As he gazed from across the street at the big, abandoned mansion in Rutherford, N.J., the young facultyman from Columbia University fell to musing. "Wouldn't it be wonderful," said he, "to turn that place into a college?" Eventually, Peter Sammartino did just that, but the institution he founded was far from orthodox. Now known as Fairleigh Dickinson University, it is one man's aggressive but imaginative answer to the increasing demand for higher education.
The son of an Italian-born pastry cook, Sammartino graduated from City College, studied at the Sorbonne, finally became an associate of...