Universities: Cow College Conversion

Bossy cow cow Honey bee bee Oleomargarine oleobutterine Alfalfa—hey!

Only a cow college could boast a cheer like that, and only the University of California could boast a cow college like Davis. Northernmost of Cal’s nine campuses, Davis is the M.I.T. of California agriculture.

Now, growing at a dizzy rate on the Central Valley flatlands near Sacramento, Davis aims to be something more: a first-rate university with a vast campus of 3,710 acres. Already it has 4,900 students and 300,000 books; soon it will triple both, becoming the rural rival of Cal’s urban jewels, Berkeley and U.C.L.A.

“Cal Aggie Spirit.” Davis began in 1905 as Berkeley’s farm. Ag students went up there, 60 miles north, to practice planting and harvesting. As mass-farming grew, Davis trained managers and technicians; to broaden their education, it opened a liberal arts college in 1951. Then in 1959, to help accommodate California’s burgeoning college population, Davis was spun off entirely from Berkeley to become a general university campus.

Davis now has graduate students in 118 fields, from art to range management to thermodynamics. A thriving new engineering college is keyed to California’s thriving aerospace industry. By 1965, Davis will boast the world’s largest colony of subhuman primates (10,000 animals for biomedical research) and a Big Science cyclotron costing $2,257,000. By 1970, it expects to have law and medical schools.

With its “Cal Aggie spirit”—corn-fed coeds, boys in cowboy boots, and an honored honor system—rural Davis seems almost anachronistic in the age of urban universities. That is precisely its pitch. “Our isolation is important,” says genial Chancellor Emil Mrak, 62, a noted food technologist who used to teach at Berkeley. To justify his $10 million-a-year building program, Mrak has only to point at California’s jammed cities and freeways. Davis appeals as an oasis—part farm, part suburbia—where everyone still knows everyone else. Cars are disdained in favor of bicycles, a 700-lb. pig snuffles outside the chancellor’s window, new dormitories will house a comfortable 40 to 60 students, and the human-scale motto is “divide and congeal.”

Space to Think. Davis is not about to drop its super-cow-college learning. Foreign students (a high 10% of enrollment) are there mainly for that purpose. California’s $3 billion-a-year farm industry still needs trained talent. But Davis now has more than twice as many liberal arts students as regular aggies. Engineering enrollment has jumped 48% in the past year. Like all Cal campuses, Davis takes only the top 12% of California high school students (out-of-staters need a B+average). One result: a new Phi Beta Kappa chapter. Another: Cal President Clark Kerr’s own son attends Davis.

Cal’s regents envision Davis as the cultural leader of the Central Valley. The English faculty is adorned with men such as Hart Crane Biographer Brom Weber and Critic-Short Story Writer William Van O’Connor. Music has avant-garde Composer Larry Austin, protege of Darius Milhaud. Painters Wayne Thiebaud and Roland Petersen help make Davis tops in art among Cal campuses. Drama boasts talented young acting students with a beard or two, and this year’s visiting lecturer, Director Joseph Schildkraut, has already staged an excellent Peer Gynt. Symbolic of the times, the old Davis livestock judging barn is being remodeled as a Shakespearean theater.

“This place is really on the move,” says a recent faculty newcomer from a top Eastern college. Says Critic O’Connor: “I’ve enjoyed my two years here a lot more than my 14 years at the University of Minnesota. These kids are bright, but they don’t have any pseudo sophistication about them. They don’t have to act bored.” As for their teach ers, adds O’Connor, “Here you can really collect your thoughts.”