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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.