Growing Up in Miami

For most of its 35 years, the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla., turned out many expert playboys, few true scholars. But the University of Miami has lately grown up, both in scholarship and civic responsibility. This week a group of 50 Negroes, mostly undergraduate students, started summer session in the first lowering of the color bar at the largest independent school in the Southeast. In the fall, the bar will be lowered further: 26 more Negroes have been accepted so far, as a result of a board of trustees decision last January to open the school to all qualified students "regardless of race, creed or color."

Part of a Trend. Because Miami has been accepting students from Latin America, some with Negro blood, since it was founded (in recent years South and Central American students have numbered about 225 of the total of 14,000), the university had been in the awkward position of refusing admission only to American Negroes. "This just makes legal what we've been doing all along," said one dean. But Miami President Jay F. W. Pearson made clear that the move was deliberate and far-reaching. Said he: "We all recognized that sooner or later we would integrate. Some said it ought to begin at the graduate level, but some of us said, 'Why do it in steps? If you believe it's right, you do it and get it over with.' If you are going to depict the image of our country to highly integrated countries of South and Central America, this university must be a part of that image."

Miami's decision to accept Negroes was only the latest feature of a general face lifting. In the last three years, an encouraging experiment in student reclamation restored to good standing 210 students who had flunked out, by putting them through intensive courses. "We have students making A's who first told me that they never had and never could," said one official. Capitalizing on its location, the school has won distinction for research in marine biology and tropical and subtropical medicine. In order to help retrain refugee Cuban doctors and lawyers, the medical and law schools set up crash programs to help qualify them for practice in the U.S. Last year six Miami undergraduates won Woodrow Wilson scholarships. Built or going up are a new library, dormitory, classroom building and symphony rehearsal hall--all air-conditioned, all in modern architecture.

Lowering High Jinks. Last fall the university decided to tackle its toughest problem: the fun-and-games atmosphere that attracted 5,000 students from outside sunny Florida (biggest out-of-state delegation: New York, with 1,300) and had earned Miami its nickname of Suntan U. The administration hired tough, grey-haired Robert Johns, director of the Illinois Commission on Higher Education, as its executive vice president, told him to crack down on student saturnalias.

Almost before he became acclimated, Johns had his first cutup to cut out: Sigma Nu fraternity brawlers drunkenly smashed furniture during a lost weekend at the Roney Plaza Hotel. He put the fraternity on probation for a year. Other Johns edicts on the way may revolutionize life at Miami even further: classes will run until 6 p.m., eliminating afternoon ocean dips; telephones in girls' dorms will be disconnected at 10:30 p.m.; plans for all social functions will be subject to stiff prior approval; driving across the sprawling campus between classes will be stopped and the use of cars otherwise curbed. "We live in a center of temptation for kids," said Johns, "but we'll keep them so busy studying they won't have time to hell around."

Last week, reaching a milestone on its march to academic excellence, Miami University proudly presented its first two Ph.D.s at commencement exercises held in the huge Miami Beach Convention Hall. Another landmark, to come within four years, will be the awarding of the first A.B. to a Negro.

Three other Southern universities last week eased or dropped their white-only entrance requirements:

P: The University of the South (Sewanee), which last month stirred protests by awarding an honorary degree to Racist Editor Thomas R. Waring (TIME, June 2), reversed gears by approving a surprise resolution, offered by the Episcopal bishop of the Georgia diocese, ending racial restrictions. The secret vote by the board of trustees, prompted at least in part by the outcry over the award to Waring, follows by eight years the desegregation of Sewanee's noted theology school.

P: Two Negroes will enter the law school of Duke University at Durham, N.C., this fall, and one will enter its divinity school, ending a prohibition in effect for 123 years. But Duke still excludes Negro undergraduates.

P: The University of Georgia, which rioted over the admission of Negro Undergraduates Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes in January, last week without any disorder or protest registered its first Negro graduate student--Atlanta Music Teacher Mary Frances Early, who will try for a degree in music.

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