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 the now defunct experimental New College at Teachers College, Columbia. There, in the mid-'30s he took part in a survey of high-school principals around Rutherford, found them agreed that too many of their students were missing out on a college education either because they could not afford to go to a campus away from home or because they could not get the training they wanted. In 1941 Sammartino and a group of the principals began discussing plans for a two-year junior college, got Rutherford's wealthy (surgical instruments) Colonel Fairleigh S. Dickinson excited over the idea. Dickinson arranged the purchase of the abandoned mansion and turned it over to Sammartino. In 1942 the new college opened its doors.
"You're Nuts." The time was hardly propitious. The armed services were draining U.S. campuses of their students, and one college official bluntly warned Sammartino: "Everybody else is either cutting down or folding up. You must be nuts." The first year, Fairleigh Dickinson managed to attract only 60 day and 90 night students. But balding President Sammartino offered something special to the community. He made local high-school principals his board of educational directors, evolved with them a curriculum that could be tailored to what local high-school seniors seemed to want and need. By 1945 his enrollment had jumped to 650.
As the community grew, so did the college. Though it offered basic liberal arts, it placed heavy emphasis on training students for careers. Its keynote from the start was flexibility. If an electronics or engineering student wanted to study only part of the year and work the rest, Sammartino would arrange with a local industry for him to do so.
"If You Can't Get in . . ." As might be expected, the college at first had to take its share of abuse. "If you can't get into college," local wags would say, "you can always go to Fairleigh Dickinson." But nearby industries continued to give Sammartino support, and his ten-acre campus flourished. He added a two-year nursing course, a school of dental hygiene, courses in hotel and restaurant management. In 1954 he took over the dying (150 students) Bergen Junior College in nearby Teaneck, included both campuses in the single full-fledged four-year college. He persuaded a steady stream of celebrities—e.g., Ralph Bunche, Madame Pandit, Perle Mesta, Gloria Swanson—to visit and speak. Finally, Sammartino's biggest dream came true. This June the New Jersey State Board of Education gave the once struggling two-year college permission to call itself a university.