Do you have a brilliant child who makes you proud, but is also infuriating?
So does the Golden State. It’s called the University of California.
In her terrific new book, “California Dreams: The Making and Remaking of the University of California,” journalist and author Miriam Pawel (my former L.A. Times colleague) tags all the bases of UC history, from the university’s 1868 founding in the Berkeley Hills through its expansion into a $60 billion economic engine encompassing 10 campuses, six health systems, and three national laboratories.
But Pawel’s book is really something more intimate: an examination of the fraught, familial relationship between our state and its world-class university system.
“California Dreams” is often quite moving, as it shows
how the university shaped the ideas, ambitions, and people of California. Among the book’s stars are the acclaimed Central Valley farmer-writer David Mas Masumoto, and child psychology pioneer Milicent Washburn Shinn, Berkeley Class of 1880, and the first woman to receive a PhD from the university.
The book charts the shifting arguments that Californians have had with each other about what they want their university to be. As UC became the world’s finest public university system, each new generation of institutional leaders feared something has been lost. Each new generation of politicians fought the university. Each generation of students complained that the university was lacking.
All the arguing is the result of this fact: UC is one of the few institutions important and interesting enough to connect all of California’s places and people. “In a state larger and more diverse in all aspects than many countries,” Pawel writes, “the University remained one of the few forces that transcended disparate regions and groups. It was perhaps the only public institution that inspired widespread loyalty and admiration, even among those who were rejected.”
In this context, present-day Californians’ constant disputes about UC are reassuring — proof that the university still matters. Today’s fights — over “woke” politics, diversity, and the current ban on using SAT scores in admissions — seem familiar, and less divisive, when compared to the past.
Pawel recounts how, during the Red Scare of the 1950s, UC and its Board of Regents engaged in brutal ideological purges that make 21st-century cancellations look tame. In the 1960s, long before current debates over campus free speech or political interference, the UC found itself in a 1960s vise, squeezed between Free Speech Movement student radicals and a conservative public outraged by campus disruption.
In the 1990s, UC was the central front in a statewide war over affirmative action that ran even hotter than the DEI debates of today. That battle included a voter-approved measure in 1996 to ban the practice which reduced diversity throughout an unrepresentative university system.
One reason why UC remains so controversial is that it is expected to do two contradictory things. First, it’s supposed to be exclusive. UC screens the population of California (and the world) to identify the most promising students. At the same time, the university is supposed to be inclusive, equity-producing engine of social mobility in a very unequal state.
So, as California and the university system, paradoxically, grow more open and diverse, they grow more expensive and exclusive.
The book suggests that UC’s true superpower is its resilience — its ability to absorb conflict, and adapt. At UC’s 125th anniversary, writer Joan Didion recalled growing up in small-town Sacramento, when the state was less rich and less educated.
“That California doesn’t exist anymore,” Didion said. “We joined the rest of the country, the rest of the world… As we did so, some of us kicking and screaming, this university did what it has been doing for 125 years now. It provided the bridge. It provided the forum. It provided the safe house in which old and new California could be seen to be not irreconcilable.”
Perhaps California and the UC fight for the same reason parents fight with children: because they’re related, they’re too much alike.
Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Why Californians always fight over UC | Mathews
