The time we tried free college for all? Andrew Stone Higgins on the California Master Plan

(upbeat music) Welcome to the American Campus Podcast, a history of higher education. I'm Lauren Lesabb-Cheppard. My guest today is Andrew Higgins, a Boston-based historian, who is here to tell us about the creation of the California Master Plan and the research that went into his new book, higher education for all, racial inequality, cold war liberalism, and the California Master Plan just out from the University of North Carolina Press. Andrew, it's such a pleasure to have you. - Well, thank you so much for having me on. - So to get us started, can you tell us about the creation of the Master Plan? So what was it, how did it come to be in the context of the Cold War? What do we need to know about why the California Master Plan existed? - So the boring answer is, the 1960 Master Plan is essentially a reform of the system of public higher education within the state of California. The reason it's important, I would say, is because it remains the largest attempt made in American history to provide free higher education to people. Now, while the Master Plan was made up of, I guess, about 67 different agreements about the functioning of the system, in my eyes, it really boils down to two key things. And those were coordination and restriction. And I'll talk about what each of those mean. So to start with coordination, prior to the Master Plan, there were three levels of higher education that had developed separately in California, the UC University of California, the state colleges, which is today's CSU. And those two levels emerged in the 1850s and '60s with the state colleges initially serving as teacher colleges. Community colleges, which were originally called junior colleges, began in 1910 with the junior college in Fresnel. And by the 1950s, you had about 80 plus public institutions of higher education in California, but only the UC campuses were coordinated. And this was done by the Board of Regents. The campuses within the state college system and the individual community colleges largely operated autonomously while they were under the purview of the state board of education, which really took a hands-off approach. The Master Plan changes this by creating a board that would govern the entire system, the coordinating council for higher education, and by delineating exactly what sorts of educations each of these three tiers would provide. So the second thing the Master Plan does is restrict admissions in order to prepare the state for the demographic and financial title wave that's represented by the baby boom generation going to college. The Master Plan tightens admissions across the board, which makes it harder for students to get into the UC and state colleges, and it increases the share of students who are sent to the community colleges from approximately 55% to 67% of all students who are matriculating to the Master Plan system. So while it does offer higher education for all, the bottom two thirds of students are heading to these relatively poorly funded two-year institutions, and in practice, the students sent to this bottom rung of the system are disproportionately working class in people of color. So you mentioned the cold war, and as far as this context, Sputnik is really the key. Educators and politicians in California knew that this uncoordinated Master Plan system as it existed was something of a mess. There were several really detailed studies that were done in the years prior to the Master Plan, these in 1948, 1955, and early 1957, and all of these go nowhere. There's simply not the political willpower to figure out how to change this massive system and to make sure it's actually done. But this changes on October 4th, 1957, which is when the Soviets launched the first man-made satellite into orbit, Sputnik, Russian for satellite. Americans sort of lose their minds when this happens. Somehow Americans had fallen so far behind the Soviets that they have lost this first important leg in the space race. And without getting into the debates that follow, I trace those in the first chapter of the book, there are really two big outcomes from Sputnik and education, one national and one in California. The National One is the National Defense Education Act of September 1958. The California One is the 1960 Master Plan. So the NDEA National Defense Education Act opens up tons of federal funding for higher education. And what happens in California is both the UC system and the state colleges want to gain access to this funding. So this further exacerbates the need for an overhaul of the system, and the Master Plan comes in large part as a response to that. The Master Plan was the product of about 125 people who served on what was called the Master Plan Survey Team, but the two key figures were the UC president Clark Kerr and Roy Simpson, who was the California State Superintendent of Public Instruction, essentially the person in charge of K through 12, the community colleges and the state colleges at that point. - So you mentioned Clark Kerr. Listeners will probably be familiar with him and some of the other better known characters that come out of California in the early '60s. So I'm thinking like Mario Savio, but you introduce us to some other major figures who really sort of shaped the critiques of the Master Plan. So these are people like Hal Draper from the left, Max Rafferty from the right, or I would even say probably the far right. So first can you tell us who are these other people, who are these other important characters? And then what are their criticisms add to the way that we can understand sort of the weaknesses of the Master Plan? And ultimately why it failed. - Yeah, I'd love to talk about these figures. And I'll add before I really get into it that I think you're right to position Rafferty on the far right. He is the person who follows Roy Simpson into the position of States Superintendent for Public Instruction in California. Simpson was also a Republican, but Rafferty was so far right that Simpson ends up endorsing his opponent in the race of Democrat. So Rafferty, yeah, Rafferty's pretty far out there. As far as Rafferty and Draper, I would say, I wanna be clear, I don't see them as symmetrical. They're doing really different things. Draper is a very serious intellectual to get us started. Rafferty was, when you read what he wrote, which was quite a lot, he comes across as fairly hysterical. He's clearly literate, but he's this hard line reactionary in the mold of the John Birch society and folks of that nature. Draper, his critique of the master plan focuses mainly on Cold War complicity. So I'd also point out that there are other folks on the left who are doing important critiques. A lot of them come out of the context of the third world liberation front strike at SF State. And these individuals talked a lot about the racist structural impact of the master plan. But I guess all this is to say that there's a distinction to be made between right and left critiques that I read in that the left thinkers who write on the master plan tend to base their critiques in the specific struggles in which they are involved. And folks critiquing the master plan from the right have sort of more general critiques. So for Hal Draper, he's involved in the free speech movement, for those who don't know. If there's some people listening to this podcast who don't know about the free speech movement, in brief, it emerges as a struggle over the right for UC Berkeley students to utilize their campus as a hub to organize towards greater participation in the civil rights movement as it existed at that time in the Bay Area. It's not so much about an abstract right to free speech, which is how some people remember it. And this was in the fall of 1964. So to sort of keep Draper's critique brief, he draws from Clark Kerr's published works. Clark Kerr is the head of the UC system, also the architect of the master plan. Draper reads everything he's written, and he highlights attention. So he says, on the one hand, Kerr is lauding the master plan system that he has created for being, quote, "plugged into the state and federal governments and for responding to the needs of regional and national economy in the context of the Cold War." Now, on the other hand, Clark Kerr forbids students to involve themselves in political struggles on and off campus while painting the university as sort of a neutral player in these off campus issues. So Draper draws on Curse Use of Rural. the terms "multiversity and knowledge economy" to paint the UC as a knowledge factory. This brings out a lot of the metaphors that people who've read about the free speech movement probably know. Things like the student as product, the university as the machine, Savio's famous line about the need to throw our bodies onto the gears and the levers of that machine to prevent its functioning. The paper is really just an important unsung influence on many of the students most deeply involved in the free speech movement, particularly Mario Savio and Jack Weinberg, but others as well. To contrast that, I mentioned these other left thinkers in the context of the Third World Liberation Front Strike which took place at SF State in 1968, '69. These individuals are people like Anatole Anton, who is a young philosophy professor, Magali Sarfati Larson, who is a sociologist, as well as a lot of students. They critique the master plan for a different reason than Draper. They say this is essentially a colorblind institution or reform that ends up replicating and exacerbating racial and class inequality that had already existed at the K through 12 levels. In the 50s and 60s and beyond, there's still quite a bit of residential segregation in California. This results in segregated neighborhood schools, of course, and students of color end up systematically disadvantaged when it comes to gaining access to the UC and the State Colleges. So this is yet another left critique that's developed around different struggles. Mags Rafferty on the other hand, this might not be fair, but I really think it is. I've read just a ton of what he wrote. He doesn't really seem to ever give an honest assessment of the master plan. He's not really interested in talking about the master plan. What he does is he complains essentially that taxpayers are footing the bill and all these students are unpatriotic, they're communists, they're communist doops. And he uses the predictable uproar that this generates among conservatives in California to try to push for funding cuts and more conservative oversight over higher education. So conservatives like Rafferty and Ronald Reagan, who's governor at this time, or by early 1967, they're very critical of the master plan as it functions, but they don't actually say out loud that their main concern with the master plan is it represents an expansion of state of the state and of state power. This is something they're very much opposed to. In addition, it's doing so in the service of these ostensibly very liberal institutions. And folks like Rafferty and Reagan are anti-status members of the new right. They're fiercely opposed to the new deal. This is, of course, all stuff you know. They're opposed to the expansion of the welfare state. So naturally, they oppose the master plan. They see it as one and the same. These right wing tensions, especially coming out of California, are always so fascinating to me because it's at the same time that in the spirit of fighting the Cold War, they went all of this money for military and other sort of developments that, especially in Southern California, all of the military bases. And I wonder, you said in Rafferty's writing, you don't really come across any honest critiques. Does he ever say anything about the STEM funding or any of that for the university? I don't recall anything that specific from him. He's very clear about wanting to use education. And to be clear, he's the most important educator in California in the two terms he serves as State Superintendent of Higher Education. I don't recall him talking about specifics like that. Instead, he says, you know, we should inculcate patriotism. There's some line where he says something like, you know, indoctrination is not a bad word, right? He's very clear about what he wants to do with education. I think the more higher level funding, you know, STEM students, graduate students to go work with top professors to create the machines, right, that'll help us win the Cold War or the technologies, he's not going to be opposed to this. But his big thing is, you know, going after the English professors and the students who dress like slabs and are protesting all the time, he's very clearly focused on the humanities and social science. He has a long history of a critic of Dewey and progressive education. Very much, right? Yes, he just, he lays off the actual, you know, funding for defense because of course, he does support those sorts of things. And that's in part one of the problems with the shorthand we have in talking about the new writer neoliberalism saying that it's opposed to state intervention in the economy. Well, of course, there's a lot of state intervention in the economy, but you just want very specific times, right? I could, I could share one more quote that has stayed with me. It's by an advisor to Ronald Reagan, I think in the early 70s, and he's talking about the master plan system and he says, we are in danger of creating an educated proletariat. That's dynamite. And this is one of those rare instances of openness you get from conservatives. And I think it shows, in part, why they tend to be so opposed to higher education and mass public education, it threatens the hierarchies that they cherish, whether those be class, racial, gendered. And I think that's what it boils down to in the end. That rafferty quote is so interesting because you hear the same language in Lewis F. Fowls, but famously the Powell memo in the aspects when he talks about higher ed. And that's not, I mean, that comes a little bit later in the early 1970s. So there's those understandings, you know, they're being recirculated throughout the right. So can you talk more broadly about the student movement in California and its relation to the master plans? How did students respond to this program? That's a great question. And really more than half of the book is about this. So I do have a lot to say because so much of what exists on the master plan that's out there that's been published is from the perspective of administrators and politicians. And I thought, well, what about the students? You know, what about the people who actually got their educations in this system? To begin, I'll say, it takes time for students to respond to the master plan. I think this is in part because, you know, being a student is transitory. You're not a student forever. There's turnover, but also because a number of the changes introduced by the master plan are not immediate. They take time to be implemented and they take time to have an impact. But when you see the first substantial student movement emerging in California in the master plan era, this is the fall of 1964 and it's the the free speech movement. It's very critical of the master plan. You can see this explicitly in student rejections of the master plan by name and some quotes that I share from not only Mario Savio, but a guy named Brad Cleveland, who's been sort of lost in the historiography. Also in the critiques I talked about from Hal Draper. So the free speech movement tracing the rhetoric as it emerges from master plan architect Clark Kerr through Draper to the students. You know, it's just very, very critical of the master plan system. And that critique is shared beyond the campus. One of the unintended consequences of the master plan is that in unifying and coordinating across about 100 different campuses by the time you get to the mid to late 60s, it gives students across all of these very different schools a mutual target of criticism. This reform the master plan that Mario Savio says has structured and perverted their immediate daily environment, which is paraphrasing. So you have about eight UCs, 20 state colleges, 80 community colleges. And to explain the context, you get this massive student movement across these 100 campuses. It's incredibly dense. There's a shocking number of students who seem to be involved. And there are many, many different student organizations that are political, that have robust memberships, and that are actually active in these years, particularly the late 60s and early 70s. At a minimum, I find that on campuses within the master plan system, thinking about the students left, you have SDS, which is a predominantly white organization. They are without question collaborating with the black students unions that develop across California and the nation at this time, and collaborating with Chicano, Mexican American students who tended to group in one of two organizations that would eventually become a metcha, the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Azzlan. Depending on the campus, you have Native Americans who join in various sort of red power organizations. You have Pan Asian organizations like the Asian American Political Alliance, but also national specific organizations, so say representing Chinese or Filipino students. And within all these race and ethnic based organizations, you have various political currents. You have people who are advocating for a sort of. Marxist analysis, you have cultural nationalism, which is very strong on certain campuses. And then beyond this, you also have countercultural students who might be involved in things like student newspapers or experimental colleges, cooperative housing. And as students organize in all of these different groups, they come to learn about the master plan and they become critical of it. So it's through these various organizations that they make certain demands on campus administrators and politicians to fix the problems that exist in the master plan as they see it. And this is chiefly the way in which it serves to exacerbate racial inequality in higher education. So to do this most crucially, and this happens across the master plan system at all levels, students form and support educational opportunity programs, EOPs. These are programs that provide for affirmative action and admissions, counseling, tutoring, and financial aid for working class students and particularly for students of color. In the years from about 1967 to 1970, these EOPs begin to bring in hundreds of working class youth and students of color, changing the face of the UC and State College systems. I'd be clear here, these are individual campuses that start bringing in hundreds of EOP recruits every single year. So we're talking about thousands of students who will enter the master plan system through institutions of affirmative action that in the early years are powered by the student movement. And this is really how the master plan ends up delivering what it originally promised, which is quality higher education for all Californians. It's only because of the activism of students themselves. - Which is such an important part of the story that's missing, right? If you said the historiography is so focused on administrative goals and what sort of the adults are doing, it's actually the students who help really realize this. If I can tease out just one more story from you, you have a few anecdotes in the book about black student athletes in their work with the EOPs. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? This is not something I set out to find, as with so many of us our first book ends up being, the dissertation reworked. And while I was working on the dissertation, it wasn't really coming together and I was reorganizing. And I realized I had all these stories about, well, a number of stories about black student athletes. Cheefly, I had originally realized that this, iconic photograph from the 1968 Olympics in Mexico, Tommy Smith and John Carlos, they were both San Jose State students. So I said, well, they're in the master plan system. Let's see how this is all connected. And of course it was. And it turns out that the origins of that iconic photograph that everyone knows lay in the response of black student athletes at San Jose State to the fact that the master plan helped keep state college campuses you see as well. So disproportionately white. There was another story I came across which was from the efforts of the black student union at San Fernando Valley State today's CSU Northridge. And I realized that the organizing that they did, which became a national news story in the late '60s, had originated with the efforts of black athletes on campus. So when I realized that this is happening, I ended up looking at other campuses in the UC and state college system in particular and realized that this is really common. And the reason for this, which I lay out in the book, is that the master plan makes it a lot harder for students who grew up in segregated schools to gain access to the UC and state colleges. The one exception is if you get in through special admissions. Now this could be athletes, it could be a number of other things. You could be a child of a donor. You could be a high school valedictorian or something, well, I guess not valedictorian, but you know, some class president whose grades were not all that great. The master plan had taken special admissions down from 10% of all students in an incoming class to 2%. So if it became much harder to get in through special admissions, still you do have certain numbers of black student athletes gaining access to top schools, whether it's UCLA, like, you know, Kreme Abdul-Jabbar was there and was involved in some of this activism, UC Berkeley, or students going to the state college system like Tommy Smith and John Carlos, they end up in time serving as a nucleus of much larger movement. So time and time again, I saw on different campuses what begins with the efforts of black students who are athletes to protest, you know, discrimination on campus, segregation in housing, lack of access to fraternities and sororities, casual interpersonal racism, racism they dealt with in athletic departments, whatever the case may be, they end up linking with other students and bringing their critique of these lily white campuses to administrators into the public and play a really important part in helping to reshape these student bodies and make them much more welcoming places for a more diverse range of students. - Thank you so much for this book because I think back to my own understanding, like when I first learned about the California master plan, and none of this is present in that story. So it's a really good sort of return to legislation that branches out into so many other areas. And of course, you open the book, actually, I can't remember where you talk about it, but you're going back into the 2010s and this call to like bring back the master plan and I think that's where you intervene and say, it was never that perfect to begin with. So again, great story, listeners, I highly encourage you to go out and read the book. And then one final question for you before you go. What are you reading now? If I were completely honest, I would say I am reading some Ursula Laguind, who is one of my favorite sci-fi authors and speculative fiction authors and I've been sort of working my way through her lesser-known works, which I really enjoy. I don't actually currently have an academic read, but I am very, very excited because in a couple weeks, a good friend of mine from grad school, his book is coming out. And so I'm just holding off until that's out. My buddy, Ron Zelnik, has a book called "American Laughter American Fury," "Humor and the Making of a White Man's Democracy," 1750 to 1850. I've been talking with him about the project for years and I'm really excited to see it in print. So that's why I like, I haven't started anything new right now. I'm just waiting for it to show up. - Wow, that sounds really good. I'm going to drop a link to that in show notes for listeners. And for Ursula Le Guin, do you have a specific book right to start with? - You know, probably close to 20 years ago, the first book I read of hers was "The Dispossessed," which is just a classic and tremendous. I couldn't even tell you the name of the one I'm reading right now because I forget, but it's set in the same fictional universe, the heinous cycle, very, very dorky stuff. (laughing) She's just tremendous and originally from Berkeley as well, so it's a nice California connection. - Well, and it's always good for us nonfiction people to keep our eyes on fiction works as well, makes our own writing much better. - Oh, for sure. - And they think in different ways, then we do, that's helpful for all of us. So Andrew Stone Higgins, it was great to talk to you. For listeners, I will drop a link to Andrew's book, "Hire Education for All in the Show Notes." If you enjoyed the episode, be sure to subscribe, share with colleagues and friends, and leave a review. Thanks for listening to the American Campus Podcast. - As a time when the operation of the machine becomes so audience, makes you so sick and hard that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented From warning at all!