appointment was seen as a signal of the university administration's intent to move in that direction. The news of his appointment stirred up such open hostility from the faculty members who thought they had signed up under Watkins to work for a liberal arts college that Spieth never held a ceremony to inaugurate his provostship. UC President Clark Kerr was bewildered to discover years later that Watkins had inexplicably recommended Spieth as his replacement over the other leading candidate, Robert Nisbet; Watkins knew or should have known that Spieth's appointment would seal the fate of his liberal arts college. By the time Kerr succeeded Sproul as president of the UC system in 1958, UCR was in its fifth year of operation and comprised 1,087 students. Kerr articulated a vision of UC as "one university, many campuses" and so Riverside, Santa Barbara, Davis and San Diego were all designated general campuses of the UC system by 1959. Like the provosts elsewhere, Spieth's title was upgraded from provost to chancellor. The Regents tasked him with increasing UCR's enrollment capacity to 5,000 students and administering UCR's development towards full university status. As UCR's first chancellor, Spieth was to combine the College of Letters and Science and the Citrus Research Center under a single academic and administrative entity, as well as oversee the planning and development of UCR's graduate division, in accord with the provisions of the developing California Master Plan for Higher Education. UCR started accepting graduate students in 1961; UCR's College of Agriculture, Air Pollution Research Center and the Dry-Lands Research Institute were also established during Spieth's administration. One of Spieth's most important contributions to Riverside was in planning its campus. Oddly, Watkins attempted to use the liberal arts colleges of the East Coast as a model for campus design in the hot, arid Inland Empire, which meant the college's first buildings looked like a New England high school to Kerr. Spieth quickly shifted the Riverside campus towards Spanish- and Moorish-inspired architecture more appropriate for its arid climate. The Kerr directives In October 1959, President Kerr prohibited the student governments on all UC campuses from taking positions on off-campus political issues without the expressed permission of their resident chancellors. Students at Riverside picketed Spieth's office in protest, and student newspaper editors at Berkeley, Riverside and Santa Barbara signed a joint editorial condemning them. As the editor of the UCR Highlander summed up