Can U Learn at Drive-In U?

In a rueful moment, University of California President Clark Kerr once defined his three main headaches as "sex for the students, athletics for the alumni and parking for the faculty." Now sex and sport seem simple concerns, compared to parking--for everybody.

One of the biggest migraines is Kerr's own hemmed-in, 387-acre U.C.L.A. campus. Los Angeles' notoriously deficient public transportation cannot deliver the university's mostly commuter students; yet those who drive are forbidden to park on neighboring streets. So the school has been forced to build $2,800,000 worth of multilevel parking garages, plus other parking areas, which all take in $964,000 a year in fees. Yet this costly effort provides only 10,486 campus spaces for 38,800 students and teachers, and a 60-man staff has to herd U.C.L.A. cars in and out like SAC bombers on a red alert.

Rush Hour Every Hour. In a recent poll of 317 colleges, Duke University found that only 5% of them ban all student cars. Apart from freshmen, who are usually forbidden to drive on campus, roughly one out of three U.S. collegians has a car. But the pattern varies widely. Miami is plagued with two-car students, while Purdue forbids freshmen and sophomores even to drive in the county around the campus. At well-heeled Northwestern, coeds tool to class in Cadillacs ("We've always had a high caliber of automobile here"). At Harvard, vehement Vespas grind like drunken dentists. At M.I.T., some students park in a remote lot, heft bicycles off the roofs of their cars, pedal the remaining two miles to class.

Campus cars are proliferating so fast that Michigan State has traffic lights and a 28-man police force to control "a rush hour every hour all day." The University of Georgia has more autos than eight out of ten towns in Georgia. The University of Houston has 14,000 student cars competing for 5,500 parking places. At the University of Washington, armed campus cops in prowl cars can chase speeders clear to Idaho if necessary. Illinois has put a criminology professor in charge of the whole mess. The car has begun to shape campus life all over the country. The timing of cultural events depends on available parking. Fraternity house lawns look like drive-in restaurants. On sprawling campuses, where classes may be miles apart, students confess that they occasionally pick courses not for intellectual interest, but for parking proximity. Harvard men drop their Wellesley dates long before the girls are ready to call it a night -- the boys have to rush back to Cambridge and park.

Ingenious Solutions. Commonest solution is the annual parking fee, ranging up to $75. Other ingenious methods are being tried. To plow tax money into parking, Berkeley is building big garages roofed with tennis courts and athletic fields. To solve the land shortage (new buildings are eating up old parking lots), the University of Washington is integrating kids and cars in combined garage-dormitories. But Fordham University failed when it tried to call in the commercial Kinney System Inc. to run a $225,000 parking operation --price-protesting students chanted "Let the lot rot!" And just having rich alumni, as Harvard has, is no help. Who wants to put up a Memorial Garage?

Yale bans student parkers and gives out faculty parking permits on an elaborate point system based on the academic pecking order. Given the fewest points, green instructors are parked so far from their offices that it almost pays to leave the car at home. Only when a professor is finally admitted to the lot of his choice does he feel that he has truly arrived at Yale.

In short, U.S. higher education's most vivid lesson today is that getting into college on paper may be a lot easier than getting to it in person.' Maybe the only solution is to turn colleges into educational drive-in movie theaters --how else can they teach students who cannot get out of their cars?

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