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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.

American universities were unprepared for the explosion of student protests on their campuses in the mid-1960s. Consequently, trustees of many leading universities appointed their industrial relations professors—the National War Labor Board vets and their protégés—as their new presidents, chancellors, and top deans. Clark Kerr botched the job at the University of California at Berkeley, but the Labor Board vets were more successful elsewhere. They not only mediated conflicts on their campuses but designed conflict-resolution systems that remain in place at universities and colleges throughout the nation. Their systems drew on the models they created with unions and management in the 1940s. This chapter explains the development by focusing on Robben Fleming at the University of Michigan, John McConnell at the University of New Hampshire, and John Dunlop at Harvard University.

The Labor Board vets insisted that they were always realistic and had no ideological convictions of any kind. This chapter argues that such a characterization is not accurate. Clark Kerr, John Dunlop, and the other veterans of the board’s staff were in truth utopians—not utopians as that term is usually imagined, but liberal reformers who believed that they could transform the world over time, one step at a time. The famous German sociologist Karl Mannheim termed that mindset “liberal-humanitarian utopian.” The chapter looks back to their youth to explain how they came to that worldview and how unarticulated utopian beliefs pervaded their teaching, writing, and other work. The chapter concludes with the prediction advanced by Clark Kerr, John Dunlop, Charles Myers, and Frederick Harbison that the U.S. and Soviet systems would converge in the future--a conviction that appeared realistic in the latter 1980s and the early 1990s.

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.

In January 1942, President Roosevelt set up the National War Labor Board to reduce strikes, control wage inflation, develop national policies for union-management relations, and resolve disputes between labor and companies for the duration for the war. This chapter explains the dire situation facing the United States and its allies in the winter of 1941-42, how the NWLB came into being, the board’s members, and the backgrounds and outlook of the young economists and attorneys who did the bulk of the board’s work. Philip Murray, the president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the Steelworkers union, called the staffers “the Labor Board boys.”

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.

The conclusion begins with the loyalty oath required by the University of California in 1949 of all university employees and the controversy spurred by the firing of the German-Jewish émigré and University of California-Berkeley professor Ernst Kantorowicz when he refused to sign. The conclusion argues that Kantorowicz’s defense of the university’s “inner sovereignty” reflected the longstanding history of the academic social contract in which the university received autonomy in exchange for services to society. The book shows how once the contract was exhausted, academic entrepreneurs found new partners, formulated new ideas, and established new institutions—sometimes outside the university. The conclusion further argues that if the conditions and terms were new, the academic contract itself was not. With the perspective of the full arc of the development of the modern research university, the lessons of this book do indeed apply to the post–World War II era of Cold War science and such academic entrepreneurs as Clark Kerr in which the contract became so unbalanced to almost not be recognizable to the earlier era.

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.

Unlike most elderly workers, the Labor Board vets continued to work to the end of their lives. They had a mission in life. This chapter explores their work in their latter years. After briefly discussing Jean McKelvey, Clark Kerr, Ben Aaron, Robben Fleming, and George Shultz, it focuses on John Dunlop’s work with the clerical workers union at Harvard University, his work with the farmworkers union in Ohio and Michigan, and the commission he chaired at the request of President Bill Clinton to improve worker, union, and management relations in the United States. The first two efforts were successful, the latter a complete failure. The world overwhelmed the reformers