Robert Meister Interview – pt. 2

Michael Shapira:

In Uses of the University Clark Kerr talks about the multiversity combining the best of the German research university, the best of the English liberal arts model, and best aspects of American entrepreneurialism. Santa Cruz was meant to be part of the system as a beacon of UC’s commitment to undergraduate education, given the increased scale of enrollments as laid out by the California Master Plan (CMP). Do you think there was something salutary in the way that the UCSC experiment approached the growing imbalance between research, or graduate education, and undergraduate education, or the liberal arts tradition? Do you think that there can be something extracted from this initial period given that this pure college model is something that has been subsequently deemphasized at UCSC?

[Laughter] I suppose my laughter is part of the answer. When I was the chair of the campus budget committee, our then chancellor hired a management consultant to advise her on how UCSC could raise private funding by capitalizing on its advantages. The consultant said that our principle advantage was a loyal and successful alumni base from our early years who were still absolutely devoted to the college system — which had ceased to have any academic role in the way UCSC reorganized after it stopped growing by adding new colleges. That model was dead, so the consultant recommended that we turn one or more of the now-vestigial colleges into burial plots-with-a-view that could be sold to rich alumni who believed in the college system and still wanted to support it. I was willing to support this recommendation, but with the addition that we rename the college “Sunset College,” so that you could look west over the Pacific and contemplate your own sunset along with that of the college model. Despite my enthusiasm, the idea of colleges-as-graveyards was dropped and the chancellor said I hope you won’t mention this to anyone else — but here it is.

Going back to your question on the college model, Dean McHenry, who created my position as a junior faculty member to fill the gap left by the departure of Sheldon Wolin to Princeton, envisioned that Santa Cruz would grow and develop graduate programs slowly as the University of Oxford had, but in a way that was more deliberate and creative. Instead of competing with other new campuses to buy up the latest disciplinary fads, we would add college each year that defined an interdisciplinary model and that had as provost an interdisciplinary leader. In McHenry’s vision the science college would have someone like Ken Thimann as its first provost, an eminent interdisciplinary biologist, followed by Stephen Toulmin, who arrived when I did but didn’t last more than a year. The idea was that the provost in a science-themed college would develop an interdisciplinary faculty of scientists who were interested in the history and philosophy of science, alongside philosophers who were trained like [Thomas] Kuhn in the sciences in which they did their philosophy, and so on and so forth. Eventually, UCSC would develop more traditional disciplinary programs out of cross-college committees — we called them “Boards of Studies” — consisting of people from different disciplines who would set examining standards and course requirements for degrees in those disciplines that would be awarded by the campus, but through the student’s college.