Hail, California

Seventy-five years is a long time on the Pacific Coast. That was the hoary age last week of the University of California. It had become a great and solid institution but it was still full of the pioneering imagination of Kentucky-born Robert Semple, who in '49 told the California Territory's Constitutional Convention: "We could bring the president of Oxford University here if we paid him enough."

Out in the wide world, celebrating Bears, with the strains of Hail, California in memory, could take great satisfaction in what Californians dearly love to call the world's largest university. They can make a good case for the claim:

> 18,364 full-time enrolled students (before the draft: more than 26,000), all tuition-free except for out-of-staters.

> 10,081 acres of land in university use--world's biggest campus.

> A $60,000,000 plant (Yale's was costlier).

> A $28,772,314 endowment (13th in the U.S.).

> A faculty consistently rated in the top quality quartet (with Harvard, Chicago and Columbia).

> A library of 1,597,304 books (largest west of the Mississippi).*

Bears who celebrated last week on Berkeley's green, oak-groved hills above San Francisco Bay, found an alma mater with hundreds in uniform. In the sweeping, serene Hearst Greek Theater, they heard Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish draw a Paul Bunyanesque portrait of The American:

"A restless man. A great builder and maker and shaper, a man delighting in size and height and dimensions: the world's tallest; the town's biggest. . . . A man naturally hopeful . . . foremost of all, a restless man and a believing man, a builder and maker of things and of nations."

Smashing and Quietude. Meanwhile around the speechmakers, the big university was going about its manifold chores without much rhetoric and with obvious Americanism. In a special building California's $1,150,000 atom-smashing cyclotron was harnessed to the militarily secret imagination of Nobel Prizeman Ernest Orlando Lawrence. The Signal Corps invaders of the Agricultural College at Davis had not disturbed the quiet of university researchers. They had just discovered, for instance, that of each sugar-beet seed's five segments, only one need be planted--thus avoiding the wearisome labor of thinning.

In 21 months the university had put 50,000 students through war courses that included everything from the Japanese language to aircraft stress analysis and the administration of occupied territories.

Students still found time to stroll under the chiming Campanile in the shade of the eucalyptus trees. Among the pretty coeds were also many in Nurse's Aide uniforms (with 240, the course is the country's biggest), others who clerk in war industries in nearby towns.

Sobriety has increased on a campus where many students have always worked their way through. Last autumn Sigma Chi chose no sweetheart, fraternities and sororities have been crippled. Dimmed out was the night bonfire before the Leland Stanford football game. Student dances have phonographs instead of name bands, are fewer, simpler. Freshman-sophomore rivalry has become competitive crop harvesting.

Barbs and Thunders. For resolving all manner of political tides (from Isolationism to Stalinism) into concentrated aid to the war effort--and at the same time preserving high scholarly tone--the credit must go very largely to big, booming, businessy Bachelor of Science Robert Gordon Sproul (rhymes with "owl")--'13, president of the university since 1930. No Ph.D., he became university comptroller at 29, prexy at 38. Many scholars winced at this raising of administrative talent over learned distinction. But Sproul imagined and organized a great staff of scholars, an academic mammoth.

Sproul is the antithesis of Chicago's classical-minded Robert M. Hutchins. Multiminded as a department-store manager, Sproul tries to provide students with courses in whatever they want to learn. He has political genius. When the university's name was reddened, he toured the state to win friends. A nimble balancer, Sproul offered two answers to radicalism: for the short run, "barbs of ridicule and thunders of silence"; for the long run, "more equitable distribution of wealth and work."

Results: In 1940, 2,000 students milled at the university gates to protest the draft. In 1941 they voted 2-to-1 for the draft and aid to Britain, heaved out the Communist-infected American Students Union. California gold might have bought the president of Oxford, but hardly a more imaginative executive than Robert Gordon Sproul.

* Figures cover the university's six satellite campuses, including the huge Los Angeles branch whose Bruins (yearning to be distinct from Berkeley's Bears) earlier last week heard Poet MacLeish in a preview of the anniversary celebration.

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