By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 3, 2003; Page B06

Clark Kerr, 92, who as president of the University of California system revolutionized the structure of higher education and advocated freedom of ideas but became a political casualty of the campus protest movements of the 1960s, died Dec. 1 at his home in El Cerrito, Calif., of complications of a fall.

Dr. Kerr was reared on an apple farm, did social work as a Quaker, resolved intense labor negotiations as a professional mediator and became one of the great wry wits of higher education. He once quipped that a successful university administrator had but three needs to fulfill: football for the alumni, sex for the students and parking for the professors.

He came to prominence in academia starting in the late 1950s, both for his master plan to restructure the University of California system and for the way social and political forces led to his dismissal. Although it pained him more than he let on, he once joked that he accepted the job as president "fired with enthusiasm" and left the same way.

As a faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1940s, he fought to keep college teachers who refused to sign a Cold War-era loyalty oath. As chancellor of the Berkeley campus from 1952 to 1958, he built facilities and encouraged faculty research to keep the school competitive.

He then became president of the statewide public university system, adding campuses while restructuring others from specialty schools into comprehensive institutions. He ended a ban on campus speakers deemed subversive and met with student leaders to hear their grievances concerning racial discrimination, academic freedom and the university's role in defense research during the Vietnam War.

Student protests continued, and a new governor, Ronald Reagan, had Dr. Kerr fired in 1967.

His legacy as an educator rests largely on a master plan that redefined access to public education in the state. The plan emphasized universal access and established an enrollment hierarchy. He envisioned the top 12 percent of high school graduates attending the more-elite university system with the remainder in state colleges and junior colleges.

In his 1963 book "The Uses of the University," based on lectures he gave at Harvard University, he coined the term "multiversity" to describe the modern campus, which he said had outgrown the archaic notion of "a single community -- a community of masters and students." He said universities had a duty not just to the students but to the larger society, to spur ideas in government and industry.

He later said he regretted publishing the multiversity plan while serving as president, because it allowed some in the burgeoning student movement to paint him as an outmoded conservative who wanted to turn the school into a dehumanizing "knowledge factory."

Starting in 1964, the Free Speech Movement, led by Mario Savio, began a series of sit-ins and demonstrations at the Berkeley campus.

Politicians took note, especially Reagan, who had run in part against the counterculture at Berkeley. He ordered Dr. Kerr's dismissal for "not using a heavy enough hand on student dissenters."

Dr. Kerr told The Washington Post in 1982 that he still thought he had followed the right course: "First, as a Quaker, I felt that force was the last resort. And second, out of my industrial relations experience, I realized that the use of violence embitters the situation for years."

After being fired from the university system, he was chairman of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education and the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education.

Dr. Kerr was born in Stony Creek, Pa., to an apple farmer who was the first college-educated member of his family.

In 1932, he graduated from Swarthmore College, where he was student body president and captain of the debating team. He also spent his summers with the American Friends Service Committee working with the poor during the Depression.

He met his future wife, Catherine Spaulding, at a student conference in 1934. Bored, she scribbled him a note: "Are you a Communist?" He wrote back, "No." She replied, "I'm not either."

They married that Christmas. She survives him, as do three children.

Dr. Kerr received a master's degree in economics from Stanford University and a doctorate in economics from Berkeley.

He arrived on the Berkeley campus in 1945 to start the Institute of Industrial Relations. He continued his role as a professional arbitrator. In 1949, Dr. Kerr was head of the faculty committee on tenure when the California regents forced staff members to sign loyalty oaths under threat of dismissal. Dr. Kerr signed, but he also engaged in mediation with the regents and helped many teachers keep their jobs. His role endeared him to the faculty, and he was named chancellor of the Berkeley campus in 1952.

Later, as president of the university system, he went about dismantling a McCarthy-era ban on communist speakers. The university, he said, "is not engaged in making ideas safe for students. It is engaged in making students safe for ideas."

Disagreements about the meaning of open debate led to his dismissal by the regents.

As the Free Speech movement started to become violent, he limited which groups could use the campus to raise funds. Large demonstrations continued, which put Dr. Kerr between the students and politicians in Sacramento.

After Reagan was elected in 1966, he proposed cuts in the university system's operating funds and threatened to end free education. In January 1967, the state regents, with Reagan as a new member, voted to fire Dr. Kerr.

In recent years, he wrote his memoirs, the two-volume "The Gold and the Blue." He retained a sense of humor about the past. The second volume addressed some of the more tumultuous years, and he suggested a better title might have been "The Black and the Blue."