When University of California President Clark Kerr delivered the Godkin Lectures at Harvard in 1963, published shortly thereafter as The Uses of the University, he was doing something unusual for an academic administrator: he was offering a sophisticated social theory, and doing so with wit. In these lectures, Kerr coined the term “multiversity” to describe what the postwar American research university had become. In Kerr’s account, the modern university was no longer to be understood as a community of scholars united by a shared ideal of learning, but rather as a sprawling institutional conglomerate serving at once as a research engine, a job-training facility, a credentialing mechanism, a coming-of-age experience, and an incubator of the national technical elite. The University of California, which Kerr had just finished steering through a near-decade of explosive growth, was his exemplar.
Kerr was a droll man. He once observed that the three great problems facing any university president were “parking for the faculty, athletics for the alumni, and sex for the students.” He described the university faculty (and I can confirm from personal experience that this remains accurate) as “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.” And when Ronald Reagan made good on his 1966 gubernatorial campaign promise to fire him for being too lenient with the Free Speech Movement protesters, Kerr offered one of the great farewell lines in American academic history: “I leave the University of California as I arrived: fired with enthusiasm!”
Despite the jokes, Kerr was a serious man. The argument underneath The Uses of the University was that the multiversity, precisely because of its sprawl and apparent incoherence, was the institutional master key of mid-century American civilization. It was the nexus at which basic scientific knowledge was produced, technical and professional talent was credentialed, democratic citizenship was cultivated, and the national project of technological supremacy was advanced. The multiversity didn’t need to be coherent in order to be functionally useful as a platform for what Kerr called“administering the present.” He wrote with the high modernist confidence of someone who believed that hierarchical technocratic institutions, if competently managed, could keep these various volatile elements in balance.