2014 Clark Kerr Lectures

Tuesday, October 7, 2014 - Thursday, October 9, 2014
4:00 - 5:30PM
Richard & Rhoda Goldman Theater, David Brower Center, 2150 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA 94704 (map)
Simon Marginson
Professor of International Higher Education at the Institute of Education, London

Marginson is a distinguished scholar of remarkable depth and breadth.  Drawing on disciplines from sociology and history to political economy and political philosophy, he brings a consistently international and comparative perspective to a wide range of topics involving university systems, policy, and organization.   During the past decade he has done extensive research on globalization and higher education; the impact of university rankings and international competition; and the global strategies of leading Asian-Pacific research universities across 18 countries in the region.  His most recent work deals with problems of equality, freedom, and creativity, and public universities’ role in creating the public good. 

The author or co-author of dozens of books, articles, reports, and scholarly studies, he is one of world’s most frequently cited researchers in the area of international higher education.  He serves as Joint Editor-in-Chief of Higher Education, the leading international journal in the field, and as a member of 15 other editorial boards.

Before his October 2013 appointment to the University of London’s Institute of Education, Marginson was for many years a faculty member at the University of Melbourne’s Center for the Study of Higher Education.   His honors include the University of Melbourne’s Woodward Medal in the Humanities and Social Sciences for his research on higher education and globalization; the Critics Choice Award from the American Educational Studies Association for his 2010 book Imagination: Three Models of the Imagination in the Age of the Knowledge Economy; and appointment as a Lifetime Fellow of the Society for Research into Higher Education in the United Kingdom.  

Professor Marginson presented the series of four Kerr Lectures during the weeks of September 29 and October 6, 2014.  The first three were held adjacent to the Berkeley campus and the fourth at UC San Diego.

LECTURE 1

Clark Kerr and the Californian Model of Higher Education - Read the paper
Tuesday, September 30, 2014 
4pm -5:30pm (Reception Following)
Richard and Rhoda Goldman Theater 
David Brower Center, 2150 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA (Directions)

Fifty years on, Clark Kerr’s multiversity and the Californian Master Plan for Higher Education stand as signal high points in the building of not just great public institutions but high participation modern human society. Key features of the Californian Model have become a universal template for research universities and system design. Seminal ideas and practices of higher education developed by Clark Kerr, Martin Trow, Burton Clark and others continue to colonize the thinking of policy makers, scientists, scholars, students and citizens, with profound effects not just in the United States but in every country. Yet the Californian Model of higher education - which long appeared everywhere else to be ahead of its time – was also specific to its own time and place. The conditions in which it was born, and which nurtured its flourishing, have changed. 

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LECTURE 2

The Californian Model of Higher Education in the World 
Thursday, October 2, 2014
4pm - 5:30pm
Richard and Rhoda Goldman Theater
David Brower Center, 2150 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA (Directions)

The high participation higher education system first developed in California has spread to national systems across the world. In 2012 more than half the school leaver age group was enrolled in higher education in over fifty countries. Research universities are also springing up in more and more countries. At the same time there has been a great growth in the level of cross-border engagement and American universities are collaborating all over the world. Although the United States continues to sustain the leading higher education and research system, the university world is rapidly become more plural, with growing educational participation in Latin America, a renaissance in Western Europe, and above all the rise of East Asia as the third great zone of universities and science. In future much of the new knowledge will flow into America as well as out. Relations between universities in the Anglo-American countries and China will be a key influence in shaping future world society.

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LECTURE 3

"Bonfire of the Publics”? Rebuilding the Social Foundations of Higher Education
Tuesday, October 7, 2014
4pm - 5:30pm
Richard and Rhoda Goldman Theater
David Brower Center, 2150 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA (Directions)

The bedrock of Clark Kerr’s Californian Model of higher education was a compact between individual self-realization and the common good which gave every family a stake in a higher education system committed to expanding opportunity for all. This compact endured surprisingly well through the collectivist anti-statism of the 1960s student revolt and the more individualist anti-statism of the 1970s/1980s tax revolt, but its basis is now eroded. While higher education has never been more globally effective, its social foundations have fractured. The cost of tuition is outstripping the capacity to pay. In societies becoming more unequal, elite universities are moving further out of reach, while the quality of mass higher education is under growing pressure. Amid a one-sided emphasis on instrumental private benefits, the public mission of the university is in question, not only in the United States but elsewhere. Yet there are also resilient traditions of institutions for the common good, university learning is at the core of social identity, and higher education has a deep capacity to address key global problems that neither states nor markets have been competent to solve. Do we have the vision and energy to find the road map through? In rebuilding the social foundations and taking a new and more internationalized Californian Model of higher education to the world, there is much at stake. 

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LECTURE 4

The Future of the Californian Model of Higher Education 
Thursday, October 9, 2014
3:00pm - 4:30pm (Reception Following)
Geisel Library, Seuss Room (Map)
University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA  92093

Fifty years on, Clark Kerr’s multiversity and the Californian Master Plan for Higher Education stand as signal high points in the building of not just great public institutions but high participation modern human society. Key features of the Californian Model have become a universal template for research universities and system design. High social participation in higher education, and research universities, are spreading all over the world. Yet the Californian Model of higher education was also specific to its own time and place, and the conditions in which it was born, and which nurtured its flourishing, have changed. The compact between individual self-realization and the common good which was the bedrock of the Model has been seriously eroded. Yet higher education has a deep capacity to address key global problems that neither states nor markets have been competent to solve, and the present encounter between universities East and West is shaping the future. In rebuilding the social foundations of higher education and creating a new and more internationalized Californian Model, there is much at stake.