Universities: The Giant That Nobody Knows

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scholarships. He was also highly successful at fund raising—a chore he detests. But then he alienated the tightly knit Antioch community by becoming the first college president to live in an off-campus house. Antioch's liberty-minded students were appalled by his warning to sloppy dressers that they ought to be "shaved, shod and shorn." There was a feeling, recalls one college official, that "Sam would be too formal, even in his underwear, for Antioch."

Gould was not much happier as the first chancellor of the University of California's campus at Santa Barbara—a job he took in 1959 at the request of Clark Kerr, who had once taught economics at Antioch. Gould managed to modify the school's reputation as a playground for social dilettantes, urging students to bring "more than their surfboards" to Santa Barbara. He also launched an overseas study program, and patched up the school's community relations. Yet Gould felt restricted by the dominance of the central Berkeley administration over the entire system.

Man, Time & Conviction. A seemingly larger challenge loomed in 1962, when Gould was offered the presidency of New York City's television station WNDT, which had grandiose plans of becoming a showcase example of what could be done with educational TV. "I was misled about the job," says Gould sadly. He found the station deeply in debt, spent most of his time fund raising and fighting with labor unions instead of pursuing plans for better programming. He also ran into a volatile and imaginative professional broadcaster in his general manager, Richard Heffner, who was determined to control the creative side of WNDT himself. Pushed too far, Gould finally fired Heffner, an act that drew upon him a storm of press criticism. Heffner, who suffered just as much, now says: "My historical sense prevents me from taking too much away from Sam Gould. With S.U.N.Y., the man, the time and the conviction all came together."

When Gould was offered the S.U.N.Y. position, it looked to him like "absolutely the worst job in the world." Neither the legislature nor the Governor had until then done much about building up the university; the previous president, Thomas H. Hamilton, felt so powerless that he left to take over the University of Hawaii.* S.U.N.Y.'s trustees spent nearly two years looking for a replacement, ran fruitlessly through 140 names before thinking of Gould. More prophetic (and optimistic) than most, Gould became convinced that "this place had to be important in the future of New York—it just had to be." He exacted a pledge from Governor Rockefeller and the trustees that he would be given solid support and considerable freedom, then said yes. True to his word, Rockefeller found ways to provide the essential underpinning of S.U.N.Y.'s growth: massive funding.

No one is more aware than Gould that he has not solved his multiversity's problems in just 3½ years. He knows that some of his units do not yet have college-level quality and that his students are too often right when they complain about the irrelevance of their courses. Much of the university, he thinks, is still more concerned about whether a student has the right number of courses for a degree than whether he has really learned anything. And he is not sure where he is going to