Pitt's Big Thinker

Pittsburgh's steel tycoons--having razed slums, banished smog, tamed rivers, and put up a great medical center--paused seven years ago to mull over the stagnant University of Pittsburgh. The verdict: Pitt was a "trolley-car school" saved from obscurity only by a renowned football team and a bizarre 42-story Gothic skyscraper called the Cathedral of Learning. To revive Pitt, the tycoons resolved to spend $100 million, and to get the job done they hired as chancellor Edward H. Litchfield, who predicted that Pitt would soon emerge as "one of the world's greatest institutions." Pitt is not yet remotely in that class, but in restless Ed Litchfield, 48, it boasts a coldly brilliant administrator who runs Pitt (total enrollment: 14,210) as majestically as Andrew Carnegie once poured steel. "He thinks big," says one awed Pitt official. "We're still not used to it."

Airborne Academic. Litchfield has now spent or earmarked some $126 million for ambitious expansion--and rubbed raw nerves all over town and gown. Spending freely, he has literally taken over the city's Oakland area, buying up the Pittsburgh Pirates' Forbes Field and the old Schenley Park Hotel, where Lillian Russell was married. He now aims to super develop Oakland into a vast cultural center costing $250 million.

Litchfield is probably the only man in academic life who can buzz off for the weekend to his own 600-acre farm in his own airplane, a two-engine Aero Commander. Along with running Pitt, he is chairman of Smith-Corona Marchant's board of directors, a member of Stude baker's executive committee, a director of Avco Corp., and founder-chairman of Washington's Governmental Affairs Institute. Pitt pays him $45,000 a year, plus expenses. His extracurricular activities boost that to roughly $100.000.

Shape or Ship. The son of a Detroit postal clerk, Litchfield has had experience teaching public administration at his alma mater, the University of Michigan, serving in a top slot under General Lucius Clay in postwar Germany, and as dean of Cornell's Graduate School of Business and Public Administration. He came to Pitt with a controversial theory that the same rules of management apply to any organization--armies, banks or universities.

Litchfield diagnosed Pitt as an "under-administered" campus split into 27 faculty sheikdoms. He organized an overriding ten-man "cabinet," including four vice chancellors. He launched a "vertical reorganization of the disciplines"--Litch-fieldese for uniting humanities, natural and social science as units serving all levels of the university. He weighed and tested the faculty for academic content, found one-third (250) substandard, including 16% with only a B.A. degree. The "low" men got no more raises. Today, with a 19% bigger faculty, 38% higher pay, and the first sabbaticals ever, only 42 profs are under par. The others, as one official put it succinctly, "shaped up or shipped out." Bright Image. Medicine is a Pitt strong point. But in engineering it lags behind nearby Carnegie Tech--which worries an economically troubled city that longs for federal research contracts.

Litchfield has other problems. His eleven-month "trimester plan," now copied by some 30 other colleges, tends to stumble along at half-speed in the summer. He has raised tuition by a whopping 50%, so that undergraduate enrollment is down considerably (to 5,210).

On the plus side, Litchfield has drastically raised entrance standards, created dormitories that changed Pitt's provincial student body from 96% Pennsylvanians to 75% now. The history department is far better; anthropology has grown from nothing to good. Last year Litchfield won faculty respect when the state legislature, which supplies 16% of Pitt's budget, scented "subversive" activities at the university. Litchfield spent $100,000 investigating the case of a professor accused of being a Communist fronter, cleared him in an eloquent brief defending Pitt's inalienable right to "free inquiry." Sensitive to criticism. Litchfield is given to hiring pollsters to gauge Pitt's public "image." The Madison Avenue approach appalls academic purists. But it turns out that among the leading citizenry of Pittsburgh, 65% now feel "highly favorable" to the emerging university.

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