Formality Is Taboo California Institute of Technology

People driving by the pleasant campus in Pasadena, Calif., barely notice the low-rise stucco buildings, the casually dressed students strolling across lawns or sitting on benches with their noses buried in books. It could, to all appearances, be any one of hundreds of small vocational colleges. In fact, that is how it began life in 1891, saddled with the uneuphonious name of Throop University.

The California Institute of Technology (as it was renamed in 1920) has come a long way since then. Other small universities have a Nobel laureate or two among their faculty and alumni; Caltech boasts 20, including Physicist Richard Feynman, who helped formulate the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and Neuroscientist Roger Sperry, whose experiments revealed functional differences in the left and right hemispheres of the human brain.

Other universities take credit for a handful of major discoveries; Caltech’s would fill a book. It was there that Seismologist Charles Richter devised the standard scale for measuring the intensity of earthquakes; that Astronomer Maarten Schmidt discovered the nature of quasars; that Physicist John Schwarz developed the “superstring” theory that may achieve Einstein’s goal of linking the universe’s four basic forces; that scientists made interleukin-3, the longest biologically active protein ever chemically synthesized. Caltech administers NASA’s nearby Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which designed, built and guided many of the nation’s unmanned spacecraft, including Explorer 1, the first U.S. satellite, and the Voyager that flew by Uranus in January. These and a host of other achievements have sprung from an institution that is pint-size in comparison with major universities; Caltech has only 273 professors and fewer than 1,000 each of graduate and undergraduate students.

Caltech’s rise to prominence came in the 1920s under the direction of three eminent scholars: Chemist Arthur Noyes, who was imported from M.I.T., Physicist and Nobel Laureate Robert Millikan, from the University of Chicago, and Astronomer George Ellery Hale of California’s Mount Wilson Observatory –known for their respective disciplines as “Stinker, Tinker and Thinker.” Using their prestige to lure both brains and financing, primarily from the East, the trio built a superlative faculty and outstanding facilities that in turn attracted some of the nation’s best students; almost one-third of last year’s entering freshmen ranked first in their high school graduating classes.

Adding to Caltech’s appeal is the permissive, informal atmosphere that pervades the campus. Says President Marvin Goldberger: “Select the very best people, give them the very best facilities and stand aside.” He does just that, giving his professors a voice in choosing which students should be admitted, who should be hired and which research projects should be funded. “We don’t have a lot of deans running around,” says Chemistry Professor Harry Gray. “The scientists run this place.” As a result, Caltech scientists can test a theory in the time that other universities take merely to consider it.

Formality is taboo. The president is not Dr. Goldberger but “Murph” to faculty and students alike. Professors lecture in jeans and open-collared shirts, shorts and sandals. They encourage questions and expect challenges. Gray has been known to wear a horse’s head while lecturing. Feynman, who played a bongo-banging tribal chieftain in a student production of South Pacific, mixes serious physics with stand-up comedy. And Murph marked the centennial of Einstein’s birth by donning pith helmet and chaps and riding an elephant across campus.

Professors are not the only ones noted for their peculiar sense of humor. During the school’s annual Ditch Day, seniors secure their rooms with a variety of fiendishly clever locks and barriers, then leave campus and challenge the wimps (underclassmen) to get in. This year one room was guarded by a computer that had to be addressed in several languages before the door could be opened. “I guess it sounds like a strange way to have fun,” says Ky-Anh Phan, 19, a sophomore from San Jose, “but building strange things is what this place is all about.”

Such single-minded devotion to problem solving has led to criticism that Caltech turns out scientists who have little understanding of life outside their fields and works its students so hard, despite the high jinks, that they have little time for politics or social problems.

But no one denies Caltech’s enviable record or doubts that it will achieve even more. This week Caltech scientists will announce the completion of a DNA sequenator, an instrument that uses a laser beam and colored dyes to analyze rapidly the structure of DNA molecules. And even while major astronomical discoveries are still being made with Caltech’s 200-in. Hale Telescope, the school has joined with the University of California in building on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea a 394-in. optical scope, the world’s biggest, which will enable astronomers to see 12 billion light-years into space.

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