"TAKE-OFF" UNIVERSITIES

AMERICANS dream of college as an ivied campus in the country. But more than 70% of them now live in urban areas, and the urban university is their cultural home. It is art's gallery, music's concert hall and industry's researcher. It cures the sick, trains the lawyer, and retreads the housewife. It lures the country boy weary of milking machines, and holds the city girl living on a budget. Today "unknown" urban universities are blossoming across the land, and if none of them are yet another Harvard, Chicago or University of California, some of them are poised for take-off in that direction.

Most "take-off" universities start with one strong suit -- typically, a good medical school. What marks them is a new effort to strengthen their other schools, to pool their resources with former rivals, to serve the community in some striking way, to install strong leadership and keep moving. Though worried because they lag in undergraduate education, they nonetheless see graduate study as their rising role in a knowledge-hungry society. More than ever they are ready to use money effectively. At least four such schools, all private, have now outstripped their regional reputations and stand ready for national recognition.

Western Reserve University

The name, which comes from Connecticut's onetime claim to Ohio as a "western reserve." suggests the school's founding date: 1826. It was not until 1882 that Western Reserve (enrollment: 8,059) moved from the sleepy hamlet of Hudson to Cleveland, now the nation's eighth biggest city (pop. 870,000). It boasts eight graduate and professional schools that far overshadow its three undergraduate colleges (one for boys, one for girls, one for adults). President John Millis calls this pattern "what we think a university should be," but he also frets over lack of unity: "We are an aggregate of almost independent professional schools."

Most notable is the medical school (one prof: Dr. Spock, the famed pediatrician), where all subjects are correlated and taught together; every student is apprenticed to a family to learn the bedside manner. Western Reserve is biggest in science, has 450 research projects, spent $3,000,000 on a new lab just to lure two star biologists from Cornell. Also thriving: the school of library science, an automation-aimed academy specializing in the new arts of "information retrieval."

Faculty pay is surprisingly poor at Western Reserve, but a new scholarly spirit is banishing an old Babbittry and attracting able researchers who like the labs as well as the living. Western Reserve also offers the pooled cultural riches of Cleveland's rising "University Circle," a 488-acre complex costing $175 million that includes everything from hospitals to Case Institute of Technology to the Cleveland Orchestra. Western Reserve has more than tripled endowment since 1949 to $69 million, sharing a happy windfall: the 1% of income before taxes that Cleveland corporations two years ago began voluntarily giving to Cleveland higher education.

University or Rochester

Settled in Azariah Boody's cow pasture in 1860, New York's Rochester (enrollment: 5,387) until recently drowsed in its provincial city (pop. 317,000) like Boody's kine. But town and gown changed drastically in the decade of President Cornells W. de Kiewiet, who retired last year. Rochester's trustees have taken fire under Chairman Joseph Wilson, president of Xerox Corp. Rochester now boasts one of the nation's ten biggest endowments: $175 million, market value.

Rochester's claims to fame include the topflight Eastman School of Music, given by Kodak Tycoon George Eastman. In 1900 Rochester acquired a separate women's college, inspired by Suffragette Susan B. Anthony. Now boys and girls live and learn together on the main 82-acre campus beside the Genesee River.

Rochester's graduate enrollment (2,460) has more than tripled in a decade. The medical school claims four Nobel prizewinners and ranks third behind Harvard and Johns Hopkins as a producer of U.S. medical professors. Also up are the engineering school and the physics department, which this year got a record $3,561,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for a new accelerator.

Conversely, humanities lag at Rochester, and Board Chairman Wilson has personally unhanded $1,000,000 for improvement. Last week Rochester inaugurated a new president, W. Allen Wallis, 50, former dean of the University of Chicago's graduate school of business. Having plumbed the place, he set himself a significant goal: "To rethink our undergraduate programs."

Tulane University

New Orleans' Tulane (enrollment: 7,109) is paying a price for rapid improvement. Income from its $45 million endowment pays only 10% of its costs, against 25% a few years ago. Faculty pay is low; the 800,000-volume library is inadequate. But Tulane has compensations: able leadership in Pennsylvania-born Herbert Longenecker, its first Northern president, and a spirit of academic freedom that is unmatched in the Deep South.

Tulane's faculty wives did yeoman service in escorting Negro children to white schools during the 1961 desegregation crisis. Tulane recently admitted about a dozen Negroes--after inspiring a court suit that opened its doors. Old grads grumbled, but the school had warm support from its rights-minded students and helpful pressure from foundations with a policy of no integration, no grants.

Tulane has a lofty scorn for meddling Louisiana politicians--it once refused Huey Long an honorary degree. The first U.S. university with a coordinate women's college (Newcomb in 1886), it is best known for a first-class medical school that boasts a biomedical computer center and a special skill in tropical medicine. Tulane's law school is the only one in the U.S. that offers degrees in both Anglo-American common law and Latin-European civil law, because Louisiana is the only state that abides by the latter. Biggest recent progress is in the graduate school, where 194 professors with doctorates (largely Chicago men) teach 925 students.

Washington University

Founded in 1853 as a night school for workingmen, long a streetcar college for commuters such as Tennessee Williams, St. Louis' Washington (enrollment: 6,372) has in fact already taken off. Said Harvard's former dean, McGeorge Bundy, a few years ago: "Washington U. has shown the steepest trajectory of any university in the U.S."

Chief reason is the long-famed medical school, a separate complex of clinics and hospitals, which has harbored most of Washington's six Nobel prizewinners. It also siphons off much of the university's $98 million endowment income, accounts for nearly half the new construction. But things are evening up fast under new Chancellor Thomas H. Eliot, a Harvard-and-Boston Eliot* distantly related to Washington's founder, the Rev. William Greenleaf Eliot. A ferocious faculty raider, Political Scientist Eliot recently kidnaped Princeton's eminent Historian Robert R. Palmer, who becomes Washington's first Harvard-style dean of the faculty of arts and sciences. Another newcomer: Judson T. Shaplin, acting dean of the Harvard graduate school of education, who becomes dean of Washington's education school.

Though faculty pay has risen 40% in a decade, Washington has other lures for star scholars. One is a stout academic freedom sparked by Eliot's predecessors, Physicist Arthur H. Compton (1946-53) and Lawyer Ethan A. H. Shepley (1954-60), now chairman of the board of directors. Another lure is booming sponsored research, which last year hit $8,612,413. Recent grants aim at everything from mental health needs in St. Louis to business training in South Korea.

Washington's directors now reflect national interests, include such newcomers as McDonnell Aircraft's James S. McDonnell and Washington Lawyer Clark M. Clifford. Admission standards are rising fast; students come increasingly from all over the U.S., and 14 new dormitories will soon await them. Undergraduates still dominate Washington by 3 to 1; they also flock to graduate study as did 75% of last year's male seniors.

In the hills, valleys and badlands of U.S. higher education, all this portends a kind of academic orogenesis--the growth of new mountains. As California's President Clark Kerr put it in the Godkin Lectures at Harvard: "The university is being called upon to educate previously unimagined numbers of students, to respond to the expanding claims of national service, to merge its activities with industry as never before, to adjust to new intellectual currents." By 1973 the academic cartographer may well list beside the Everests of Harvard and California many a major minor peak--including Tulane, Rochester, Washington and Western Reserve.

* His grandpa: Harvard President (1869-1909) Charles W. Eliot.

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