Subway College

Most of its students go to classes by subway, and one of its off-campus centers of undergraduate life is an Automat. If you want rah-rah, Manhattan's City College (the full, unrelieved title is The City College of the College of the City of New York*) is no place to go.

Despite its uncollegiate atmosphere and its sparsely ivied walls, City College has developed an alumni body as full of loyalty as it is of famous names. Last week City College was busily celebrating the 100th anniversary of its founding. The centenary year opened with a dinner addressed by Alumni Bernard M. Baruch, '89, and Justice Felix Frankfurter, '02.

(Other graduates and former students: the late General George Goethals, '77, Rabbi Stephen Wise, '92, Upton Sinclair, '97, Senator Robert F. Wagner, '98, Conductor Alexander Smallens, '09, John Kieran, '12, Edward G. Robinson, '14.)

Free but Not Easy. City College was the first tuition-free, city-owned U.S. college (nine cities now own colleges), and was started, according to its first president, West Pointer Horace Webster, as an "experiment [in] whether the highest education can be given to the masses."

Of the first 143 who entered in 1849, only .17 were graduated. Today City College, with 27,000 students, /- has proportionately fewer casualties but still rates as a college with exacting entrance exams and high academic standards. Its engineering and business courses are topnotch.

City College students (mostly men) live at home, generally consider college a serious preparation for making a living, usually hurry from class to class in businesslike silence or earnest conversation. In the 30's the school had a reputation for pacifism and radicalism; now its scholarship and its first-rate basketball teams are its chief glories. The main campus, on St. Nicholas Heights in upper Manhattan, has six be-gargoyled Gothic buildings; but its downtown branch at 23rd Street and Lexington Avenue looks like any big Manhattan office building. Students who don't foregather at the nearby Automat are apt to be found across the street at the George Washington Hotel, which before the war always kept a ten-pound cheese handy for them at the bar. This year City College added a third "campus," for veterans only: a former public-school building on West 50th Street.

City College's President Harry N. Wright, a mild-mannered, meticulous Quaker who loves problems, never runs short of them. Examples: cramming the overgrown student body into buildings designed for half the present enrollment; trying to counteract the slanders and slights that City College sometimes receives because of its 85% Jewish student body.

* "College of the City of New York" is the common moniker of all four of New York's city-owned colleges: City College, Hunter (for women), Brooklyn College, Queens College. /- Other top overall enrollments this fall: University of California, 47,864; New York University, 39,500; Minnesota, 33,115; Columbia, 28,108; Ohio State, 24,600; Illinois, 24,332.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.