World's Fanciest Campus

On a boulder-strewn lava plain outside Mexico City, 10,000 workmen, artists and engineers labored last week to finish Mexico's biggest single construction job since the building of the Halls of Montezuma (circa 1500). For the 401-year-old University of Mexico, North America's oldest university,* they were creating a handsome, ultramodern University City, spectacularly expressive of the new, post-revolutionary Mexico. Scheduled for occupancy early next year, the dazzling, $50 million University City is the most up-to-date college campus anywhere.

For generations, the University of Mexico had been a typical European-style collection of colleges scattered among downtown colonial monuments: the law school occupied a former convent, the medical faculty the Spanish Inquisition's old headquarters, the art school a onetime leper hospital. In 1948, the university's most powerful alumnus, President Miguel Aleman (Law, '28), decided that the 28,000 students needed a brand-new home--a U.S.-style campus complete with dormitories and a football stadium. A group of faculty and student architects submitted the winning design. Finally, in 1950, Aleman named Architect Carlos Lazo, 38, to take overall charge of the work.

Next Year's Car. Under Lazo's driving direction, a team of 156 architects and the country's best painters, sculptors and designers pitched in. Mexico's famed muralists for once muted their revolutionary messages and joined happily in experiments with giant outdoor mosaics.

The result is as modern as next year's car and as variegated as a Mexican market scene. Near the entrance looms an impressionistic statue of ex-President Aleman which bore such an odd resemblance to Joseph Stalin (see cut) that the sculptor had to do some retouching. Within the grounds a shell-roofed cosmic-ray laboratory shows the functional influence; translucent marble towers follow the "international" style of French architect Le Corbusier; glass-studded classroom cupolas renew the familiar form of the Spanish colonial. But all bear--in color, in texture, in decoration or design--the authentic Aztec mark of Mexico.

The handsome, new 110,000-seat stadium was literally built like Mexico's pyramids. To have built it wholly of concrete would have created a national cement shortage. Lazo got the idea of scooping back the volcanic rubble on the site into two great mounds, and laying a concrete oval shell on the cavity between. The job, carried out in 15 months, cost about one-fourth that of a concrete stadium. And because most of the oval's seats are located on the two tall slopes, most of the spectators can watch the university's football team from reasonably near the 50-yd. line. On the stadium's sloping outside walls, Diego Rivera is now executing a three-dimensional frieze of acid-painted stones. This "sculpture painting" depicts the history of Mexican sport from Mayan handball to gringo baseball.

The Old & the Older. A group of fronton courts, strikingly similar in line and color to the ancient pyramids near by, seem even closer to Mexico's Indian past. Actually, the structures are made largely of concrete, and the local volcanic rock is used merely as a coating. A far more striking blending of Indian and international is Architect-Muralist Juan O'Gorman's magnificent windowless library (see opposite page). O'Gorman, son of an Irish father and Mexican mother, has decorated the four sides of his tower with vast and vivid mosaics pairing heraldic symbols of Mexico's Mediterranean and Middle American pasts, the feathered serpent of Quetzalcoatl and the cross of Cortes.

For engineering students, there are laboratories big enough to hold any kind of model machinery; for demonstration lectures, there is a whole building full of amphitheaters; for the humanities, there is a three-story, ruler-shaped structure 1,000 ft. long.

In such quarters, the ancient university is sure to change drastically. It already has. Once a cloister for seminarians, later a hotbed of middle-class anticlericals, the University of Mexico has become since the 1910 revolution a center of mass-produced higher education. Its doors are open to anyone with certain minimum secondary-school marks and $20 a year tuition money. More & more it resembles the big U.S. state universities at which so many of its faculty leaders have been trained. Overwhelmingly conservative nowadays, the students, men & women alike, seem mainly concerned with the practical business of preparing for their vocations as lawyer, doctor or engineer.

Toward the Ivory Tower? With its traditions of self-government and academic independence, the university is likely to hold its commanding position in the Latin American intellectual world. Some 5,000 non-Mexicans enroll each year in its 15 colleges. But it is a big question whether the university's prestige will persuade the distinguished Mexico City lawyers, physicians and businessmen who now comprise almost 90% of the faculty to continue as part-time professors at a nominal fee of about $10 a month, after the university moves eleven miles away from their courts, hospitals and board rooms. These men, whose respect for the prestige of being on the university faculty has enabled the institution to operate on a ridiculously small budget, have largely set its tone. They attract to themselves personal disciples, who sit at their feet much as students sat at the feet of great scholars in medieval universities.

This side of academic life may now tend to disappear. The university expects to establish a full-time faculty. The cost is bound to be heavy. Just to maintain the new campus will take more than the university's present $3,000,000 annual budget. To make a go of the University City, the administration will need almost three times the sum it receives now from the national treasury. In Mexico, as elsewhere, the cost of education is going up.

* The U.S.'s oldest: Harvard (1636).

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