Vocational Supplement

When Dr. William S. Carlson, 52, became president of the 2 1/2-year-old State University of New York in 1952, he took over what is probably the most outlandish educational hodgepodge in the nation. From his Albany office, which is not even on a campus, he watches over two medical schools, a forestry and a maritime college, four community colleges, a fashion institute of technology, six technical institutes, six more technical-and-agricultural institutes, twelve teachers colleges. There are also colleges of ceramics, agriculture, home economics, industrial and labor relations, and veterinary medicine (operated through special contracts by Cornell and Alfred Universities). There is only one Ph.D. program (in forestry), and only one campus--Harpur, at Endicott--offers the liberal arts.

A geologist who once headed the University of Delaware and later the University of Vermont, Carlson has done his best to give his students a better education. But though he has accomplished much, he has been constantly frustrated by the chronic feud between his trustees and the State Board of Regents. Worse still is a dilemma that has faced S.U.N.Y. all along: Should it try to be a real university, or merely continue to offer fringe programs, while leaving the real job of education to the state's private campuses?

When Carlson and his hard-working trustees proposed a topnotch science center and engineering college on Long Island, the regents said no. It was not until last week that, because of "recent developments abroad.'' the regents changed their minds. Though Carlson won his fight for a $250 million bond issue last fall, it was over the opposition of both the regents and the governor. He battled hard to keep the liberal-arts campus of Champlain College within the university system, but the campus was turned over to the Air Force as a SAC base.

Last month Carlson released a report by Dean Theodore Blegen of the University of Minnesota that tagged S.U.N.Y. "an academic animal without a head," recommended a leading central campus to give all the others some sense of unity and direction. The trustees rejected the idea, and for the first time turned on Carlson himself with a reprimand for letting the report out. S.U.N.Y., they said in effect, will go right on being a vocational supplement to the private colleges and universities.

In his introduction to the Blegen report, Carlson clearly showed what he wanted S.U.N.Y. to be--"an institution with responsibility as great for the conduct of research as for giving instruction." But it was obviously no easy job to be a state-university president in a state that ranks No. 31 in per-capita spending for higher education. Until 1949, when S.U.N.Y. began. New York was the only state without a public university to call its own. In a very real sense, it still is.

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