How the UC System Transformed California

SPEAKER_1 (0:03)

Support for KQED comes from Genentech, the original biotech company. For 50 years, Genentech has pioneered more than 40 scientific breakthroughs across various diseases bringing greater hope to patients everywhere. Learn more at gene.com. That's gene.com.

Mina Kim (0:23)

Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Chances are you, or someone you know, went to a UC.

Historian Miriam Pawel calls the University of California system an educational juggernaut. Quote, its research programs earn top rankings, its campuses boast record numbers of Nobel Prize laureates, its employees are the second largest workforce in a state that is itself the fourth largest economy in the world. And, Pawel writes, it has arguably made its most important contribution in the lives of those not born into privilege.

As the UC and colleges nationwide face attacks from the federal government and broader questions about the value of a university education, Miriam Pawel's new book shows us what's possible when a higher ed system is founded with a commitment to access, as long as it can maintain it. It's called California Dreams, The Making and Remaking of the University of California. And Miriam Pawel joins me now. Welcome to Forum.

Miriam Pawel (1:21)

Thank you so much.

Mina Kim (1:22)

I just noted the incredible reach of the UC, but actually you did not go to a UC.

Miriam Pawel (1:28)

That's correct. I'm actually a New Yorker originally, so which surprises people. But it was partly because of coming from New York and moving to California in 2000, that I've sort of been fascinated by the whole system of public higher education in California because no state has anything remotely comparable, not just to the UC, but the UCs, the Cal States and the community colleges, that whole system is just a real commitment to publicly funded higher education, even though, of course, as we all know, that that commitment has wavered at different times. But that was one of the things about California that impressed me the most when I moved here.

Mina Kim (2:14)

You also write about the unique bond people seem to have here to their UC.

Miriam Pawel (2:19)

Yeah, like this whole Go Bears thing, which is kind of a cult, if you know.

But it's true, and it's not just here in Berkeley, but across the state, people really feel a connection. They love it, they hate it, they struggle with it, they feel betrayed by it, they're loyal to it, and you don't find that in other states. I mean, as a New Yorker, it's not like people run around saying, I went to SUNY Albany, it's not the same thing. I think that's a reflection of the role that the university has played from its start in the development of the state. Of course, partly because so many Californians stay here when they graduate and maintain those ties. Yes.

Mina Kim (3:05)

And then of course, there's the founding mission of this university system. Talk about that and how those principles came to be.

Miriam Pawel (3:14)

Yeah. So I came to that backwards in the sense that, as I said, I was so interested in the system from the start. And then the longer I lived here, the more people I met whose lives had been so transformed by the university, people who would not have had access to that kind of education, if not for the University of California. And I didn't know when I started this, how much that was sort of built in to the founding of the school. It was founded in 1868 in those post-Gold Rush years when there was not a social caste system in San Francisco yet. People were just pouring in.

And it's explicitly founded as a place for the children of working people who cannot afford to send their kids to Harvard and Yale. And so that really is kind of built in from the start. There's a famous quote from the second president, Daniel Coyt-Gilman, where he says in his inaugural, this must be a university for the people of California. It is not the University of Connecticut, we're not in Connecticut or Berlin. This is a different place in a different time.

And that quote gets repeated over the decades by different people as they wrestle with how the university needs to change to adapt to the changes in California, right? Because California changes demographically so dramatically from those early years. So how does it continue to be a university for the people of California? And what does that mean? Those become very heated debates sometimes.

Mina Kim (4:58)

Yeah, and you write also very beautifully about the tension of being sort of an elite institution and an accessible institution.

Miriam Pawel (5:06)