Robert Gordon Sproul

Robert Gordon Sproul ( ; May 22, 1891 – September 10, 1975) was the first systemwide president (1952–1958) of the University of California system, and the 11th president of the University of California, Berkeley, serving from 1930 to 1952.

Background

Robert Gordon Sproul was born on May 22, 1891, in San Francisco, California, to Robert Sproul, an immigrant from Scotland, and Sarah Elizabeth Sproul, a native of New England. His younger brother, Allan Sproul, served as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In 1913, he earned a B.S. in engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, where his classmates included future Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren.

Career

In 1913, Sproul started his career briefly as an efficiency engineer in Oakland, California.

During the Great Depression, expansion of facilities stopped. After World War II, he served on the Committee for the Marshall Plan. Sproul started to speak of UC's missions as "teaching, research, and public service",

California governor Earl Warren asked Sproul, his former classmate and fellow 1911 member of the University of California Band, to place his name in nomination for Vice President of the United States at the 1948 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Sproul retired in 1958. He became active in the Save the Redwoods League (after being a member since 1921) and in the East Bay Regional Park District and served on the National Park Advisory Board.

Before and during Sproul's presidency, the University of California's bureaucracy was highly centralized in Berkeley, but that was no longer politically viable by the time he retired. After 1900, the skyrocketing population of Southern California meant that Southern Californians were becoming the majority of everything—the state's population, then the state legislature, and then the Board of Regents—and they were fed up with long-distance micromanagement from Berkeley. UC Berkeley Chancellor Clark Kerr succeeded Sproul in 1958 with a clear mandate for change from the southern regents. Oddly, Kerr kept Sproul around as president emeritus and allowed him to sit on the committee which developed the actual plans for decentralizing the university's bureaucracy—that is, for dismantling the empire in Berkeley which Sproul had carefully protected for so many years. Sproul participated in the committee's meetings, but had enough dignity to know when he had been beaten fair and square. He put up no opposition and all committee votes were unanimous.

From Sproul's office as president emeritus, he gave a speech during the 1967 Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, by which he "contributed one of the few notes of humor in an otherwise grim confrontation." When student demonstrators broke into his office and scattered his papers, he told a reporter, "Nonsense. Nobody messed up my office. It always looks that way." (now Delta Chi Abracadabra), the Order of the Golden Bear, and the Bohemian Club - he sponsored Ernest Lawrence's membership in 1932.

He died age 84 on September 10, 1975, at home in Berkeley, California. made an honorary fellow of Stanford University, 1941; and named "Alumnus of the Year" by the California Alumni Association in 1946.

(All honors and awards listed come from the University of California History - Digital Archives.

Research

The research vessel R/V Robert Gordon Sproul, used by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California, San Diego is named after him. It has been in service to the University of California since 1984.