Universities: Kansas Centennial

“I knew there was a Kansas,” said Critic Dwight MacDonald. “So I guessed there had to be a University of Kansas.” MacDonald was right, of course—there has been a University of Kansas for 100 years. Last week he and a dozen other celebrities helped K.U. mark its centennial, and saw how the school that started out offering courses in “Xenophon’s Anabasis” and “Cicero’s Orations” has grown to a big and diverse university full in the process of self-renewal.

What strikes most visitors when they first go to K.U. is the beauty of the 900-acre, tree-covered campus, atop a hill called Mt. Oread, curiously rising out of the prairies around the town of Lawrence. If he tarries longer, the visitor is impressed by the million-volume library, the small classes, the spectacular wildlife diorama that Kansas inherited from the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, the extension courses for prisoners at Leavenworth Penitentiary (favorite subjects: abnormal psychology and sociology of deviant behavior), the big medical school (in nearby Kansas City, Kans.).

Big & Also Little. Under state law, any Kansas high school graduate has the right to enroll at the university, but incompetents are weeded out fast in the first semester. Over the past eight years, Kansas has harvested six Rhodes scholarships, almost as many as Princeton or Yale, and 106 Woodrow Wilson scholarships for postgraduate study in the past six years. An honors program exempts the top 150 students from class-load limits, lets some students carry as many as 28 hours per semester and whiz through college in little over two years.

While Kansas enrollment has grown to 15,000, the school is also experimenting with ways to keep the intimate feeling of a small campus. Next fall 600 freshmen will be selected at random to live in the same dorms, take the same classes and eat together, to form a “college within a college.” But under Chancellor W. Clarke Wescoe, a physician and former dean of the Kansas Medical School, the stress is on expansion.Enrollment will go up another 25% by 1972. A $30 million building-constructionprogram was begun in 1965. To top it all, an $18.7 million scholarship and faculty-salary fund drive was launched last week.

Private Support. Penny pinching by Kansas politicians, plus a state ban on going into debt, leaves the university with no alternative except to seek funds from private sources. But Chancellor Wescoe forthrightly favors the principle that “no state university can hope to be first-rate without private support.” He has even encouraged the construction of privately owned student dormitories that provide frills, charge higher fees, and turn a profit for investors.

To help celebrate its birthday, Kansas invited a sampling of intellectuals: Designer Buckminster Fuller, former Supreme Court Justice Charles Whittaker, Anthropologist Ashley Montagu, Psychiatrist Karl Menninger, Broadway Producer-Director Harold Clurman, Rule-of-Law Expert Arthur Larson. But the center of attention was a long-dead Kansas woman, Carry Nation. For the centennial observation, which will go on for six months, Composer Douglas Moore (The Ballad of Baby Doe), now a visiting professor at K.U., wrote an opera about that booze-hating feminist’s tortured marriage and bar-smashing career. Now in rehearsal at the university’s handsome new Murphy Hall for performing arts, the opera will have its première there at the end of this month.