Bowker for Berkeley

Governor Ronald Reagan, a master picker of political targets, has long fired his hottest salvos at the University of California. He has rarely missed a board of regents meeting, where his conservative appointees have routinely attacked campus activists and university spending. Yet last week, pleading flu, Reagan missed his second monthly meeting in a row--perhaps, insiders suggested, because he has lately shifted his fire to a new target of opportunity, the welfare mess. The upshot was startling and wholly unexpected: by a comfortable margin, the regents chose a decided liberal to succeed retiring Roger W. Heyns as the new chancellor of California's most controversial campus, Berkeley.

Their choice is Albert H. Bowker, 51, chancellor of the City University of New York. Said Regent William M. Roth: "This is a hopeful sign that the whole university community can come together." For CUNY Board Chairman Frederick Burkhardt, it was something else. "They say no man is irreplaceable," he said. "But right now I find that very hard to believe."

Breathtaking Expansion. During his eight years at CUNY, Bowker has indeed become an irreplaceable crisis manager and shrewd lobbyist for city and state funds. Disarmingly low-keyed and rumpled (he looks, say aides, "like an unmade bed"), he has charmed state legislators and plugged his office into New York politics by installing hot lines to both Mayor John Lindsay and Governor Nelson Rockefeller. As a result, he has engineered a breathtaking expansion of both CUNY's enrollment (now 195,000) and its commitment to solving urban problems. His major accomplishment came last fall when he launched CUNY's "open admissions" program (TIME, Oct. 19). It guaranteed a place at tuition-free CUNY to any city high school graduate, regardless of his academic record, plus massive doses of tutoring and counseling for students who would otherwise flunk out. Such egalitarianism shocked critics, who feared the loss of CUNY's intellectual distinction. Vice President Agnew denounced the plan as a giveaway of "100,000 devalued diplomas." So far, the program has stretched CUNY's academic quality but not snapped it.

Born in Winchendon, Mass., Bowker earned degrees at M.I.T. and Columbia and became a leading mathematical statistician. As dean of the Stanford graduate school, he sharply improved its faculty, then left in 1963 to create a first-rate graduate program at CUNY. Because of his unusual record of academic, political and social expertise, University of California President Charles J. Hitch recommended only one man to head Berkeley--Bowker.

Bowker is leaving CUNY at a time when city funds are getting tighter and the university's rate of budget growth is likely to start declining. He will stick through this year's budget crisis, which he admits is "catastrophic," and then tackle more of the same at Berkeley. His first priority: salving the cuts in Berkeley's staff (110 teaching positions this year) that Governor Reagan's parsimonious budgets have made necessary. That task, in fact, may be a relief after the strain of running CUNY's 20 units, which he seldom had time to even visit. At Berkeley (a mere 28,000 students), says Bowker, he will happily "return to campus life."

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