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But in pursuing scholarship, S.I.U. is doing even better. "The progress has been incredible," says a member of the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. More than 60% of the S.I.U. staff have doctorates, which puts the school among the top 15%-20% in the U.S. For the first time in Little Egypt's history, students are coming from other parts of the state and from other states. They are attracted by strong faculties in the liberal arts and in such specialties as microbiology and theater design. Among the 260 students from 40 foreign countries, many are taking courses at a novel center for the study of crime and correction that works closely with a model federal prison in nearby Marion. The university press, which published its first book in 1956, is now working on its 125th; among its notable volumes are the Selected Poems of Herman Melville (TIME, May 1) and Modes of Being, by Paul Weiss, Sterling Professor of Philosophy at Yale.
Pacesetter. From 3,000 students only 15 years ago, the school now has 18,200 students (apart from adults), of whom 80% are the first in their families to attend college. The faculty has grown from 250 to 1,150. By the end of the decade, with completion of a second permanent campus now rising out of the wheatfields near Edwardsville, 110 miles northwest of Carbondale, the university's capacity will reach 36,000 students.
Next month S.I.U. becomes one of the few universities in the U.S. to operate on a four-quarter academic year. Coupled with a 78-hour week of classroom use that runs from 8 a.m. to midnight, officials have squeezed the most out of the educational facilities—and educators. S.I.U. was the first university in the nation deliberately to hire visiting professors who were retired or soon to be retired at other schools. Among dozens of such luminaries have been Harvard Astronomer Harlow Shapley, University of Chicago Theologian Henry Wieman and Designer-Dreamer Buckminster Fuller (TIME Cover, Jan. 10).
Autonomy. The Illinois legislature used to starve S.I.U., but Supersalesman Morris, with the aid of regional politicians and a separate board of trustees appointed by the Governor, got the school a total appropriation of $103 million for 1963-65 (still far less than the favored land-grant University of Illinois). More than 60 new buildings have been completed or are going up in Carbondale alone, including a 17-story dormitory tower. Students have also pitched in to expand S.I.U., though 4,000 of them work to help support themselves. They paid for a $4,500,000 student union, with 16-lane bowling alley, and are now planning to kick in toward a new medical center.
Morris thrives on such displays of university spirit. Along with Little Egypt's awakening from economic and cultural torpor, it is proof of his promise that S.I.U. "must do more than promote good teaching. We must take the university to the people."