called “the multiversity” for decades to come. In this endeavor, there was no one at the time better suited to the task. An economist who had served for several years on the faculty at the University of Washington, Seattle, Kerr joined the University of California, Berkeley, in 1945. Appointed Berkeley's first chancellor in 1952, he was the mastermind behind the enormous expansion (in both capacity and excellence) that marked the campus's immediate postwar history. By 1958, as the then legendary Robert Gordon Sproul concluded his 28-year duty as University of California (UC) president, Kerr seemed the obvious and best choice as successor.

This article offers a broad sketch of claims regarding the university’s public purpose in the 1960s while noting that a vision of the university as an autonomous forum for moral debate cut across the seemingly insurmountable divide between young radicals and their liberal elders. Read through the lens of educational philosophies, the era's clashes did not simply pit liberal advocates of political neutrality against radical exponents of political commitment. Rather, many radical activists—and some liberals— believed that the university should cut off many of its ties to the wider society to gain a more critical purchase on it. Indeed, critics of Clark Kerr's bureaucratic “multiversity” often hewed to a surprisingly traditional conception of higher education.

This article traces the pluralist politics at the heart of Clark Kerr's book The Uses of the University to the present-day politics of diversity. Pluralism was the dominant theory of American politics at midcentury, and Kerr was among its most admired spokespersons. First as a labor economist and strike negotiator, then as chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, and later as president of the University of California system, Kerr relied on “pluralistic decision-making” to harmonize relations among the multiversity's mix of vested interests. Shortly after The Uses of the University was published in 1963, however, student protesters at Berkeley and at other multiversities like it let Kerr know that they had grown tired of the pluralist politics that he championed. Ironically, in their effort to upend the pluralist status quo and to make politics more participatory, campus insurgents sowed the seeds for the growth of a new brand of pluralist politics known as diversity. By uncovering the relationship between pluralism and diversity, this article reveals the enduring—and surprising—political legacy of Kerr's multiversity model 50 years after he unveiled it.

Central to American identity have been public memories of events like the struggle for independence and the achievements of key figures from the past. The individual most often subject to hagiographic accounts is Abraham Lincoln, with emphasis both on his epic achievements in saving the Union and ending slavery and on his personal characteristics, such as honesty and the motivation to transcend his “backwoods” childhood and attain positions of local, state, and national leadership. However, a recent study based on extensive survey data found that Lincoln’s connection to emancipation provided the primary content of beliefs about him for most Americans today, with other beliefs mentioned much less often. Our present research supports that emphasis when presidential actions are the focus, but a randomized survey-based experiment shows that with a type of questioning that reflects the distinction between “essence” and “action”—inner character versus public achievements—beliefs about the former become at least as prominent as beliefs about the latter. Preliminary evidence to this effect is replicated decisively in a separate experiment, and the study is then extended to consider changes over time in indicators of essence versus action. Our research highlights the importance of how inquiries are framed, and they show that variations in framing, including those that are unintended, can enlarge our understanding of collective memory of Lincoln and of collective memory generally.

This article examines the key events leading to the creation of the California higher education system and Clark Kerr’s influential concept the “multiversity.” The wide, uncritical reception of this term requires explanation, which the essay explores both in terms of Kerr’s 1963 book, The Uses of the University, and in terms of its impact even on historical scholarship about American higher education. The essay concludes by finding the multiversity a highly selective (not an inclusive) standard and a latter-day extension of a pragmatic ideology with a long history and many unacknowledged problems.