ABSTRACT
James L. Fisher comments on the importance of academic leaders being conversant with the literature on higher education, a thought echoed by Steve B. Sample, who states that academic leaders are what they read. Thorstein Veblen, one of the founders of the American school of institutional economics, was a very original thinker who looked at economic systems from an evolutionary point of view. His approach was like that of an anthropologist describing a culture very different from his own, with methods borrowed from sociology and psychology. There are many traces of Veblen's and Upton Sinclair's ideas in Clark Kerr's thinking. These traces were beginning with his acute awareness of the existence of an upward drift in universities. This acute awareness made him insist on preventing California State University from becoming a research university, a role that was reserved for the University of California in the California Master Plan for Higher Education.
