From Biggest to Biggest

The new tendency of U.S. public colleges to federate is most sharply evident in California, whose 15 state colleges, with 96,000 students, now comprise "the world's largest college system." A close second is New York City's system of seven municipal colleges, with 91,000 students, which by granting doctorates may soon become "the world's largest university." Last week, as its first chancellor, the California colossus logically picked a-skilled New Yorker: Buell G. Gallagher, 57, president of The City College, the oldest (1847) and biggest of the New York group. For $32,000 a year, California thus hired one of the nation's most respected scholar-administrators.

Son of a Congregationalist minister, Gallagher was himself so ordained after graduating from Minnesota's Carleton College ('25). In 1933 he took on a difficult, decade-long task, the presidency of Alabama's Negro Talladega College, where he adroitly worked to heal local race relations, became a top white official of the N.A.A.C.P. In 1952, after serving as professor of Christian ethics at the Pacific School of Religion irr Berkeley, Calif., then as U.S. Assistant Commissioner for Higher Education, Gallagher took over City College. It was a bad moment: City was dishonored by one of the messier basketball-bribe scandals in sports history.

Playing down big-time athletics, Gallagher stressed high moral standards. In 1954, at the height of faculty fear of McCarthyism in the colleges, he dismissed the Senator with "It is time for us to remind an ambitious politician that the American college and university are welded into an anvil which has worn out many hammers." Last fall he faced another kind of problem: student editors began to give a campus newspaper a "Marxistoriented" sound. Gallagher, shunning censorship, discredited them in a fact-filled brief.

Gallagher's job in California is an outcome of the complex new "Master Plan," a fair-trade agreement between state colleges and the University of California's President Clark Kerr (TIME cover, Oct. 17). State colleges got an independent governing board, apart from the university's own board of regents. Gallagher, picked from 180 candidates during a five-month search, is the new system's operating boss. He inherits a frenetically expanding empire, stretching from Humboldt State in the north to San Diego State in the south. As Gallagher put it, the Gargantuan system is "full of dynamism. There is a tremendous job to be done out here."

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