Education: Speedup

If everything had gone according to plan, Dr. Franklin D. Murphy might have made quite a name for himself as a heart specialist in Kansas City, Mo. Instead, he has won a reputation as one of the fastest-rising educators in the U.S. Last week, after three years of watching his spectacular performance as dean of its medical school, the University of Kansas made him its tenth chancellor—the youngest it has ever had.

Bach to Berlin. At 35, K.U.’s new chancellor is an urbane, affable man who reads everything from Rabelais to Runyon, listens to everything from Bach to Berlin, gets along equally well with scholars, bankers, farmers and legislators. The son of a physician, he graduated from K.U. in 1936, and after time out for a year of studying physiology at Gottingen, Germany, finally got his M.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was top man in his class. By the time he returned to his home town, he had been around enough to be sure of one thing: the Midwest was losing far too many good men to the richer and older universities and cities of the East.

Preaching this gospel while practicing medicine, Franklin Murphy soon attracted the attention of K.U. officials, and in 1948 the university invited him to head its medical school. Before long, K.U. was wondering how it had ever gotten along without him.

In the old days, the medical school thought it was doing well to get $200,000 a year in gifts and grants. In 1949, Murphy saw the figure rise to $300,000; in 1950, to $357,000; and in 1951, to $700,-000. He persuaded the legislature to give him the unprecedented sum of $3,800,000 to expand the school and its hospital. He raised faculty salaries all around, went after the ablest young men he could find for his staff.

Courses & Clinics. Murphy’s influence spread beyond his campus. He tackled medical problems affecting the whole state, notably the problem of the vanishing country doctor; 70 Kansas rural communities had no physician at all. He took the lead in urging his own graduates to go to the country, in persuading rural communities to build new clinics to attract the young M.D.s. To combat the country doctor’s fear of “medical isolation,” he sent his faculty members around to lecture on the latest scientific developments, and organized refresher courses for general practitioners. The education of a doctor, he said, is a 4O-year program.

As successor to Chancellor Deane W. Malott, now president of Cornell (TiME, Feb. 5), Dr. Murphy will take over 6,500 students, a 684-man faculty, and a $30 million plant with schools of medicine, law, pharmacy, business, engineering and architecture, journalism, and fine arts. In the last twelve years, K.U. has begun to climb from its place as a solid but unspectacular state university. Under Chancellor Murphy, it hopes to climb even faster.