| 851Suburbanization of Physics The Postwar Suburbanization of American Physics

In his 1963 Godkin Lectures at Harvard on “The Uses of the University,”Clark Kerr, then chancellor of the burgeoning University of California,observed that the faculty of the emergent cold war universities had be-come “affluent, ” and that their “salaries and status have risen considerably.” Most telling of all, their roles and ways of life had changed palpably from the prewar days: “A professor’s life has become, it is said, ‘a rat race of business and activity, managing contracts and projects, guiding teams and assistants, boss-ing crews of technicians, making numerous trips, sitting on committees for government agencies, and engaging in other distractions necessary to keep the whole frenetic business from collapse.’ ” In short, Kerr concluded, the cold war university was neither a village nor a town, as older colleges and universi-ties had been modeled, but rather a city—he called it a “City of Intellect ” and a “city of infinite variety”—full of distinct subcultures, complex economies of operation, and vast managerial infrastructures. Kerr celebrated the modern, urbanized university, “rat race ” and all.2 Other commentators read a different lesson into these structural changes in American higher education. The cold war university was not a grand and ex-citing city, they contended, but rather the ultimate suburb—and, as such, hardly deserving of praise. Irving Howe, for example, lambasted postwar liter-ary intellectuals in a scathing 1954 Partisan Review article titled “This Age of Conformity. ” Intellectuals, Howe charged, had succumbed to the “tempta-tions of an improved standard of living ” and had sunk “into suburbs, country homes, and college towns. ” With this descent into suburbia came a “desire to retreat into the caves of bureaucratic caution ” and “intellectual conformity.”