Get-Together

In the high-ceilinged back parlor of the Richmond mansion of Virginia's late Novelist Ellen Glasgow, the deans and presidents of twelve colleges and universities in the area gathered one day last week for a kind of meeting that is all too rare in the world of U.S. higher education. All members of the Richmond Area University Center, they had come not only to exchange ideas but to plan a series of projects together that would have been impossible for any one campus to try alone. In the last ten years, the educators had learned an important lesson: the best cure for many of the ills of U.S. higher education is a steady diet of intercampus cooperation.

With a grant from the Rockefeller-backed General Education Board, the center began as the most ambitious experiment of its kind in the country. Though its original nine members were skeptical at first, they gradually began to realize how much they had lost by clinging to the competitive tradition of each campus for itself. "Cooperation comes hard at first," says the center's administrator. Herbert Fitzroy. "But once you get everybody thinking cooperatively about one thing, they're talking cooperatively about 18 things." Eventually, four more campuses joined up, and though the center still depends on outside grants, its members* now chip in $42,000 of their own. It is money well spent. "For every dollar we put in," says President George Modlin of the University of Richmond, "we have received at least two or three dollars worth of benefit."

Nobel Bargain. Through the center, the various colleges and universities have been able to import a procession of visiting lecturers that any Ivy Leaguer might envy. The visitors have included everyone from Julian Huxley and Bertrand Russell to Nobel Prizewinner Otto Loewi of New York University and Buu-Hoi of the Institut de France. They may lecture at only two campuses or at all, but none has cost any one college more than $60.

Before the center began, only two of the present members carried on significant research in the social sciences and humanities. Now, because of center grants and the fact that a professor at a small college has access to the facilities of 13, every campus has a research program. In the last six years, the center has given 153 research grants, enabled facultymen to publish 79 monographs and 43 books.

Out of the 18th Century. The center has also set up cooperative professorships so that two or more colleges can share a scholar they would not have been able to afford alone. It has arranged intercampus conferences in special fields, compiled a catalogue of all periodicals in the members' libraries, organized a joint adult education program with an enrollment of 7,000. Last week member deans and presidents added other projects, e.g., a plan by which six or seven of the smaller campuses would share the cost and use of an atomic reactor, and another to enable five colleges to share a common radio station.

Successful as it has been so far, Administrator Fitzroy claims that the center idea will be a must for small colleges in the future. "Some colleges." says he, "act as if they were in the 18th century, as if no good highways, telephones or modern communications exist. We ought to face the fact that the big-name institutions will be able to take care of only a limited number of the deluge of students in the next few years. We must be concerned more and more with putting the small colleges in shape to meet the deluge. This is where the center idea comes in."

* The members: the University of Virginia and the affiliated Mary Washington College, Randolph-Macon College, General Assembly's Training School, Union Theological Seminary, Virginia Union University, University of Richmond, Medical College of Virginia, the College of William and Mary and the affiliated Richmond Professional Institute, Longwood College, Hampden-Sydney College, Virginia State College.

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