Education: Big Man on Eight Campuses

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In the open-air Hearst Greek Theater at Berkeley, Calif, one day last week, 8,000 new students sat waiting. As the warm sun beat down on them, the band blared out Hail to California. A huge, hearty figure strode on stage. The yell leader called for a “Six.” The big man stood listening to the cheer with a big smile. Then he called for another chorus of Hail to California; he helped out with his bathtub baritone. Then silence fell. Robert Gordon Sproul, president of the nation’s largest university (41,451 full-time students), began to speak. As everybody had known he would, he struck just the right note.

“I hope you will not take this personally,” he said, “but I think that there are 10,000 too many of you. You would all be happier if somehow the 10,000 could go elsewhere. But whether you belong here or not I welcome you. You are the most attractive and handsome group of newcomers I have ever seen, especially the girls. [Giggles from the audience.]

“Of course, I have made the same compliment to other classes, but then I had never seen the class of 1951. You will find the campus cluttered with shacks, tenements, huts and barracks. Where the goober-hangers-are going to find a place I don’t know [laughter]. Somehow we will make out. . . . The general level of education . . . must be raised if we are to disappoint the Kremlin with the vigor of our society. . . . You must work hard here, and you must think. That is probably harder work than you have ever done. . . .”

Then, once again, everybody sang Hail to California. At the University of California, school was open.

That night Robert Gordon Sproul (rhymes with jowl) put on a boiled shirt and shook hands with 3,000 of his new charges at a party in the women’s gymnasium. Next day he and Mrs. Sproul boarded the streamlined Southern Pacific Lark for the second of his eight campuses, Cal’s jealous younger sister, the University of California at Los Angeles, to go through the routine again. He still had a long way to go” to cover all his domain. Says Bob Sproul: “Sure it’s tough, but I do it purposely. I do it with the intention of making my person the visible unity of the university.”

Sky High, Ocean Deep. Californians boast about their eight-campused university in the same extravagant, affectionate way that they talk about their climate and their oranges. Their enthusiasm is adjectival: the university is big, varied, young, impatient, aggressive, progressive. Especially big. Its interests run as deep as the ocean and as high as the sky. At Scripps Institution in La Jolla (pronounced La Hoya), Cal oceanographers study the depths of the Pacific, and at Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton, Cal astronomers scan the stars. The university operates the atom-bomb city of Los Alamos, N.Mex. It owns ranches, waterworks, apartment buildings, forests, and the world’s biggest cyclotron. On its 10,000 acres grow tomatoes, peaches, oranges, olives, avocados, alfalfa. A man can get frostbite or burn to a crisp without leaving university premises. The university employs 12,000 professors, janitors, secretaries and swineherds. It will spend $36,990,000 this year to run its eight campuses.*

Commuter Campuses. This fall, practically every college in the U.S., crammed with ex-G.I.s, feels like the old woman who lived in a shoe. But California, whose shoe is the biggest, feels the pinch as badly as any. Last week at Berkeley, the narrow off-campus streets reaching out from the 300-foot Campanile were choked with cars from all over the Bay region.

Electric trains carried other undergrads across the Bay Bridge from San Francis co; thousands more of Berkeley’s 21,396 students arrived by bus and streetcar.

Down south at U.C.L.A. (14,258), 2,000 cars filled all parking lots, and the over flow lined the curbs for two blocks.

Berkeley’s Engineers’ Glade was buried under an unsightly array of temporary buildings ; another row of prefabs made a garish contrast with the Italian architecture of U.C.L.A.’s Royce Hall. Even the floor of the men’s gym at Berkeley was in use for classes, and regular classrooms ran as late as 10 p.m.

The first student to register at Berkeley last week queued up at 3 130 a.m., and was allowed in at 7:45. European History was jammed; so were most engineering, chemistry and physics courses. Those who had heard about a new course in World Affairs, with no exams, waited from one to three hours to sign up; only 1,000 of the 2,500 who applied could be accepted.

Down at U.C.L.A., the big bottlenecks were chemistry and engineering — and the student bookstore, which had a block-long line.

Big & Lonely. In the overflowing, far-flung University of California, just about the only thing its thousands of students have in common is Robert Gordon Sproul. The lonely bigness of Berkeley helps to explain why the Cal rooting section* at football games is not only the world’s largest but at times its most raucous. Undergraduates sometimes blow off steam by deluging neighbors with pillow feathers and toilet paper, and loudly counting out the steps as the referee paces off a penalty against Cal, ending up with a thunderous “You Bastard!” When Stanford beat Cal in last year’s Big Game, 25-6, disgruntled Cal rooters tore up the grandstands. U.C.L.A.’s rooters, who last year had a Rose Bowl team, behave better.

The loneliness disturbs a friendly fellow like Bob Sproul, who is Rotary’s best foot forward.† He works hard trying to make everybody happy. At the freshman receptions, Sproul turns on what he calls his “astonishing memory,” amazes and flatters a newcomer by pumping his hand and roaring: “Dan Baxter from San Juan Bautista? Why, you must be Arnold Baxter’s boy. Class of 1917, wasn’t he?”

To help give Cal’s commuters a campus spirit, Sproul sponsors monthly “University Meetings” in the gym or the Greek Theater. He invites V.I.P.s in education, sport, politics and military affairs to headline the bill (top drawing cards: Philosopher John Dewey, the late football coach Knute Rockne). Introducing a student leader who had just been disciplined for raiding the Stanford campus to steal the traditional “Axe” before the Big Game, Sproul remarked at one meeting: “You all know Don McNary, who has represented this university officially many times and unofficially at least once.” That sort of indulgent presidential view of their conduct makes a hit with Cal students, even more than Sproul’s occasional all-out efforts to be one of the boys. (At U.C.L.A., Sproul once sang the Three Little Fishies with the Tri Delts.)

Sproul had a painful time last season when Cal won only two football games, and lost seven. A good many of the alumni blamed the bad record not only on the coach (who was fired) but on Sproul, who insists that he wants “students playing at athletics, not atheletes playing at studies.”

Four-Check Visitors. Bob Sproul, a Californian both by birth and inclination, is the first native son and first alumnus ever elected president of the university. He has spent 37 of his 56 years on the campus, 17 as president. Bluff and extraverted, he personifies the confidence and optimism, the booming voice and outsized gesture, that marked California of the ’20s. A large man (6 ft., 200 lbs.), he diets and exercises to keep trim.

Every morning at 8:30 his secretary brings him a list of people who want to see him. Sproul ranks them in order of importance, from four checks down to one. He clips appointments to a 2O-minute maximum, allows himself three minutes in between to dictate a digest of the conversation. These digests are kept in bound volumes; callers are often astonished when Sproul picks up where he left off a year before.

The president lives with his wife, his mother and a fidgety Irish setter, in a twelve-room stone mansion overlooking the Berkeley campus. They do a lot of entertaining (a September house guest: Harvard’s President James Bryant Conant), have occasionally fed a whole varsity team. All three of the Sproul children, two sons and a daughter, are Cal grads. So is sobersided brother Allan, who is president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Sproul’s father was an accountant for the Southern Pacific and hated it. Recalls Bob: “He told me never to get mixed up in a job I didn’t enjoy, no matter what rewards it offered.” Bob was born & raised in San Francisco, a geographical accident that he tries to minimize in ruling California’s northern and southern branches with an impartial hand.

As an engineering student at Berkeley, Bob made Tau Beta Pi (the engineers’ version of Phi Beta Kappa), a feat which he has attributed more to his photographic memory than to any scholarly gifts. He was also a Big Man on Campus: a star two-miler, class president, Y.M.C.A. president, manager of the “Big C Sirkus” carnival, R.O.T.C. regimental captain, drum major of the band.

Soon after his graduation in 1913, he was a Little Man off Campus—an efficiency engineer in nearby Oakland. It wasn’t half as much fun. Remembering his father’s advice, Bob Sproul stuck it out only a year—long enough to marry the girl at the next desk (says he: “I’m the victim of propinquity”). When the university cashier absconded, creating a deficit and a vacancy, Bob Sproul joyfully went back to college. He has been there ever since.

Lobbyist Supreme. At 29, Sproul became comptroller, making him business manager of the university’s campuses and its vast real-estate investments, and watchdog of Cal’s interests at the state capital. As a business manager, Bob Sproul was efficient; as a legislative lobbyist, he was superb. Sometimes his methods annoyed Cal’s crotchety old astronomer-president, William Wallace (“Eyebrows”) Campbell. Once, hearing Sproul’s booming voice ripping through the wall, President Campbell demanded to know what the comptroller was doing. Told that he was talking to Sacramento, the old man snapped: “Well, tell him to use the telephone.”

When Sproul was not in Sacramento, backslapping and bulldozing the legislators, he was hitting the road to visit his most influential “constituents”—the farmers. Sproul convinced them that the university was doing a good job, sold himself in the bargain. In 1930, when he was only 39, Sproul, who had never taught a class in his life, and had only a bachelor’s degree, became president of the University of California.

No Thanks. The average U.S. college president lasts only five years in office. Bob Sproul is still going strong after 17, and it is not for lack of other offers (“They’re getting to be a nuisance”). Sproul has declined the presidency of the Anglo California National Bank (at $50,000), the presidency of the Prune and Apricot Growers, the directorship of Selective Service, candidacy for the Republican nomination for senator and governor. His biggest temptation came last January.

All day the rumor had gone around that Columbia University wanted Sproul as president, at a whacking figure. Nearly 8,000 students jammed the gym, chafed impatiently until Governor Earl Warren, ’12, finished a long speech. Then up jumped husky varsity halfback and Student President Ed Welch. Grabbing the mike, he cried: “We’ve been trying to steal a coach from another university. Now another university is trying to steal our most important man. We can’t go on without Bob Sproul!” The band played For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow. A blue-&-gold banner implored: STICK WITH us, BOB! When Sproul promised that “Your wishes will not be ignored,” cheering undergraduates raised the roof. The Columbia job went instead to Ike Eisenhower, whose doctoral degrees are also honorary.

Barnstormer. Few Californians would deny that Bob Sproul earns his $20,000 a year. After his role as papa of the university family, the president considers himself a kind of dignified pressagent—”the symbol of the university to the state and the people, and the spearhead of the university’s public relations.” To make sure that no bushels hide Cal’s lights, Sproul makes at least one major address a month, does a lot of minor banqueting besides. Periodically he barnstorms around the state, renewing his friendships. One “good friend and great alumnus” whom he never neglects: his college chum, Governor Earl Warren.

It helps to have a legislature honeyCombed with Cal alumni (about 40 out of 120). Last year the university was involved in 143 bills introduced at Sacramento, ranging from a “Little Dies Committee” probe to a bill for sardine research. Bob Sproul woos each indifferent and hostile legislator, invites them to visit Cal campuses. There prominent alumni guides point out what Cal is doing to rear the youth and raise the crops, gently remind the visitors that Cal has 190,000 living, breathing, voting alumni. Former students range from Atomic Physicist Harold C. Urey to Radio Actress Vera Vague; include General Jimmy Doolittle, Cartoonist Rube Goldberg, Helen Wills Moody, Jack London, Gregory Peck, Kathleen (Forever Amber) Winsor, and Sun Fo, president of China’s Legislative Yuan.

To cope with a major legislative crisis, Bob Sproul always has a secret weapon in reserve: alumni of the Order of the Golden Bears, a pack of onetime Berkeley campus big shots, who come out of hibernation whenever Golden Bear Sproul cries for help. In less than 24 hours, as many as 70 bank presidents, manufacturers, brokers, lawyers and physicians have assembled on call. Once briefed on the crisis, the Bears go back to their plush-carpeted lairs, pick up their telephones and growl at their senators and assemblymen. Since Sproul became president, the legislature has given the university $255,173,885, or more than double the total in all the previous 43 years of the university’s history.

Persuader’s Job. Some university presidents have dictatorial powers; the president of the University of California is only a prime minister. His educational program must win the approval of the Academic Senate, a powerful faculty body that predates Sproul’s regime, and makes California one of the most democratically run universities in the U.S. No new courses or departments can be added, no dean appointed, no new professor called, no academic budget instituted, without Senate action. Says Sproul with a grin: “The faculty can’t be driven. It can only be persuaded.” Sproul is, of course, a professionally persuasive man.

The 16-man Board of Regents (appointed to 16-year terms and by custom reappointed for life) own the eight campuses, hire & fire university presidents, spend the legislature’s appropriations as they see fit. The board is dominated by four conservative members: Bankers James K. Moffitt, ’86, and Edward A. Dickson, ’01; Lawyers John Francis Neylan (who made a fortune as Hearst’s attorney) and Sidney M. Ehrman, ’96. At regents’ meetings, Sproul waits until his opinion is asked, as he knows it will be.

The regents respect Bob Sproul, though the more moss-backed regard his defense of free speech on the campuses as some sort of incurable malady common to educators. Sproul has an excellent record on civil liberties, which is something of an accomplishment, since the Hearst press is always ready to brand Cal and U.C.L.A. as “hotbeds of Communism.” Sproul is able to defend campus liberties because not even State Senator Jack Tenney, chairman of the “Little Dies Committee,” would accuse him of being even a crypto-Communist. Says Bob Sproul: “Tenney thinks I am softheaded, but not malicious.” Toward undergraduate radicals, Sproul has a hate-the-sin-but-love-the-sinner attitude: “I take pleasure in opposing those ingenious youngsters. We have some great little fights.”

The Separatists. Bob Sproul has even greater little fights with the patriotic citizens of Southern California, who are hot for separating U.C.L.A. from its sister at Berkeley. Sproul modestly disagrees with the general verdict that “the University of California is held together by me alone.” His principal argument for keeping the state’s colleges in a single system is to avoid expensive duplication. To keep Southern California happy, Sproul has helped make young and lusty U.C.L.A. a strong school in its own right. Now growing at a faster rate than Berkeley, U.C.L.A. has its own football team, its own alumni association, will soon have a $7,000,000 medical school.

Like Harry Truman at the Army-Navy game, Bob Sproul roots for both sides at the annual U.C.L.A.-Cal game. He always gets a big cheer when he ceremoniously swaps seats at the half. Until 1945, he maintained a house on both the Berkeley and the Los Angeles campuses. Then, as a more enduring way of satisfying the south, Bob Sproul nominated to the vacant U.C.L.A. provost’s job Clarence Addison Dykstra, onetime city manager of Cincinnati and later president of the University of Wisconsin. (The Berkeley campus has been without a provost since Monroe Deutsch, Sproul’s high-school Latin teacher, retired recently.) “Dyke” was handed a considerable measure of autonomy—and the president’s house—at U.C.L.A. He runs a campus that has fewer big names and less academic prestige than Berkeley.

The Fifty-Foot Test. Just how good an education do California’s 41,451 students—north & south—get?

The San Francisco Chronicle once observed that it is better for a student to get within 50 feet of a great man than within five feet of an ordinary one. That is the theory on which the University of California operates. California, which pays better salaries than any other state university, has bagged more than its share of the nation’s eminent scholars and good teachers.

Most experts rate its faculty in the nation’s top four, along with Harvard, Chicago and Columbia. Among CaPs galaxy of scientific stars: Nobel Prizewinner Ernest O. Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron; Glenn T. Seaborg, discoverer of plutonium; and—until recently—Physicist Robert Oppenheimer. Among its strongest suits: physics, chemistry, engineering, history, agriculture, music.

The predominance of the sciences at Cal is no accident; as shrewd Bob Sproul well knows, it is much easier to persuade legislators of the tangible benefits of research in plastics or potatoes than of the value of knowing about Yeats and Keats. That attitude is not peculiar to legislators; it is shared by many of the faculty, by the overwhelming majority of California undergraduates—and by most Americans. Remarked one history major last week: “You’re made to feel that if you aren’t taking both physics and chemistry, you’re wasting valuable space.”

There are 947 students in the biggest class at Berkeley. This sheep-dip style of education encourages short cuts: mimeographed commercial lecture notes (Fybate Notes) sell like Books-of-the-Month on Berkeley’s campus. California does its best to break up, and to personalize, the courses. At U.C.L.A., one professor of history props up a seating chart of his 150 students next to his shaving mirror until he commits it to memory. But the university recognizes its limitations. Says popular Chemistry Professor Joel Hildebrand: “The big institution must be content to be a place of opportunity rather than a place of compulsion. It is no place for a student of unformed character and uncertain purpose. [But] the presence of the mob need not seriously interfere with the education of the gifted.”

Who Goes? To a considerable degree, California’s problem is democracy’s: Who is entitled to go to college? One answer is, everyone who can afford to; but that is an answer that does not satisfy even wealthy and independent universities. Another answer is that every boy & girl in the U.S. should be given a college education. Robert Gordon Sproul does not agree. Practically everyone in the U.S. wants a college education, he says, and now, with inexpensive state universities* and the Government passing out millions of dollars under the G.I. Bill of Rights, practically everybody can get one. But, he adds, “large numbers of students [are] not properly qualified by native ability, or previous training, or even social attitude.” Only one in five graduates of California’s high schools has high enough grades (B average) to enter Cal.

Sproul thinks it would help if every baby were awarded a bachelor’s degree at birth; that might satisfy those interested only in the prestige of a college education. A good many others, he suggests, should be shunted off to junior colleges and vocational schools, to be given the education they really want and are fitted for. That would leave the university free for what Sproul considers its real responsibility: the specialized work of the junior and senior years, graduate and professional schools, for exceptional students.

From the president of a state university, that is a bold proposal. Before it is adopted, Bob Sproul will have to weather a lot of wrangling with Californians who still think Cal should be open to every taxpayer’s son & daughter. Says Sproul: “You can’t do anything as long as the G.I.s are coming anyway. You can’t keep those boys waiting around while you remodel the educational system.” But he is sure (“I’ll bet my hat on it”) that the state university of the future will be “a university more likely to produce great scholars than great football players. It won’t be an educational country club.”

It will not be, in fact, the kind of college that Bob Sproul himself, and millions of his fellow Americans, went to, and where they had the time of their lives.

* Goober-hanging”: a discreet daytime version of what grandmother called spooning. A less active sport is “piping the flock,” when Cal males watch Cal “quails” preening in the sun on the steps of Wheeler Hall. * The eight: Berkeley, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, the agricultural college at Davis, a medical center in San Francisco, Mt. Hamilton, La Jolla and a citrus experiment station at Riverside. The last three are campuses only in the imaginative, California sense: they are mainly research centers. Not part of the University of California, and not state-owned: Stanford University (at Palo Alto), the University of Southern California (at Los Angeles), the California Institute of Technology (at Pasadena). * The Berkeley team is known as the Bears; U.C.L.A.’s as the Bruins. † Sproul is now, or has been, president of the Berkeley Rotary Club, Berkeley Community Chest and Berkeley Boy Scouts Council; treasurer of the Save the Redwoods League, a director of the Berkeley and Los Angeles Chambers of Commerce, etc. He takes up 65 lines in Who’s Who in America. * Cal tuition: $35 a semester for Californians; $185 for out-of-staters.