On The Town

Like any other campus in search of a new head, the University of Buffalo (10,000 students) looked far & wide. Perhaps it was only natural that the search ended up right where it began. Last week, when the university announced that it had chosen as its new chancellor Clifford C. Furnas, director of the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory in Buffalo, it was unintentionally helping to prove a point: Buffalo (pop. 580,132) is a city where town and gown are one.

The university was a community project right from the start. In 1849 some 630 citizens raised $12,000 to put up a medical school which gradually earned a national reputation. One of its founders, Dr. Frank Hamilton, was summoned as a consultant after President James A. Garfield was shot. Professor James P. White introduced clinical midwifery into the curriculum for the first time in the U.S., and Dr. John C. Dalton Jr. was the first physiologist in the country to experiment on living animals as a part of his teaching. Under Chancellor Millard Fillmore (he kept the title even while President of the U.S.), the new school flourished, and by the 18905 the university was beginning to take shape.

Today the university's 14 divisions range from schools of business administration and nursing to education and social work, spread over 178 acres on the northeastern edge of Buffalo. But if the city has kept the campus going, the university has paid its debt in full. Of Buffalo's physicians, 70% are graduates; so are three out of four of its dentists, and a majority of its lawyers, judges and public officials.

As its ninth chancellor, Clifford Furnas, 53, will rule over a $25 million plant and a substantial ($4 million) budget. But since enrollments are expected to go up another 60%, he will have to keep his campus expanding. He seems to combine the necessary talents. A top metallurgist and a former professor of chemical engineering at Yale, he is also an able administrator who has seen his laboratory staff grow from 50 to 450. But his greatest asset will probably be his adopted city.

Last week, for instance. Buffalo was planning another windfall -the pledge of an annual $71,000 from the city's doctors for the medical school.

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