I was one of more than 500 mostly white-haired friends and admirers who gathered in a University of California at Berkeley auditorium recently to pay tribute to Clark Kerr, who died in December at age 92. He was chancellor of the Berkeley campus and then president of the nine-campus UC system during the 1950s and '60s.

What were Clark Kerr's accomplishments? Why does he deserve to be remembered by Californians?

He was chief author of the 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education. His vision was that virtually all high school graduates could aspire to a quality, low-cost four-year college degree, made possible by a cooperative division of labor between the community colleges, CSU campuses and UC campuses.

The community colleges would provide lower-division general education and vocational programs; CSU campuses, four-year and limited master's-degree programs; and UC campuses, undergraduate, graduate and professional, and research programs.

While there have been struggles among the three tiers about course comparability, the basic concepts of the Master Plan have stood the test of time. The plan has been widely copied throughout the country. Kerr, however, was to voice disappointment that so few community college students actually transfer to CSU or UC campuses.

Kerr would be dismayed at the state government's financial situation and the severe budget cuts that will mean a reduction of new freshmen next fall at UC and CSU campuses. That disrupts the promise of the Master Plan to California students and their parents. The Master Plan specifies that all eligible UC applicants -- the top 12 percent of high school graduates -- are to be admitted to one or another UC campus. Because of budget cuts, many who are eligible will not be admitted.

Three new UC campuses -- Santa Cruz, Irvine and San Diego -- were created during Kerr's tenure. Undoubtedly, Kerr would have approved of a new UC campus at Merced. Access to higher education underlay the Master Plan, and a UC campus in the Central Valley would expand the access.

Kerr's broad interests and prodigious work habits led to some 40 policy reports from the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, which he chaired beginning in 1967. One of the first reports from the commission recommended a major federal student aid initiative that became the Pell Grant program. Another report called for a grants-to-institutions program that became the federal Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, which over the years has awarded more than 1,000 grants to all sorts of campuses throughout the country.

One of the speakers said that Kerr had "fidelity to reality." From working with him for several years in the early '70s, this strikes me as particularly apt. He would identify some problem facing the nation's colleges, and then very soon begin thinking about solutions and recommendations. In doing so, he typically wanted a fix on reality -- in the form of hard data -- to back up his recommendations. He was not an ideologue; he seldom seemed to have preset positions. Instead, he commissioned dozens of surveys of faculty, students and institutional practices.

In May 1970, following the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the National Guard's killing of four students at Kent State, I proposed a survey to understand the scope of student protest that broke across the nation's campuses. Kerr agreed and suggested a case study of how the protest -- resulting in the campus being shut down -- had unfolded at Berkeley.

To my knowledge, Kerr was never interested in editing or changing the language in any of the reports he had commissioned from outside researchers, with one exception: A man of exceptional civility, he objected to the four-letter words in the draft of the above-mentioned study. The author, a graduate student, sought to portray the actions and emotions of the Berkeley student activists as accurately and vividly as he could. After some give-and-take, mostly with the commission's copy editor, the uncouth words were deleted. It was an occasion for staff chuckling.

Kerr knew people all over the world. He was on first-name terms, for example, with David Riesman ("The Lonely Crowd") and John Kenneth Galbraith ("The Affluent Society"). Few such luminaries were at the memorial; Kerr outlived them all, with one exception: Arthur Levine, now president of Columbia Teachers College. Art was a student leader at State University of New York-Buffalo in the 1960s whom Kerr recruited to the Carnegie Commission (later Carnegie Council) staff to help with reports on reforming undergraduate education at large research universities.

Clark Kerr's range of interests was breathtaking. Virtually every facet of college and university functioning drew his attention. The impact of his thinking about access and opportunity in California and elsewhere, for example, is inestimable. He was among the most important and influential higher education leaders, analysts and visionaries in our time.

Peterson is a retired research psychologist with Educational Testing Service now living in Sonora.