Phenomenal Phoenix

To the young zoologist who had decided to take a job as a professor at the new University of Miami, the news in 1926 was depressing. The crash of Florida's big real-estate boom had all but wiped out the university backers; worse still was the devastation left by the 1926 hurricane. Zoologist Jay F. W. Pearson might never have gone to Miami at all if he had spotted the headline sooner: MIAMI IN RUINS.

For a good many months, it seemed as if the university might remain part of the ruins. But Pearson decided to stay anyway. He rose to be President Bowman Ashe's second in command, was picked as his successor after Ashe died last December. Last week, at Pearson's inauguration, visiting scholars and notables could see what a phenomenal phoenix the university had become: Pearson was officially taking over one of the fastest-growing campuses in the South.

Spanish Skeleton. If everything had gone according to plan, the University of Miami might have been born big and grandiose. Its founders, a group of Coral Gables plungers, wanted it to look like a bit of old Seville--"a triumph of Spanish architecture." Instead, with its founders financially crippled by crash and hurricane, the university opened with a $500,000 debt. Its great administration building remained only a skeleton; its one usable building was an abandoned, half-finished hotel, which was fixed up with beaverboard partitions to accommodate classes. President Ashe himself had to borrow on his own insurance policies to help pay professors' salaries, and Zoologist Pearson had to build his own laboratory tables. The whole campus seemed so shaky, in fact, that it became known throughout the U.S. as "Cardboard College."

After six years of scrimping and saving, going into bankruptcy and buying himself out again, Ashe got rid of his debt. By 1936, he had managed to buy up 59 acres, collect 1,000 students. Then, during the war, the university suddenly began to boom. R.A.F. trainees and G.I.s were sent there by the thousands. After them came hordes of veterans. With a $5,000,000 loan from FHA, Ashe started creating the campus he had always dreamed of. In 1947, he opened the streamlined Memorial Classroom Building--the first real building the university had ever had.

Two years later, Ashe finished the administration building, put up the lavish Student Club, built out over a man-made lake eight miles southwest of the center of Miami. With gifts from local citizens' groups and a few Manhattan millionaires, he built ultramodern classrooms and breezeways. He lined his walks with palm trees, planted flowering rubber bushes, poinsettia and bougainvillea. This year Miami's enrollment climbed to a total of 10,000 students.

Caribbean Center. Today Miami is a good deal closer to being the "university of the Caribbean" that President Ashe wanted. Its Hispanic-American Institute oversees courses for some 200 South Americans a year, and its regular curriculum places considerable emphasis on South American studies. Its young school of medicine is becoming a center for the study of tropical diseases, and its botanists are pioneering in ways of preserving, shipping and marketing tropical fruits.

To Greater Miami, the university means even more. It has the only legitimate theater in town, has the only symphony orchestra, owns the only art museum. Under new President Pearson, it is obviously not planning to stand still. Among its present projects: the building of a new $2,000,000 medical school, a Beaux Arts pavilion, a special school of tropical agruculture.

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