City College

The biggest institution for higher learning in the world has 47,000 students, most of whom pay no tuition. To visit its campuses and buildings, among which is not a single dormitory, takes a day's hard traveling by subway. Its football teams are trounced by such tiny colleges as Albright. Last week this immense, sprawling educational factory, the College of the City of New York, which embraces four city colleges, passed not one but several new material milestones:

P:Brooklyn College moved into a new $6,000,000 home in Flatbush--a 42-acre campus and five new buildings, academic, science, library, gymnasium, power plant --built by the city and PWA.

P:Plans were prepared for a $5,000,000 16-story skyscraper on Manhattan's Park Avenue to house Hunter College, largest women's college in the world.

P:In Queens a brand new college plunged into its first term, extending free higher education into the fourth of New York's boroughs and clearing the way for a campaign for another college by the patriotic citizens of the fifth, Staten Island.

Fortnight ago the colleges had undergone a less heralded but more significant change, the advent of a new administration. City College is ruled by a Board of Higher Education of 21 members, who are appointed by the Mayor for nine-year terms. For 20 years board and college had been ruled by Tammany Hall. Since 1934 Fusion Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia had made inroads on this regime by appointing nine members to vacancies. But when three more terms expired last June, and one of his appointees resigned, the Mayor, on the verge of transferring control of higher education from Tammany to Fusion, was stumped to fill the four places. The job is unpaid, takes considerable time and many prominent citizens fear to become embroiled in politics. Finally, two weeks ago, the mayor found respectable citizens who would take three of the jobs, giving him a majority of eleven on the board. Chairman of the board, suave Mark Eisner, law partner of Tammany's former leader, George W. Olvany, continued as a holdover in the fourth job, waited for the mayor to reappoint or replace him.

Leading LaGuardians on the board are Columbia University's roly-poly Professor Joseph D. McGoldrick, currently running for comptroller of the city, and ruddy, fast-talking John T. Flynn, writer and economist. Others include Author Ordway Tead, Amalgamated Clothing Workers Secretary-Treasurer Joseph Schlossberg. Art Critic Lewis Mumford is the one who resigned.

The four colleges operated by this board are City (men), Hunter (women), Brooklyn and Queens (co-educational). Each in turn is run by a president and an administrative committee of board members. City has a group of Gothic buildings on Washington Heights and a 16-story business school downtown. Hunter is scattered among its main centre at 68th St. and Lexington Ave., a midtown office building and a new campus next to a reservoir at the farthest limits of The Bronx. Brooklyn has just moved out of five rented, jampacked office buildings around Borough Hall. Queens starts in a group of buildings, once a reform school for truant youngsters, in Flushing.

To the city's youth and oldsters, for whose higher education the city will spend nearly $9,000,000 in the coming year, the four colleges offer an almost unlimited range of instruction, from English for immigrants to an M. A., City College gives free training in technical schools of education, business, engineering, in addition to its liberal arts course. And one-half of the 47,000 enrollees are taking evening or extension courses. In the past ten years enrollment has jumped 14,000. Now the colleges rigidly limit entrance, require a high-school average of 75 to 80% for admission and have waiting lists. They are the only municipal colleges in the U. S. charging no tuition to undergraduates; they even supply some books. Non-city residents, evening and graduate students pay $2.50 to $5 a point.

Though the faculty is large and well-paid (up to $9,600 for a full professor), it boasts few big names. Outstanding are Short Story Editor Blanche Colton Williams, Philosophers Harry Allen Overstreet and Morris Raphael Cohen, Artist Joseph Cummings Chase. Campus life such as exists in private and State universities is lacking, but City College is trying to supply this with a house plan, Hunter with teacher-student teas.

Last week John Flynn said the new regime's first step would be to draft a plan to reorganize and centralize the administration, perhaps consolidate some schools and develop a "great institute of technology." Chairman Eisner revealed some members wanted to appoint a chancellor as chief for all the colleges.

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