Education: Town-Gown Triumph

Like ants with headlights, the cars turn off Sunset and Wilshire and pour into the University of California at Los Angeles, their drivers stoically paying the 50¢ automobile admission fee that U.C.L.A. charges to discourage overcrowding the 411-acre campus with cars. Out of the cars stream 9,500 night students, who head across the campus for courses that range from modern Armenian to thermal management of spacecraft. Along with the students come some 300,000 culture-minded visitors a year to such events as a film series on the supernatural, or a superb new production of Measure for Measure (TIME, Jan. 26). Thousands of extension students last week jammed registration offices to sign up for the spring semester.

U.C.L.A. is the showpiece and home base of the biggest adult higher education program in the U.S. It is run by the seven-campus University of California, which last year enrolled 150,000 extension students, more than one-fourth of all extension students on U.S. public campuses. The part-timers’ course hours were the equivalent of those of a fulltime campus with 12,000 students. The entire operation costs $8,000,000. of which the state pays only 9%. Tuition and ticket sales cover the rest.

“Learn or Perish.” Cal’s effort goes far beyond the old image of university extension programs, which had their beginnings in agronomy courses for farmers and evening classes for teachers. About 80% of Cal’s extension students—who are mostly married, mostly men, and who average 32 years of age—have attended college: 60% have bachelor degrees; 10% have graduate degrees. They include, as one astonishing example, two out of every three California lawyers. The big motive is to keep up. “It’s no longer possible for the educational process to stop,” says Dean Paul Sheats, Cal’s statewide extension boss, “You have to learn or perish.”

U.C.L.A. runs its extension courses from its main Westwood campus, its downtown Los Angeles branch, and 50 other locations in public schools, private houses and business offices. One summer course for doctors this year will include a field trip to Japan to study the side effects of oral contraceptives. An annual management seminar draws many executives from Boston’s electronics complex.

Intellectual Burpee’s. Published three times a year, the extension catalogue of more than 1,000 courses and seminars is a sort of intellectual Burpee’s. Poring over this document, Angelenos can find anything from mortuary science, avant-garde French theater and “Values of Contemporary Man,” to applied combinatorial mathematics taught by George (One, Two, Three . . . Infinity) Gamow and “Flights of Reality” as charted by Novelist Erskine Caldwell. The catalogue has revolutionized cocktail chatter from Bel Air to Beverly Hills.

Like Broadway plays, some courses open out of town (San Diego is one try-out spot), get favorable reviews and move on to bigtime Westwood. U.C.L.A. never knows quite what to expect; adult students are no simple problem. One stiff engineering course, which meets six hours a week and requires 14 hours of homework, ran into lonely-wife trouble. Now the wives attend lectures on their husbands’ professional problems, which somewhat soothes them. Hardest of all is predicting the pulling power of new courses. One lecture series on “Man and Art” was supposed to draw 36 people, wound up with 750. For a rigorous philosophy course, officials expected 100 students. When the crowd overflowed 1,800-seat Royce Hall, 800 students got their checks back.

Expansion by Extension. All this is heady stuff for a university that did not even exist 35 years ago. As recently as 1959, it sold tickets for only five public events; this year the number is up to 117. Largely expanding by extension, U.C.L.A. now plans to double its libraries to 3,000,000 volumes. Now abuilding is a new college of fine arts, the first on any California campus. Well under way is a new theater-arts building, designed by Architect Charles Luckman, that will house two theaters.

U.C.L.A.’s daytime students have grown accustomed to sharing their campus with a good part of Southern California. When the U.C.L.A. Art Council last year staged a Picasso show, made up largely of loans from local collections, it drew 42,000 people. Prominent in the promising young Los Angeles Grand Opera Company are alumni of U.C.L.A.’s always strong music department. The first 18 productions of the rising U.C.L.A. theater have attracted 70,000 people, and as one consequence, off-Broadway-style theater is booming all over Los Angeles.

By now it is hard to say where the city begins and the university ends, and U.C.L.A.’s Chancellor Franklin D. Murphy likes it that way. “Los Angeles is destined to be one of the great intellectual and cultural centers of the world,” says he. “We’re very close to it, if not there already.”