Toward Urban Excellence

Too many city universities, says New York University's President James Hester, are either service schools that accept all comers or aloof and selective schools that seem to wish they were in small college towns. In his four years as head man, hard-driving Hester, 41, has moved N.Y.U. toward his own vi sion of "an unbeatable campus for young intellectuals who bring their hearts to the cities" and revel in ur ban culture.

Hester has raised admission standards, tuition and faculty pay, has lured such a cosmopolitan student body to the Manhattan and Bronx campuses of the nation's largest private university that half of its 41,000 enrollment now comes from outside of the city, nearly 10,000 from outside of the state. Determined to make N.Y.U. "a resident university rather than a commuter university," Hester now has 1,600 staff members and 5,000 students living near the main campus in Greenwich Village. For additional faculty and student residences, two towering apartment buildings by Architect I. M. Pei are nearly finished (a third will be a commercial co-op). N.Y.U. is more than halfway through a $100 million fund drive, has hired Architects Philip Johnson and Richard Foster to unify the Village campus by face lifting old buildings and designing new ones.

This week N.Y.U. passed the pivotal point in its drive toward urban-centered excellence. Hester announced that one of the school's trustees, Elmer H. Bobst, 81, has donated $6,000,000 to complete the financing of a new $20 million library to be built, providing city boards approve, on a plot bordering Washington Square.

N.Y.U. claims that the twelve-story library, designed by Johnson, will have more seating space than any other U.S. library--4,800 chairs, including 1,300 at group tables, 450 at individual tables, and 1,800 in one-man carrels. It will also have 2,000,000 books available in open stacks, more than any other library. The Johnson design includes a dramatic inner atrium open from floor to skylights, affording cross-court views of grilled staircases, two-story reading rooms, and what Hester terms "a library in action."

Donor Bobst, a onetime drug clerk who had only one year of college but rose to be board chairman of Warner-Lambert Pharmaceutical Co., finds the fuss over his gift "a little embarrassing." A lifetime library lover, he gave the money, he says, because of "my great faith in self-acquired education by reading." N.Y.U.'s Hester lustily applauds such faith in reading--and in the future of the urban university.

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