Mass & Class at Minnesota

One week after his inauguration, the ninth president of the University of Minnesota stepped before the state legislature last week and asked for a record $84 million for the next two years-which will still be only 46% of his budget. Getting more money is a high-priority task for Owen Meredith Wilson. 51, new boss of the nation's most popular single campus. Already swarming with 25,399 fulltime students (plus 2,640 more on its Duluth campus), Minnesota expects twice as many by 1970. Wilson confronts the prevalent nightmare of U.S. public education--how to build class amid mass.

At Minnesota, the odds are loaded against him. The university admits any Minnesota high school graduate. In a state where the university is mushrooming chiefly because it has no competitors, and 93% of undergraduates are Minnesotans, this policy is likely to stay. Wilson aims to solve his problem by revamping the university. "What begins as a burden," says he, "may prove a blessing." Wider Sidewalks. Minnesota combines all the glories and weaknesses of U.S. state universities on a 966-acre main campus beside the Mississippi River between Minneapolis and St. Paul. The campus is an architectural hodgepodge dominated by a football arena seating 65,000. Drawing heavily on the state's population hub, it has 23 parking lots for 7,000 cars. Like lunch-bound auto workers, khaki-clad boys and white-sneakered girls spew out of classrooms to the clang of bells at 20 minutes past every hour, and since 1949 the sidewalks have been widened by four feet to keep people from butting each other into the shrubbery.

The university is the brain center of the state. It houses the Minneapolis Symphony, the Twin Cities' main longhair radio station, a theater, a natural history museum. From the university's labs have come hardier hogs, wheat and strawberries. By developing a way to extract iron ore from low-grade taconite. the university helped save northern Minnesota's depleted Mesabi Range.

Its 2,200-man faculty includes Heart Surgeon C. Walton Lillehei. Oceanographer Athelstan Spilhaus, Physiologist Ancel Keys (TIME cover, Jan. 13) and Economist Walter Heller (TIME cover, March 3). Though weak in language and music, the university is strong in medical and physical sciences. Its English Department has long imported such author-teachers as Novelist Robert Penn Warren, currently employs Poet Allen Tate. The average student IQ is only 115 even at the slightly selective (top 60% of high school graduates) liberal arts college, yet Minnesota abounds with ambition. "There's a kind of eagerness to learn here," says one English professor. "They don't know much, but they want to know."

The problem at Minnesota is to impose coherence on a curriculum that ranges from sophisticated space research to the tricks of department-store floorwalking. The campus is an all-too-loose federation of competing schools that span education from poetry to dentistry, without any agreed hierarchy of academic values. For example, the Institute of Technology recently spirited physics and chemistry away from the liberal arts college, which critics contend is another dire step toward vocationalism. Liberal learning is so secondary that a business student spends only 18% of his courses on it, and a dentistry student only 4%.

Intramural Master Plan. President Wilson's proposed solution is to create a "central city" of liberal arts that would control all pure science and humanities--as well as the university itself. Geared to disinterested learning, it would stimulate liberal arts throughout the professional schools. To handle less qualified students, the two-year General College would expand its role as an escape-valve junior college within the university. Wilson also aims at a fast buildup of graduate studies, which by 1970 may command 25% of the budget. In effect, Wilson is matching, on an intramural basis, California's statewide "master plan" for a grown-up university.

The Mormon son of a Mormon educator, President Wilson is an untypical administrator with a lively mind and a quick tongue. After teaching history for 17 years at Brigham Young, Chicago and Utah, where he also doubled as dean of the college, Wilson in 1952 became secretary-treasurer of the Ford Foundation's Fund for the Advancement of Education, had a big hand in the fund's big efforts to get liberal arts students into teaching. He took over the University of Oregon in 1954, facing the same problem he has now at Minnesota-blanket admissions. Wilson set up an honors program limited to 20% of each class, and he shrewdly put Oregon into the business of science research by launching its low-cost, big-return Institute of Molecular Biology.

Getting Motivated. Along with his "central college" plan, Wilson is boiling with ideas for Minnesota that would startle many another state university. It is not just that he is considering closed-circuit TV, teaching machines, teachers' aids, and even the trimester system-all the new logistical solutions to soaring enrollment. Wilson also has a faculty committee coldly eying surplus courses, and exploring independent study plans and the possibility of allowing students to graduate whenever they can pass comprehensive exams.

By tirelessly asking "the right questions," Wilson hopes to lead the faculty itself into "effecting reform." He says: "Motivation is the most important factor in the learning process. Motivation comes from exposure to exciting people and exciting minds." It looks as though Minnesota is about to get motivated.

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