ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how Clark Kerr's earlier career in industrial relations formed his distinctive and soon controversial understanding of the role of contemporary universities. Kerr is remembered as the most influential leader in American higher education. The chapter suggests how Kerr's academic field, industrial relations, gained a foothold in the American university in general and the University of California in particular, and describes in greater detail the origins of the Institute of Industrial Relations at UC-Berkeley and how Kerr came to be its director. It investigates the work of the Institute under Kerr's direction and the characteristics it possessed as an organized research unit (ORU). In this work, Kerr exemplified a new kind of academic man—not an ivory tower scholar but a practitioner-researcher who directed an ORU dedicated to applying academic knowledge to the solution of social problems. The chapter focuses on Kerr's involvement with organized research by examining his promotion of behavioral science at Berkeley during the 1950s.
