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Chapter 2 explores the work of Clark Kerr as a thinker and university leader. It examines the Inter-University Study of Labor Problems in Economic Development directed by Kerr, one of the largest organized research projects in American social science during the postwar years. This study proposed a new theory of industrialism that informed Kerr’s thinking about universities. The Inter-University Study provides a window into its most important institutional contexts: the Institute of Industrial Relations (IIR) at UC Berkeley and the Ford Foundation’s Program in Economic Development and Administration. The chapter describes Kerr’s promotion of ORUs—first at the IIR, which he directed for seven years, and then across the Berkeley campus once he became chancellor. It also shows how his immersion in the administrative science movement shaped his view of the university’s mission. The chapter uncovers the sources of key ideas Kerr set forth in The Uses of the University.

This chapter highlights the role of the FSM in securing the right to conduct political activity on campus that is now so commonplace today and suggests that the FSM seems like a seriocomic accident that played out in a string of administrative blunders abetted by the hubris of university president Clark Kerr. It also comments on the dedication of an FSM Café near the Moffitt Library of the University of California, Berkeley.

Chapter 6 shows how the University of California at Irvine, planned under Kerr’s guidance, exemplified the instrumental university in its attempt to install perhaps the most pervasive high modern social science program ever attempted on an American campus. UC Irvine’s planners designed it to be a new kind of land-grant institution, in which social sciences replaced the agricultural sciences. Kerr and his colleagues placed tremendous expectations on interdisciplinary social science for leading humanity to a brighter future. This chapter tells how three related UC Irvine units—the Division of Social Sciences, the Graduate School of Administration, and the Public Policy Research Organization (PPRO)—attempted and failed to realize these expectations.

As World War II faded into the background, ideas of progressive and ethical business were soon met with criticism from a diversity of economic and political stances, especially concerning the raison d’être of the corporation. Did it serve the interest of shareholders, or of managers? If it did (or did not) simply maximize profits, should it? What where the consequences of the new power technology associated with applied industrial psychology? Was the new idealized relationship between organization and employee as an intimate bond not at odds with ideals of independency and of contractual relations? Through the writings of people such as John Kenneth Galbraith, William H. Whyte Jr., Milton Friedman, Erich Fromm, Clark Kerr, Reinhard Bendix, Paul Baran, and Paul Sweezy, this chapter demonstrates how the new, managerialist image of the “soulful corporation” was contested from a range of different perspectives, from Marxism to social-liberalism to neoliberalism.