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Sunday, October 25, 2020

Dean McHenry: Some UCLA, UC-Berkeley, and UC-Santa Cruz History (& Some EPIC History)


Background
Dean McHenry was born on October 18, 1910 in Lompoc, California.

Education
Dean McHenry graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was a student body president, then studied his way up the coast, receiving a master's degree from Stanford University and a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley.

[See below this item for what this account leaves out.]

Career
Dr. McHenry had a respectable academic career in political science. After teaching government at Williams College and political science at Pennsylvania State University, Dr. McHenry returned to the University of California at Los Angeles in 1939 as a member of the political science faculty.

Over the next 19 years he turned out a steady stream of scholarly works, among them ''The American Federal Government'' and ''The American System of Government'' and with time out for a couple of academic appointments in Australia and New Zealand emerged as an adept administrator at U.C.L.A. In addition to being department chairman, he had a nominally chuckling stint in charge of social sciences as Dean Dean McHenry.

As a tenured professor, Dr. McHenry might have remained at U.C.L.A. until retirement if his old Stanford roommate Clark Kerr, a longtime Berkeley professor, had not been named president of the University of California system in 1958. When Dr. Kerr asked for help, Dr. McHenry agreed to be his academic assistant and later dean of academic planning.

Those were heady days for academic planners in California, and as the university's representative on the group that drafted California's master plan for higher education in 1960, Dr. McHenry played a major role in devising what became an acclaimed and oft-copied three-tier system formed to guarantee a low-cost college education for every high school graduate in the state.

At the bottom of the academic pyramid were an array of two-year community colleges for less qualified students. In the middle was a network of four-year state colleges, like San Francisco State and Fresno State, open to students in the top third of their high school graduating classes, and at the top, for those ranked in the top eighth of their classes, were the six elite units of the University of California, among them U.C.L.A. and Berkeley. When the state authorized three new university campuses, at Irvine, San Diego and Santa Cruz, Dr. McHenry, who was in the thick of the planning, was named chancellor of the Santa Cruz campus.

At a time when the University of California was being increasingly criticized as an impersonal ''multiversity'' more interested in research than teaching, Dr. McHenry and Dr. Kerr used Oxford, Cambridge and Dr. Kerr's alma mater, Swarthmore, as the models for a campus of eight semi-autonomous residential colleges, where students would have close, continuing contact with their professors.

Leading architects were hired to construct the buildings at Santa Cruz, carefully placed to avoid disturbing the towering redwoods on the spectacular 2,000-acre campus overlooking Monterey Bay, which helped Dr. McHenry's recruitment of an impressive faculty drawn from Ivy League colleges and elsewhere. When the university opened in 1965, the dawn of the flower child era, the formula for laid-back education proved so popular that Santa Cruz attracted the cream of California's students and became the cynosure of the counterculture.

Dean E. McHenry, an academic pioneer who turned his vision of a campus with a redwoods vista, a Pacific view and a no-fault grading system into a counterculture magnet and an educational gem, died on March 17, 1998 at a hospital in Santa Cruz, California. He was 87.

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The academic biographies of McHenry often leave out this element of his career:

Dean McHenry and the 1934 End Poverty in California/Upton Sinclair Campaign

Upton Sinclair was a Socialist American author who wrote nearly 100 books, the most famous of which is The Jungle (1906) which exposed horrendous conditions in the meat-packing industry. Dean McHenry was an avid reader of his novels. In 1934 Upton Sinclair registered as a Democrat and ran for governor of California. He won the primary by a landslide, but an intense media campaign, which inaugurated the modern media's role in electoral campaigns, contributed to Sinclair's defeat.

In 1934, Clark Kerr and Dean McHenry were young and idealistic UC Berkeley graduate students. Kerr, whose Master's thesis at Stanford University was on self-help cooperatives, invited Dean McHenry to Los Angeles, where he worked as a field agent for a summer helping to establish self-help cooperatives for unemployed people. This was part of EPIC [End Poverty in California]. Dean McHenry had been raised a Republican and belonged to the progressive wing of the Republican Party. He switched to the Democratic Party partly to support Upton Sinclair as governor and also because he was disillusioned with the emerging reactionary forces within the Republican Party...

McHenry remembered:

"I was in favor of social insurance and in favor of a better tax system than we had in California. (We didn't have an income tax in California at that time.) We were pretty desperate, you know, by mid-1934. There weren't very many signs of recovery adn California hadn't changed politically very much, despite the fact that Franklin Roosevelt was presient and there was some New Deal legislation that was rolling. But I think a lot of young people are idealistic. I had always been interested in utopias. There even was a Utopian Society at the time which was joined by many, many people. We thought there might be some better society that was possible. And Sinclair raised those hopes a good deal."

When he returned to Berkeley in the fall, McHenry served as Chairman of the Planning Committee for the Northern California Division of the EPIC Young People’s League and helped gather a cadre of key Northern California politicos and thinkers who would advise Sinclair as governor, if he got elected. Dean McHenry discusses his role in the Upon Sinclair/EPIC Campaign in his oral history conducted by the Regional History Project at the UCSC Library.

"In the 1934 campaign, I had been fairly close to many of the Sinclair people . .  It was the EPIC campaign, and by far the most fascinating campaign in the history of California probably ever, but at least in my time. . . I was not really an insider in the Sinclair campaign . . . I spoke for the Democratic ticket and advocated Sinclair’s cause in a great assembly in Wheeler Auditorium at Berkeley in the fall of 1934. President Sproul presided, and there was a spokesman for Merriam and a spokesman for a third party candidate called Raymond Haight and then I spoke for Sinclair on the Democratic ticket. That, so far as I can remember, was the only public appearance I ever made in that campaign..."


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Despite what you read above, McHenry was not without fault:


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