Community of Scholars

When Physicist Frederick Seitz, 56, becomes president of Manhattan's Rockefeller University on July 1, he will be taking over a 14-year-old school that has only 138 students. For Seitz, who has been head of the National Academy of Sciences since 1962, it will hardly be a professional step back ward. Rockefeller University not only ranks as one of the world's leading centers of scientific research, but is also a unique educational phenomenon--a graduate university that gives no grades, charges no tuition, confers nothing except doctoral degrees.

R.U., as its students call it, was founded by John D. Rockefeller in 1901 as the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Since that time, its hospital and laboratories overlooking the East River have attracted some of the world's most eminent scientists. Rockefeller researchers, including eight Nobel prize winners (four of them still on the staff) , have produced such breakthroughs as the identification of the Rh blood factor and the discovery that a tumor can be induced by a virus.

Remaining Small. Under retiring President Detlev ("Del") W. Bronk, 70, the research center became a university as well. To inject "the vitality of youth that students bring," Physiologist Bronk set up a small graduate school in 1954, a year after he became president; in 1965 he had Rockefeller retitled from an institute to a university. Resisting the expansionist impulse, Bronk has insisted that R.U. remain small in order to concentrate on "areas where we can really excel." As a result, R.U. "appoints" no more than 30 new students a year out of the 170 candidates recommended for admission by scholars around the world. So conscientious are its standards that R.U. will sometimes turn away an otherwise ideal candidate simply because it feels that he will advance further in his specialty at some other school.

For the few it does admit--10% of them are M.D.s, most of the others college graduates with science degrees--the rewards are plentiful. The university has an endowment of $220 million and an annual budget of $16,290,000, and its pleasantly landscaped, 15-acre riverside campus features a 120,000-volume library and 14 buildings housing the most up-to-date research equipment. Spared tuition costs, each student also receives a fellowship of at least $2,500 for living expenses. The university also throws in $1,000 so that students, or "fellows," as they are called, can start building personal libraries and tap New York's cultural life.

R.U. boasts two faculty members for every student, and it expects its fellows to be more than usually resourceful and independent in their academic work. Oriented primarily to careers in research, the university has no departments as such. Instead, instruction is administered through informal interdisciplinary seminars in fields ranging from cardiac physiology to cellular immunology. Students propose their own course curriculum after an initial six-month period of orientation, move into independent study and research only when they feel ready. Except for a final comprehensive exam, tests are rare--but each fellow must deliver a public lecture on his thesis topic.

No Backtracking. Allowed to take anywhere from three to six years to earn his degree--either Ph.D. or Doctor of Medical Science--the Rockefeller fellow enjoys a measure of freedom unsurpassed in U.S. education. To Max Snodderly, 27, a North Carolinian who is considering changing his field of study from biophysics to animal behavior, the university is "flexible enough that I could make such a switch without running into a lot of requirements that would make it necessary to backtrack." For some, however, laxity creates its own pressures. "If you know what you want, O.K.," complains one student. "If not, it can be harrowing as hell."

For the students who make it--and since they were selected largely for their maturity to begin with, most do--the university offers the experience of living in a genuine community of scholars. Though some complain about the ivory-tower isolation from the outside world, the sense of that community runs equally strong in students and faculty members. Nobel Laureate (medicine and physiology) Edward Tatum, who has taught at Stanford and Yale, insists that "it's the most productive atmosphere I've ever been in." In joining the community, New President Seitz sees Rockefeller University as an educational pioneer with a potential impact on the scope of other institutions. "The time has come," he says, "for more full-fledged graduate institutions."

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