Edmund "Pat" G. Brown
Position in 1960: Governor, State of California

Edmund G. Brown was born in San Francisco on April 21, 1905. As a young man, Brown exhibited a strong acumen for public service, and was elected to eleven different student government positions in high school. He worked his way through law school and began a private practice in San Francisco after earning his law degree in 1927. Two of his three children—Edmund Jr. and Kathleen—would go on to hold state offices.

In 1934 Brown changed his party affiliation to Democrat, a significant step in his career as a public servant. He was elected San Francisco District Attorney in 1943, and nicknamed “Pat” after quoting the famed patriot Patrick Henry, “give me liberty or give me death,” in a speech for WWII Liberty bonds. He earned distinction as the winning candidate for Attorney General in 1950, the only democrat in a state office. In 1958 Brown won the California gubernatorial race, becoming only the second democrat to hold that office in the twentieth century. Four years later, he was re-elected governor, defeating Republican Richard M. Nixon.

Governor Brown’s administration was noted for its populist efforts. As the state’s population experienced enormous growth, he led initiatives that increased resources for parks, transportation, and schools. Brown garnered bi-partisan support as he worked for fair-housing legislation and the creation of jobs. An opponent of the death penalty, he was willing to engage in public debates on social issues. One of the governor’s most successful initiatives was in education.

Brown appreciated the need to commit resources to the state’s expanding system of higher education. A great fiscal task, he commissioned a team of educators to develop the California Master Plan for Higher Education. The Master Plan represented one of the great accomplishments of Brown’s tenure. The governor prevented forcing lawmakers to reorganize the entire system of higher education and received praise for his trustee appointments to the state board and the Board of Regents. The Master Plan Survey Team expressed appreciation for his encouragement, quiet mannerism, balanced perspectives, and good judgement.

Governor Brown realized that “The success I’ve had . . . in public life I think has come mainly from the ability to bring divergent views together.” His idea of leadership was built on the notion of inclusion and earned the title of “responsible liberalism.” Brown wrote several treatises on state politics, including Reagan and Reality: The Two Californias (1970) and Public Justice, Private Mercy: A Governor's Education on Death Row (1989). After he was defeated for a third term as governor by Ronald Reagan in 1968, he joined a law firm in Beverly Hills, working until his death on February 16, 1996.

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Arthur D. Browne
Position in 1960: Specialist, California State Department of Education

A native of California, Dr. Arthur Donald Browne was born on May 23, 1917. He graduated from San Jose State College, and secured a Master of Arts in education from Stanford University in 1943, and a doctorate in education from Syracuse University in 1952. He served as director of Utah's Coordinating Council of Higher Education from 1961-65, and subsequently became an associate director, then acting director of the state of Illinois Board of Higher Education. From Illinois, Dr. Browne served as the executive director of Wisconsin's Coordinating Council of Higher Education. He was then invited to help develop the master plan for higher education for the state of Arkansas, and served as the vice president for academic affairs at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. He withdrew from his administrative role in order to assume a professorship of higher education at the University of Arkansas, which he held until his retirement in 1987. He currently serves as the executive director of the Deseret International Foundation, which provides medical assistance to the underprivileged living in developing countries.

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Howard A. Campion
Position in 1960: Retired director of Junior College and Adult Education Programs in Los Angeles City Schools

Howard A. Campion, born in 1894, directed the Junior College and Adult Education Programs in Los Angeles City Schools from 1934 until his retirement in 1959. He joined the Los Angeles school system in 1925 as a founder and administrator of the Frank Wiggins Trade School (Los Angeles Trade-Technical College). He later taught in the School of Education at UC Los Angeles, and served as an educational consultant in Chile and the Philippines, as well as throughout the United States. He died on October 31, 1975.

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Arthur G. Coons, Chair of the Master Plan Survey Team
Position in 1960: President of Occidental College, professor of economics

Arthur G. Coons was an educator and chief executive for California's colleges for nearly fifty years. Coons was born in 1900 in Anaheim, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. He received his undergraduate degree from Occidental College in 1920, then matriculated to the University of Pennsylvania. There he received a master's degree and continued his studies in economics, teaching in the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce. While he would eventually earn his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, in 1922 he returned to Anaheim to teach high school, and two years later to teach economics at UCLA.

In 1927, when he was awarded the Ph.D. in economics, he joined the faculty at Occidental College, where he also served as executive secretary to the president. He became a visiting fellow at the California College in China in 1933.

Coons served as dean of faculty while teaching. In 1946 he became president of Occidental College where he built a reputation for having shrewd, practical wisdom. A highly respected executive, he was invited to chair the Master Plan Survey Team's efforts to prepare higher education in California to accommodate larger enrollments, and to arbitrate the competing interests of the University of California and the California State Colleges.

Arthur Coons was recognized for his achievements as an educator and an economist. He was awarded numerous honorary degrees and a decoration from the British government. As president emeritus he wrote
Crises in California Higher Education: Experience under the Master Plan and Problems of Coordination, 1959 to 1968. Published in 1968, his final scholarly publication reflected on his role as chair of the Master Plan Survey Team and the aftermath of the Free Speech Movement. Coons died in his Newport Beach home on July 26, 1968.

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Glenn S. Dumke
Position in 1960: President San Francisco State College, California historian, primary representative and advocate for the California State Colleges during the Master Plan negotiations

Glenn S. Dumke was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in 1917. He moved to Southern California and entered the undergraduate program at Occidental. He graduated in 1938, and then entered UCLA to pursue a doctorate in history. In 1940 Dumke became a faculty member at Occidental College. He served briefly in the military during World War II.

His 1942 dissertation, The Boom of the Eighties in Southern California, an examination of the economy and culture of the Los Angeles region in the 1880s, was published two years later by the Huntington Library. He proceeded to publish a number of journal articles on California history and transportation. Among his most notable works published during his Occidental years include Mexican Gold Trail: The Journal of a Forty-Niner (1945), and co-authorship of the book, A History of the Pacific Area in Modern Times (1949). His later books include The Crossing of the Tehachapi by the Southern Pacific, published in 1954 by the Book Club of California, an affiliate of the California Historical Society, and From Wilderness to Empire, A History of California (1959), which became a major text book for college courses in California history. He was also the author of works of fiction under the pseudonyms Jordan llen and Glenn Pierce.

In 1950, Arthur Coons, the president of Occidental, appointed Dumke to the position of dean of faculty, a position previously held by Arthur Coons (see above biography). For some ten years, Dumke and Coons worked together to build Occidental College. In 1957, at the age of forty, Dumke became president of San Francisco State College. His reputation as an outspoken advocate of state-wide educational standards led to his membership on the Master Plan Survey Team.

In 1961 Dumke became vice chancellor of academic affairs, and the following year he was appointed the chancellor of what would become the California State University system. He served in this position until 1982, overseeing the creation of CSU campuses including Dominguez Hills, Bakersfield, San Bernardino, and Sonoma. Many of his accomplishments as chancellor still influence the CSU today, including the creation of more accredited programs, stronger standards for accreditation of all programs, and the establishment of a system-wide general education program. Among his later publications related to higher education include co-authorship of The Faculty in Higher Education (1973). His oral history, The Evolution of the California State University System, 1961-1982, was published by The Bancroft Library in 1986.

For his many accomplishments as both scholar and administrator, Dumke received several prestigious national awards, including the USO Distinguished American Award and the award for Individual Excellence in Education from the Freedoms Foundation. Dumke died on June 29, 1989. His papers, including memos and correspondence related to the creation of the Master Plan, are held by the California State University Archives, California State University, Dominguez Hills, located in Carson, California.

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Thomas C. Holy
Position in 1960: Staff and advisor, University of California Office of the President, educational consultant

Thomas C. Holy was born in the town of Vandalia, Iowa, in 1887. He spent much of his early life in the Midwest, and served in the Army Corp. In 1909 he began working as a rural school teacher, and within three years rose to become superintendent of schools. Holy attended Des Moines University, and also worked as an instructor at Columbia Teachers College. In 1924 he earned a Ph.D. in education from Iowa State.

The skills and insights Holy developed in the Iowa school system were valuable credentials. During the next twenty-five years he was hired to direct education projects in Ohio, St. Louis, and New York, gaining knowledge on colleges and school systems across the country. For seven years Holy also chaired a commission to establish state schools for the blind and deaf in Ohio. He began working as a special consultant to the University of California in 1952.

His role in the development of the Master Plan was instructive. In the mid-1950s Holy co-authored a report on the needs for education centers in California. The document advised the legislature where schools would be most advantageous, based on their projections for enrollment. The report, A Study of the Need for Additional Centers for Public Higher Education in California, identified the urgent need to provide campuses in areas throughout southern California. It also led to the subsequent formation of a Master Plan Survey Team. Previous to his role as a member of the Master Plan Survey Team, he served as an author of the 1955 Restudy of the Needs of California in Higher Education.

Before his death in 1973, Thomas C. Holy published a number of significant studies on learning and instruction, including Education in the States: Nationwide Development Since 1900 (1969).

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Clark Kerr was born in 1911 in Stony Creek, Pennsylvania. His distinguished career as a labor economist, arbitrator, and educator began in the New Deal era when Kerr earned degrees from Swarthmore, Stanford, and the University of California in the 1930s. He studied at the London School of Economics as a traveling fellow with the American Friends Service Committee during the inter-war years. He was appointed by Presidents Truman and Eisenhower to serve on federal labor boards between World War II and 1960, developing economic programs on democratic organization.

Kerr's talents as an organizational thinker have been utilized during his extensive career as a university educator and administrator. He became the first chancellor of UC Berkeley in 1952, and in 1958 was selected to serve as president of the then seven-campus UC system. His experience as a mediator of student, faculty, and staff concerns was critical to the development of the Master Plan for education in California in 1960.

The governor had sought out higher education liaison team to resolve competition between California schools for degrees and recruitment, to devise a master plan for the state. Kerr's vision of the master plan was pragmatic. "The Master Plan has been called 'The California Dream,'" he said. "We were not dreaming the California Dream . . . we were more trying to escape the nightmare that was otherwise facing us." As advisor to the seven-member Master Plan Survey Team, Kerr proposed a compromise between state colleges, public and private universities, junior colleges, and the legislature that broadened education resources for Californians. Widely reviewed, the Master Plan remains a guideline for the state's teaching and research institutions. One of its key components, Kerr believed, was in reconciling "how much should be controlled by higher education itself and how much by the state."

President emeritus, Clark Kerr's contributions to education include studies and publications on industrialism, labor, and management issues. He continues to write and speak on issues and trends in higher education. His widely read collection of Godkin lectures on the essentials of free government and the duties of the citizen, The Uses of the University, is now in its fifth edition. The first volume of his memoirs, The Gold and the Blue: A Personal Memoir of the University of California, 1949-1967, was published by the University of California Press in 2001.

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Dean McHenry
Position in 1960: Professor of political science, UC Los Angeles, primary negotiator for the University of California

Dean McHenry was a native Californian, born in Lompoc on October 18, 1910. He received a solid education in the state's university system, taking political science degrees from UCLA, Stanford, and a doctorate from UC Berkeley in 1936. While at Stanford, McHenry was the roommate of Clark Kerr (a graduate student in economics).

In 1935, McHenry accepted a teaching position at Willliams College, then began teaching at Pennsylvania State College in 1937. In 1939 he returned to UCLA as a professor of government studies.

During the next decade McHenry became a productive scholar on California state government, producing a large number of journal articles and other publications.

In the late 1950s, he directed a survey of higher education in the state of Missouri. When Clark Kerr became president of the University of California in 1958, he asked his long-time friend to become his primary advisor in pending negotiations with state lawmakers and officials, and with state college representatives, over the future of California's higher education system. Kerr then appointed McHenry academic assistant to the president. By 1959, McHenry became the University of California's primary negotiator on the Master Plan Survey Team.

Following the Master Plan, McHenry became dean of academic planning. Three years later he was selected chancellor of the new UC Santa Cruz campus, which opened in 1965. For the next eleven years he was able to witness the goals of the Master Plan at its foundation.

In 1974 McHenry became chancellor emeritus, and generated numerous studies from his expertise as an executive and educator. In the 1970s he authored several volumes on the systems and elements of American government, including The American System of Government and The American Federal Government, widely used texts which he co-authored with John H. Ferguson. His examinations of federal and state systems were enriched by his tenure as a California scholar and appointments at the national level. He died in 1998, remembered fondly for touching the lives of generations of Californians.

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Roy E. Simpson
Position in 1960: California State superintendent of public instruction

Roy E. Simpson became superintendent of public instruction in California in the mid-1940s. Prior to holding this position he taught subjects at the high school level, and served as principal at schools throughout the state. He was born in Santa Rosa California in 1893, the decade when institutes of higher learning in California began receiving national attention for excellence. He embarked on a career in education, teaching high school classes at Anderson Union High, then joined the Army in 1917, where he served as an ordinance sergeant for two years.

Simpson followed a desire to study business in an era when California industries--from agriculture to tourism to media--were developing at full steam. He attended business schools in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Pomona before earning his M.A. from Claremont College in 1931. Within two years he was given the opportunity to apply his skills to direct school systems in Gilroy, Santa Cruz, and Pasadena. In 1945 he was chosen as the State superintendent for the Board of Education.

Simpson became a member of the Master Plan Survey Team in 1960, a flexible leader with control of the Board's power over state colleges. He was asked to provide strategies that prevented outside political interests from directing the aims of higher education. His dynamic, innovative leadership at the state level was admired by many. As the Master Plan team attempted to quell divisions from within and without, Simpson was one among the team who did not bend to pressures from those he represented. Because he performed like a statesman, Clark Kerr said he was one of those who "deserve the most respect" for his efforts.

Roy Simpson held titles on the boards of a number of educational and civic organizations, served as president of the Association of California Public School Superintendents, was affiliated with other councils and agencies throughout the nation, and held several honorary degrees.

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Henry T. Tyler
Position in 1960: Executive Secretary of the California Junior College Association

A native of Denver, Colorado, Henry T. Tyler was born in on May 31, 1900. He earned a degree in chemistry at the University of Denver in 1922, a master's degree in religious education at Union Theological Seminary of New York, and a doctorate in educational psychology at Columbia University.

He spent a lifetime devoted to higher education and earned many awards for his longtime service to the junior college system in California. Early in his career he served as the chairman of the psychology department at the Teachers College of Indianapolis. He worked at Sacramento Junior College in many capacities from 1930 to 1947: first, as an instructor in the psychology department, then as director of testing, and finally as vice president. From 1947 to 1954 he served as the president of Modesto Junior College. He continued his affiliation with Modesto Junior College as a counselor until 1961, while serving as a consultant on several studies of the California State Department of Education. His recommendations influenced legislation in many areas, including work experience education. He was executive secretary of the California Junior College Association when he was invited to serve as a member of the Master Plan Survey Team, a position he later recognized as his greatest professional honor.

After his retirement from the California Junior College Association in 1967, Dr. Tyler served as executive secretary of the Accrediting Commission for Junior Colleges of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges. In 1971, following his retirement from the Accrediting Commission, he was named "Man of the Year" by the California Association of Work Experience Educators. He died on March 10, 1987.

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Robert J. Wert
Position in 1960: Vice-Provost Stanford University, representative for California's private universities and colleges

Robert J. Wert was born in Harrison, Idaho, on January 16, 1922. He left the Midwest to attend Stanford University where he received A.B. (1943), M.B.A. (1950) and Ph.D. (1952) degrees in higher education. Wert settled in California, and joined the staff of Stanford as assistant to the president in 1951.

In 1959 he taught courses in education while also working as vice-provost and dean of undergraduate studies at his alma mater. That year he served on the Master Plan team, one of two representatives for private universities in the state. Wert's impartial participation insured that the Master Plan satisfied a broad range of interests around student recruitment, the goals of state colleges to expand their degree programs, and the need to prepare for a great wave of new students. As a consequence the Master Plan was unanimously passed in the state legislature.

From 1967 to 1976, Wert served as the president of Mills College, a private, all-women's college in Oakland, California. In addition to his academic involvement, President Wert maintained active involvement in the Bay Area community, serving on the boards of leading civic and arts organizations. A member of the Bohemian Club, the Inverness Yacht Club, and the president of the Fort Mason Foundation, he retired in 1976. Robert Wert died on January 22, 1991.

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Photograph Credits

Pat Brown: Official portrait of Governor Brown, circa 1963. Photograph courtesy of The California State Archives.
Arthur D. Browne: Photograph courtesy of Arthur D. Browne.
Howard A. Campion: Photograph courtesy of Los Angeles Trade-Technical College.
Arthur G. Coons: Photograph courtesy of College Archives, Occidental College Library.
Glenn S. Dumke: Photograph courtesy of San Francisco State University Archives.
Clark Kerr: Photograph courtesy of University Archives, The Bancroft Library.
Dean McHenry: Official portrait, taken early in McHenry's tenure as chancellor. Photograph by Moulin Studios; courtesy UC Santa Cruz.
Roy E. Simpson: Photograph courtesy of California State Library.
Henry T. Tyler: Photograph courtesy of Modesto Junior College, Public Information Office.
Robert J. Wert: Photograph by Don Jones; courtesy of the F. W. Olin Library, Mills College.