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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?"