The Ivey League

It would have cost Louisiana State University $5,000,000 to build the school of veterinary medicine it so badly wanted, and L.S.U. had only $500.000 for the project. What could it do? The answer was easy: L.S.U. put its problem to an organization called the Southern Regional Education Board, arranged to send its future vets to campuses in other states. Had the problem come up only a few yearsbefore. L.S.U. would still be stumped.

Founded in 1948 by the Southern governors, the S.R.E.B. has been a major boon to higher education in Dixie. But the man most responsible for its success is its softspoken, diplomatic Director John Eli Ivey Jr. When the governors found him, Sociologist Ivey was only 28--the youngest full professor at the University of North Carolina. His mission with the S.R.E.B.: to fill the gaps in Southern higher education by getting states and campuses to share each other's facilities.

Cooperate, Coordinate. Sixteen states are now members of the S.R.E.B., and 65 colleges and universities have joined the Ivey league to cooperate in 30 different fields. Each year the board arranges to send hundreds of students whose home states do not have schools of medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine or social work to states that do. By such exchanges, says Ivey, the board not only relieves hard-pressed campuses of the necessity of adding facilities that would be duplicated elsewhere; it strengthens the graduate schools already in existence. For instance, Nashville's Meharry Medical College, a medical and dental school for Negroes, was in financial straits when the S.R.E.B. came along. Now, with about 60% of its students coming from outside the state, it is in business to stay.

By coordinating their work in other fields, the South's colleges and universities no longer have to spread themselves thin trying to cover the whole academic waterfront. In 1951 the South had no real graduate-nursing program. The University of North Carolina had a school for public health nursing, but there was still no place to train psychiatric nurses, administrators, teachers and supervisors. Through the board's work, six campuses in six states now have nursing schools, each of which concentrates on one specialty.

False Notion. Though North Carolina-born Dr. Ivey has kept his board out of the integration controversy, he has sold educators and politicians alike on the idea that "there is nothing more isolationist than our colleges, and there is no greater barrier to sound development than the generally accepted notion of institutional sovereignty." The board's biggest job ahead: a survey of the South to see what will be needed to meet the coming onrush of students.

Unfortunately, John Ivey will not be around to see the survey through. This week New York University announced that it had snatched him for its No. 2 job, the executive vice-presidency. To the 16 governors who head the S.R.E.B. membership, it was a blow--which was probably the surest measure of Ivey's success. Said Florida's Governor Le Roy Collins somewhat ruefully: "He is one of the top young men in the nation. He has preached the sound doctrine that the South should use the manpower and brains of the South to improve the South, that we should stop the flow of our best-trained men and women to the North. And now I hope he hasn't deserted us entirely."

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