The biggest institution for higher learning in the world has 47,000 students, most of whom pay no tuition. To visit its campuses and buildings, among which is not a single dormitory, takes a day's hard traveling by subway. Its football teams are trounced by such tiny colleges as Albright. Last week this immense, sprawling educational factory, the College of the City of New York, which embraces four city colleges, passed not one but several new material milestones:
¶Brooklyn College moved into a new $6,000,000 home in Flatbush—a 42-acre campus and five new buildings, academic, science, library, gymnasium, power plant —built by the city and PWA.
¶Plans were prepared for a $5,000,000 16-story skyscraper on Manhattan's Park Avenue to house Hunter College, largest women's college in the world.
¶In Queens a brand new college plunged into its first term, extending free higher education into the fourth of New York's boroughs and clearing the way for a campaign for another college by the patriotic citizens of the fifth, Staten Island.
Fortnight ago the colleges had undergone a less heralded but more significant change, the advent of a new administration. City College is ruled by a Board of Higher Education of 21 members, who are appointed by the Mayor for nine-year terms. For 20 years board and college had been ruled by Tammany Hall. Since 1934 Fusion Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia had made inroads on this regime by appointing nine members to vacancies. But when three more terms expired last June, and one of his appointees resigned, the Mayor, on the verge of transferring control of higher education from Tammany to Fusion, was stumped to fill the four places. The job is unpaid, takes considerable time and many prominent citizens fear to become embroiled in politics. Finally, two weeks ago, the mayor found respectable citizens who would take three of the jobs, giving him a majority of eleven on the board. Chairman of the board, suave Mark Eisner, law partner of Tammany's former leader, George W. Olvany, continued as a holdover in the fourth job, waited for the mayor to reappoint or replace him.
Leading LaGuardians on the board are Columbia University's roly-poly Professor Joseph D. McGoldrick, currently running for comptroller of the city, and ruddy, fast-talking John T. Flynn, writer and economist. Others include Author Ordway Tead, Amalgamated Clothing Workers Secretary-Treasurer Joseph Schlossberg. Art Critic Lewis Mumford is the one who resigned.
The four colleges operated by this board are City (men), Hunter (women), Brooklyn and Queens (co-educational). Each in turn is run by a president and an administrative committee of board members. City has a group of Gothic buildings on Washington Heights and a 16-story business school downtown. Hunter is scattered among its main centre at 68th St. and Lexington Ave., a midtown office building and a new campus next to a reservoir at the farthest limits of The Bronx. Brooklyn has just moved out of five rented, jampacked office buildings around Borough Hall. Queens starts in a group of buildings, once a reform school for truant youngsters, in Flushing.