How to Buy a Campus

Far above Cayuga's waters There's a place known well.

'Tis our noble alma mater Higher than Cornell.

A college in Ithaca, N.Y., that looks down on Ivy League Cornell? As recently as five years ago the notion would have been considered absurd. Yet today the 2,200 students of Ithaca College sing that song with considerable spirit --and unquestionable altimetric accuracy. After 73 years as mainly a coed music and physical-education school housed in a seedy assortment of Victorian buildings in downtown Ithaca, the college now occupies 250 windswept acres atop South Hill, where the clean bold lines of its new $30 million, 23-building complex do, indeed, soar high above Cornell.

Ithaca's march up the hill has been remarkably rapid, but its real rarity lies in the fact that the private school's fiscally conservative businessman board has leaned on government, federal and state, every step of the way. With no endowment, no dependable support from foundations or industry and only 4,000 alumni (most of them unaffluent teachers), Ithaca nevertheless managed to raise $30 million in five years--all but $250,000 of it through Government loans and Government-floated bonds.

"A Good Product." The college's decision to explore every governmental source of money was taken at the urging of its horseback-riding president, Howard Irving Dillingham, 60. A Syracuse Ph.D. in education, Dillingham, although a Quaker, was headmaster of Georgia's Riverside Military Academy ("Though Quakers are pacifistic, I am not") when Ithaca summoned him back to New York in 1951, made him president in 1957. When he arrived, Ithaca had no accreditation and many of its students were Cornell flunk-outs who, insists one businessman, stuck around town "to enjoy the drinking life."

Dillingham pared many elective courses to concentrate his staff to an unusual degree on interdisciplinary general studies, which attracted national notice. He raised tuition, upgraded faculty salaries (from a miserable median $3,900 in 1953, they now stand at $10,000). Then, on a summer day in 1959, Dillingham rode up South Hill, looked out over Cayuga Lake and instantly decided: "We will build our campus on the hill."

He knew that there must be some federal money available for college construction, had no idea how much. Board Chairman Herman E. Muller, an accountant, decided it was worth investigating after an outside study showed that Ithaca could expect a rising cash flow from increasing enrollment to handle a heavy loan commitment. "It was a simple business proposition," said Muller. "We had a tremendous demand for our product. We had a good product. We had a good faculty--a good production line." Some trustees fretted about going bankrupt, or feared Government control. Yet the more they looked into the matter, the more plentiful the Government money seemed to be--and they finally plunged in.

Soon Ithaca got more than $17 million in 40-year loans from the Federal Housing and Home Finance Agency for ten conventional dormitories, two dramatic, 14-story dorm towers, a student union, dining hall and health center. New York State floated $12 million worth of 30-year tax-free bonds for music, athletic, library, science, fine arts and other administration buildings. All will be paid off, at the rate of $1,377,000 a year, from student dormitory fees and tuition, which total $2,800 per student. Modern buildings, insists Dillingham, help pay for themselves in lower maintenance costs: "If an act of God suddenly set one of those ivy-covered buildings down on our site, we would have it removed because we couldn't afford to operate it."

"Unmitigated Blessing." Did Government money bring Government control? "With these two agencies it doesn't distort our picture one damn bit," says Dillingham. "We're just as free as we ever were. It's been a happy partnership." Adds College Secretary Ben Light: "The first time we went to present an application we took our lawyer with us. Since then he's stayed home." Says Architect Robert B. Tallman: "They check the engineering and the financing details, but I can't think of any major engineering or architectural feature they've suggested." Insists English Professor John Harcourt: "It's been an unmitigated blessing."

That blessing has even inspired mighty Cornell to take notice of little Ithaca. "Dillingham's running a doggone tight little ship over there," says a top Cornell administrator. "Their aggressiveness makes us look a little foolish," concedes another.

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