Universities: Upstart U

On 640 rolling wooded acres near Stony Brook on New York’s suburban Long Island, a team of well-paid and highly ambitious educators are creating a university so fast that they audaciously call it “Instant Caltech.” At three other sites in New York, similar “university centers” are rising with similar speed, and “the day is not far off”— in the cool claim of Stony Brook President John Sampson Toll— “when the State University of New York will have sur passed that of California. We are young, flexible. By comparison, they are old, too bound up with politics, too intransigent.”

Such aspiration characterizes the urgency with which New York is belatedly creating a system of public higher education. The university was founded in 1948 by loosely grouping a motley assortment of former teachers colleges, agricultural institutes and specialized schools into a poorly financed system. It only really got cracking five years ago. Then the legislature, long content to let such top-rate private schools as Columbia, Cornell, N.Y.U., Colgate, Syracuse, Rochester, Vassar and Sarah Lawrence supply the state’s higher education, began pumping more money into the state system. Today it has 107,000 students, imaginative leaders, great teachers and plenty of money.

Constitutional Quirk. Since 1960, Governor Rockefeller has produced a fat $1 billion in building funds by turning to an unorthodox but effective device:

a State Dormitory Authority and State University Construction Fund, which by a constitutional quirk can issue bonds without voter approval. The in spiration behind the university’s new quest for quality is New York-born Sam uel B. Gould, once president of Ohio’s progressive Antioch College and later chancellor of the University of California’s Santa Barbara branch. He became S.U.N.Y. president in 1964, after the post had gone begging for nearly two years, and extracted a commitment of administrative-autonomy from the university trustees.

The system now consists of 58 units spread all over the state (see map), including ten state colleges, 28 two-year community colleges and four colleges operated for the state by Cornell in agriculture, veterinary medicine, home economics, industrial and labor relations. Rockefeller has even suggested that S.U.N.Y. might build colleges in each New York City borough, though this would overlap the city-owned City University of New York (presently racked with dissension over finance).

Glories-in-the-Making. The colleges, however, are only the infrastructure of the system: its glories-in-the-making are the university centers, each with its own specific strengths:

∙ STONY BROOK, located within 30 miles of famed Brookhaven National Laboratories, is the most exciting campus in the system. So new that the ivy is only about six inches up the red brick walls, it expects to challenge any university in physics research within a few years. Its $30,000-a-year President Toll is a theoretical physicist from the University of Maryland; his reputation—plus a $45,000-a-year salary—recently lured Nobel Physicist C. N. Yang to Stony Brook to head an Institute of Theoretical Physics that will have a $2,700,000 nuclear lab. Toll, who has also captured English Scholars Alfred Kazin and Peter Alexander, expects all his big-name professors to teach undergrads and all his researchers to apply their research to their teaching. He is applying Pentagon-style systems analysis to his educational goals, is trying programmed teaching by computer in basic physics and German. He accents interdisciplinary studies, looks forward to a planned integrated medical center with a 300-bed teaching hospital and a 1,000-bed Veterans Administration hospital. His chromium spade for ground-breaking ceremonies will soon be worn thin: 15 big buildings are already UD, and 31 more are to be completed within two years.

∙ ALBANY is a $100 million showplace campus going up on the 350-acre site of a former country club. Architect Edward Durell Stone has designed four 23-story dormitory towers, each overlooking its own one-story “academic podium” containing classrooms, labs, student lounge and auditorium. The quad system is supposed to let Albany handle its planned 7,500 students, yet retain a collegiate atmosphere. The school—which evolved from a 121-year-old teachers college—is strongest in its community-service-oriented graduate schools of public affairs, social welfare and criminal justice.

∙ BINGHAMTON is the only university unit devoted entirely to liberal arts. It is building on the scholarly fame of its incorporated Harpur College, which in turn had been created by Syracuse University to handle the G.I. Bill student surge. More than three-fourths of Bing hamton’s students come from the top 10% of their high-school classes. The school has an enthusiastic new president in former University of Delaware Arts and Science Dean Bruce Dearing “It’s exciting to be somewhere that’s growing rather than just tend the shop where someone else had all the fun,’ he says.

∙ BUFFALO, the biggest unit in the system, has 11,000 students. It grew out of the underfinanced private University of Buffalo, still occupies that school’s overcrowded 178-acre campus in North Buffalo, but will move to a $131 million, 1,000-acre campus designed to handle 27,500 students. Buffalo’s School of Pharmacy leads the nation in pharmaceutical research expenditures. Its School of Medicine has performed spectacular research in studying ways to enable dogs to breathe water, and the med school’s Dr. Robert Guthrie is the developer of a simple test to spot brain-crippling phenylketonuria (PKU) in infants. Foundation grants have allowed Buffalo to snare Nobel Laureate Willard F. Libby and Physicist Edward Teller as visiting professors. Critic Leslie Fiedler teaches in the English department. S.U.N.Y.’s only law school is at Buffalo.

Sam Gould predicts a bright future for his sprawling institution and for public higher education in New York. “It used to be thought,” he says, “that anyone who had any ability ought to go to private colleges and the remainder ought to go to the state schools. Today this is a very dangerous and even vicious thing to say. By 1985, 80% of the state’s college kids will be in public institutions. We’ll have difficulties—but whether I do it or someone else does it, I know how it’s going to come out. This is going to be a great university.”