Out of the Slough

The team was back victorious, and Oregon was incredulous. OF Portland State had won not the Class D basketball crown or the Yukon curling final but television's G.E. College Bowl quiz, breaking all records and mopping up $10,500 in scholarships. With snap-snap-snap aplomb, the team had proved that it knew the word that means both monk and monkey (Capuchin), the doctor who pioneered the use of carbolic acid (Joseph Lister), the play that opens on the setting of the palace of Theseus in Athens (A Midsummer-Night's Dream), and 200 other facts.

Flunk-Out School. But what in tunket is Portland State College? Few people outside Oregon had heard about the college until the five straight victories on TV; and few people in Oregon who had heard of it had anything good to say about it. Students who flunked out of the University of Oregon and Oregon State University have often been told, condescendingly, to make a second try at Portland State. "A lot of people still think of us as the flunk-out school," admits an associate professor.

Portland State is indeed a modest place. It was started in 1946 as an extension division of the state's higher education system to handle returning veterans who could not get into the established universities. Its site was Vanport, the sprawling federal housing development built for wartime workers on low marshland near the Columbia River. "The U by the slough," it was called. Two years later, the campus was washed into the river by a flood; only the students and 92 books were salvaged. Classes were temporarily housed in the abandoned downtown Portland administration buildings of the Oregon shipyards. In 1952 the school moved into a former Portland high school building, and now it has four major new buildings of its own. Enrollment has increased to 7,500 students.

Unhappy Distinction. All the while, Portland State has been gaining in academic quality, much to the credit of President Branford P. Millar, 51, and his deep belief in the urban college as "the fastest growing segment of higher education." The parents of most Portland State students never went to college. But, says Millar, they and their children understand the fundamental fact of the times: "This is the generation that is going to have to live on its brains." The corollary of this concept, he believes, is the American philosophical commitment to democracy. "Higher education must be available to all who can profit from it," says Millar. Portland State pushes that goal by keeping tuition down to $110 a semester.

Portland is probably the biggest U.S. city (metropolitan area population: 860,000) without a graduate-studies center, but that unhappy distinction is ending. In recognition of Portland State's rising academic standards, the Oregon Board of Higher Education gave the school the right to confer graduate liberal arts degrees. Currently the legislature is considering setting up a new state-supported graduate school. Now that the school's quiz kids have proved so bright, the chances are that Portland State will get the nod.

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