Education: California’s Investment

All morning long in Berkeley, Calif., a thin line of black figures crawled down an incline which was massed with others like themselves, crawled like ants across turf to a flower-decked platform, crawled back up and were lost among their fellows. At one end of Memorial Stadium, under the great gilded C which gleams on Berkeley’s Charter Hill, the University of California was graduating its largest class. President William Wallace Campbell, 68, mechanically distributed from cabinets which were rolled up to him, 2,596 degrees.* The hot morning wore on. Finally, as he was about to present a gold medal to a professor in the mathematics department, President Campbell swayed, tottered. “I am not well,” he gasped. Colleagues supported him off the platform, carried him out of the stadium and away from the last commencement exercises at which he will ever officiate. President Campbell will retire June 30; his place will be taken by Robert Gordon Sproul, 39, class of 1913, comptroller of the university. Mr. Sproul will become the second-youngest great university president in the land.*

In almost complete contrast are California’s past president and president-to-be. During austere, bushy-browed President Campbell’s seven years in office many of his hours have been whiled away on top of Mt. Hamilton, 30 mi. southeast of Berkeley, where, as director of Lick Observatory, he spends his time staring into the sky watching stellar orbits, comets, nebulae. For the past 30 years his fame as an authority on solar eclipses has caused him to be selected to lead expeditions into India, Russia, Spain, Australia. If you wanted to communicate with President Campbell, a letter to Lick Observatory would always reach him.

But if you wanted to see alert, big-voiced Comptroller Sproul, he might be found busy at the university’s work on the oak-grown Berkeley campus, or among the broad vineyards at Kearney, or in the fat fields of Davis. As it was when he was comptroller, his task as president will be the administration of a $60,000,000 plant whose holdings include over 13,000 acres, whose annual income is $11,000,000 from state, federal and private sources—California’s biggest cultural investment.

Unlike his predecessor, President-Elect Sproul is no schoolman, no scholar, no holder of learned degrees. His business, which he entered the year he graduated from the institution, is the commerce of education.

Scope. Well acquainted is Comptroller Sproul with the magnitude of his institution’s academic and student population. California, the nation’s largest residence institution, employs 2,866 pedagogs and officers to educate and manage its 26,111 graduate and undergraduate students in winter and summer sessions at Berkeley, at Los Angeles (under a director appointed by the president), at San Francisco, at Davis, La Jolla, Riverside, Meloland, Kearney, Mt. Hamilton. When he or she enters the university, each young Californian may choose from the curricula of 25 schools and colleges for preparation toward a career.

Berkeley. When anyone outside the state thinks of the University of Califor nia he usually thinks of Berkeley. Within the state it is a moot point, depending largely upon which end of the Commonwealth one lives in. Southern Californians jealously defend the autonomy of the University of California at Los Angeles* (whose commencement occurs the end of this month), and point with pride to their new plant, call attention to the fact that U.C.L.A. is now empowered to give a four-year college course. But the unit at Berkeley is the parent organization. An outgrowth of the College of California in Oakland, founded 75 years ago, it removed soon thereafter to the present site. It now has an enrolment of 11,473, nearly twice as many as U. C. L. A. (6,175).

Situated 20 minutes from Oakland, 35 minutes from the Metropolitan pleasures of San Francisco across the bay, Berkeley’s thousands have a very good time. The young men are addicted to wearing comfortable corduroys, driving ornamented motors, rigadooning with California’s belles (traditionally beauteous) who compose one-half of the student body.

Famed are Berkeley’s pedagogs, among them: Professor Herbert McLean Evans, discoverer of vitamin E; Professor Charles Atwood Kofoid, celebrated zoölogist, Professor Robert Heinrich Lowie., onetime (1913-21) curator of the American Museum of Natural History; Professor Gilbert Newton Lewis, whose theory of Time-Past and Time-Future may win him the Nobel Prize (TIME, April 28) ; Professor Andrew Cowper Lawson, international geologist, onetime (1914-18) dean of the College of Mining. For his good humor as well as his capabilities, dear to the heart of many a Californian is Professor Emeritus Charles Mills Gayley, pedagog and poetaster — with whom Governor Clement Calhoun Young once collaborated on a text on English poetry.

Graduates. The task of gathering funds from the legislature (which falls to any state college president) is considerably ameliorated in the case of California, for Governor Young was graduated in the class of 1892. Among other of California’s celebrated sons and daughters: Cartoonist Rube Goldberg; Authors Charles Norris and Jack London; Humorist Sam Hellman; Crack U. S. Army Aviator James Harold (“Jimmy”) Doolittle; Tennis Champion Helen Wills Moody; President Aurelia H. Reinhardt of Mills College (Oakland); Julius Klein, U. S. assistant secretary of commerce; Vice President Willis H. Booth of Guaranty Trust Co., onetime president of International Chamber of Commerce; President William Benson Storey of A. T. & S. F. Creed, late president of Pacific Gas & Electric Co.

Gifts. Because California is still comparatively young, few tycoons of the first water have yet appeared on her alumni roster. But three famed and wealthy California families have made her bounteous gifts. The late Phoebe Apperson Hearst (mother of the Hearstpapers’ publisher) gave the Women’s Gymnasium and many a scholarship. Across the stage of the famed Greek theatre runs the legend: THE GIFT OF WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST. Two sons of Publisher Hearst, who also gave the Mining Building, matriculated at California: George and William Randolph Jr. From Banker Amadeo Pe ter Giannini (Bancamerica-Blair) came the Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics. From Miss Ellen Browning Scripps (Scripps-Howard newspapers) came the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Soon to be opened is an international house—similar to one in Manhattan and to one abuilding at the University of Chicago— the $1,800,000 gift of John D. Rockefeller Jr. which will provide quarters, amusement and a rallying ground for hundreds of California’s Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Hawaiians.

* Among them, the season’s first batch of honorary degrees. Recipients: Frederick Hanley Scares, assistant director of the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Mt. Wilson Observatory, California alumnus (1895); a classmate, famed Architect Harvey Wiley Corbett (Manhattan’s Bush Terminal Office Building, George Washington Masonic Memorial at Alexandria, Va.); Professor Florian Cajori, California mathematician.

* Youngest is President Robert Maynard Hutchins, 31, of the University of Chicago.

* Not to be confused with the University of Southern California, likewise in Los Angeles. Enrolment: 9,000.