Education: Big Building

For eleven years John Gabbert Bowman, Iowa-born chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh, has been building a 535-ft., 42-story skyscraper known to his admiring fellow citizens as the “Cathedral of Learning.” During Depression, Pitt had to cut its faculty salaries and staged a Red hunt which got Chancellor Bowman into trouble with the American Association of University Professors. But the Cathedral of Learning kept climbing into the air. Last week, with Pitt’s sesquicentennial celebration well under way, the Cathedral of Learning, now 90% complete, was opened to two days of public inspection. Into a vast, four-story-high Commons Room, whose fluted columns and mosaic floor had just been finished, Chancellor Bowman invited representatives of his students, trustees and faculty to watch a belated cornerstone laying. With Mayor Cornelius Decatur Scully and Steel Heiress Helen Clay Frick looking on, the chancellor gave the stone a proud pat of cement and two husky seniors shoved it into place.

Since Pitt’s 10,500 students are already at work in the Cathedral’s 91 classrooms and 119 laboratories, this ceremony was only Chancellor Bowman’s way of spurring wealthy Pittsburgh to further contributions. He has already raised some $22,000,000 for his university and wants $10,000,000 more, is so determined a money-getter that he has become a Pittsburgh legend. He once walked into a meeting of Westinghouse Electric executives, planked a pottery vase down before startled Board Chairman Andrew Wells Robertson, recited Keats’s Ode to a Grecian Urn, and walked out with $2,000,000.