Is the scale of the higher education enterprise, with our huge public statewide megasystems, part of the problem?
PS: If somebody said to me, “Okay, you’re going to be the chancellor of CSU,” I’d say, “Where are the levers; how do you make this thing turn? How do you slow it down, speed it up?” And it seems to me that’s a huge, enormous, unpredictable kind of undertaking. And it does argue for decentralization and for breaking it down into smaller units. There’s no public higher education system as large as the California one. Maybe if you broke it down into smaller units, the individual units would be more subject to individual or to small groups of leaders who could inspire them, move them. I mean, university presidents are a very different animal now from what they were thirty years ago, both in this state and elsewhere. So it’s interesting because even when Clark Kerr was writing and giving the Godkin lectures in ’62 and ’63, he already seemed to be awed and overwhelmed by what he was creating, and had numbers in there about how many white mice we raised and how many extension courses and how
