History of Baruch College Book and Exhibit

5. A College is Born, 1962-1968

Although he was accustomed to coping with the usual problems of the Baruch School, Emanuel Saxe had never faced a decade of turmoil and uncertainty like the sixties. Student radicalism, black protest and educational upheaval culminating in teacher strikes and urban riots created havoc on university campuses and in major American cities. Within the City University of New York an expansionist chancellor, Albert Bowker, was locked in combat with the more conservative chairman of the Board of Higher Education, Gustave Rosenberg. Everything in CUNY was up for change, including the troubled Baruch School. Out of this uproar and after a prolonged period of gestation, marked by report after report, the Bernard M. Baruch College was born.

Problem: A New Building Is Needed

Saxe and Cohen, in spite of their energy and ability, could only worry about one barrier to accreditation at a time. In the mid-sixties, the graduate program took precedence. Regardless of what was in the forefront, however, the need for a new building for the Baruch School continued to dominate the background, and in the end became the precipitating agent for the creation of a separate college. All through the late fifties and early sixties, complaints from administrators, faculty and students at 23rd Street produced little more than weak promises from the Board of Higher Education. Acting on the theory that God helps those who help themselves, Saxe never stopped looking for a new site for the School. At different times it seemed as though the armory at 25th Street and Lexington Avenue (retained by the National Guard), the Remington Rand building at 27th and Lexington (not for sale), Lincoln Center (Fordham got there first), the Civic Center near Park Row (Pace got there first), the Washington Market area (not an urban renewal site, as expected), the Russell Sage building at 22nd and Lexington (went to Catholic Charities), might be the Baruch School's next home, but all of this came to naught and not until the School became a college was any sizable amount of additional space added.(1)

The delay was certainly not because the need was unrecognized. As we have seen, the 23rd Street building was considered inadequate from the time it was opened and every outside report from the mid-fifties on detailed the physical needs of the School. The evaluation of all the municipal colleges by the Middle States Association in 1955 discussed the "serious inadequacy of the 23rd Street building" and condemned "the completely unrealistic solutions proposed to date," such as the acquisition of the Children's Court building on 22nd Street, then under negotiation. Conditions at 17 Lexington Avenue must truly have been horrendous; the report abandoned the smooth and diplomatic prose favored by the Association and stated that "the situation that now exists is indescribably congested, well-nigh fantastic." It recommended that the Baruch School acquire the entire block between 22nd and 23rd Streets from Lexington to Third Avenue and erect on it a skyscraper with high-speed elevators.(2)

Interestingly, although they knew the inadequacies of 17 Lexington Avenue better than anyone, the faculty reacted defensively to the strong criticism of the Middle States team, saying in effect, "Yes, it is bad but we have plans to make it better." Worn down by years of hardship and disappointment, however, and aware of how little budgetary support they could expect, their aspirations were far more limited than the Middle States' projections; skyscrapers and high speed elevators were not for the likes of them.

The surprising intensity of the Middle States report, however, alerted Baruch School administrators to expect similar criticism from three other studies expected to appear in the early sixties. State Education Department representatives were scheduled to visit the School in February, 1961, a Board of Higher Education Committee headed by Thomas C. Holy that had been examining all the municipal colleges was to report later in the same year, and most important, Donald Cottrell's study of the Baruch School was to appear in 1962.

In preparation, Saxe began a strong campaign to put the best face possible on 17 Lexington Avenue. He forbade smoking or eating in the classrooms, urged the faculty to clean up their desks and file cabinets, offered to replace any broken furniture or equipment and told everyone not to scuff the new floor tiles or scar the freshly painted corridor walls. Saxe would admit defeat only with regard to the inadequate library; even he could not enlarge its quarters and resources before the visitors arrived.

These emergency measures may have worked for the team from Albany; they concentrated on other aspects of the School and approved its educational program. The Holy Report, however, was another matter. Beginning with its past ("This 16 story structure and its four story annex were not well planned for their present use") and moving into "the maintenance and care of both [Baruch School] buildings have been badly neglected," the report was specific regarding the areas of weakness at 17 Lexington Avenue: "library, staff offices, lunchroom, toilets, elevators and lounges." It concluded that "if the plant is to be continued for its present purposes, it needs considerable remodeling and a complete renovation."(3)

The "if" is significant. By 1961, when the Holy Report came out, many people knew that Cottrell, dean of the School of Education at Ohio State University, and his associate, J. L. Heskett, were going to recommend that 17 Lexington Avenue be abandoned and that a new midtown site for the Baruch School be acquired. Holy and his committee had reached the same conclusion, but perhaps because their task was to examine all the municipal colleges, most of whom were needy in one way or another, they were reluctant to be as forceful in their recommendations. On the other hand, the question of whether or not there should be a new building for the Baruch School, was the Cottrell Report's raison d'être.

An earlier Cottrell Report, the "Master Plan Study of Public Higher Education in the City of New York," released in 1950, had recommended that $2.75 million be spent on expanded facilities for City College's School of Business. In due time (ten years later), the Board of Higher Education proposed to, implement this recommendation and included the item in its budget request for 1960-1961. Instead of approving it, however, the New York City Bureau of the Budget authorized a second Cottrell study, this time of the Baruch School alone, "so that adequate information [be made] available for a proper evaluation of the physical needs of the School."(4) The result was "Education for Business in the City University of New York."

To begin with, Cottrell found the 23rd Street building to be inadequate and dangerous for its current population and saw no way that it could house the greatly increased enrollments he projected for the future. If the Baruch School was to continue to be an all purpose institution, offering higher education to undergraduates, graduates and nonmatriculants, he said, a new building was essential. Surprisingly, considering the importance of the Cottrell Report's recommendations on space and buildings to their future, the faculty behaved as they had when the Middle States team had recommended a new building in 1955. Although they examined and discussed the entire report, they devoted little attention to Cottrell's ideas on relocation. Problems of space and maintenance were all too familiar to them; after years of disappointments, the idea of a new building seemed more of a fairy tale than a reality. This attitude was also true for students; neither the Ticker nor the Reporter paid much attention to Cottrell's building plans. Years of deprivation had led to defeatism and a "bird in the hand" mentality. When asked, at least half of the faculty said that the School should concentrate on repair and renovation of the 23rd Street building, not on pipe dreams about a new campus.(5)

What interested them much more were the structural alternatives posited by Cottrell, which in a sense grew out of his space recommendations but were also independent of them. Should the Baruch School, wherever located, maintain its current arrangements with the main campus? At the time, as we have seen, the professional departments held power over their own faculty and curriculum, liberal arts acted as a subdivision of the uptown School, fiscal affairs and plant upkeep were in the hands of headquarters uptown and day-by-day administration over academic affairs was in the hands of the dean. Should the School move north and become the fourth school on an expanded St. Nicholas Heights campus? In that case, its students would take their liberal arts courses along with all the other City College freshmen and sophomores, and the Baruch School would become a two-year, undergraduate professional school for day-session students.

This limited role was dictated by economic and geographic realities. Cottrell saw that it would be very difficult to attract professional faculty, graduate students and evening-session undergraduates or nonmatriculants, almost all of whom worked in midtown, to 137th Street and Convent Avenue. He therefore recommended that the graduate division remain in a remodeled 23rd Street building and the undergraduate evening session be farmed out to a midtown community college. A final choice was to separate from City College entirely and establish a new four year institution, something that was quite attractive to the liberal-arts personnel at the Baruch School, a second choice for the professional staff and much disliked by those departments, such as Economics, Political Science and Psychology, who had a foot in both camps.(6)

Almost nobody on the faculty wanted to move to the main campus, though a draft report from Student Council saw advantages in a "new building next to or near the uptown campus so that business students could take advantage of the profuse offerings of the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences."(7) This view, reflecting the paucity of liberal-arts courses downtown, did not carry over to the students' final report, which considered the loss of the evening session as too great a price to pay and joined the rest of the Baruch community in wanting to stay at 23rd Street.

More than a desire for an enhanced general education lay behind student reluctance to separate from the main university. The City College, after all, had a formidable academic reputation, especially in New York City, where most of them would expect to find their first jobs. Also, the ties that bound them to alma mater were very strong. Graduation exercises were always held uptown in Lewisohn Stadium, diplomas were issued in the name of City College, and if a graduate was to continue to be a "sturdy son," he joined the City College Alumni Association. Unable to believe in the possibility of a well-funded new college in the near future, students opted for security and retention of the umbilical cord that tied them to the main campus. It is somewhat harder to understand faculty reluctance to become independent since they, in contrast to the essentially transient students, could look forward to a long-term future in the institution and knew all too well the problems inherent in the present arrangement. On the other hand, however, they also had more to lose. Separation, with all its uncertainties, was a risky step to take.

The president of City College, Buell Gallagher, was present during the faculty's discussion of the Cottrell report but carefully announced his neutrality. This, as it turned out, was not an accurate description of his real feelings. In an unused memorandum as well as in his response to a query from the City College Committee of the Board of Higher Education, Gallagher made his opposition to separation quite clear. His preference was for the status quo in a new building to be located between 14th and 34th Street and shared with the newly created but not yet housed Manhattan Community College, or a move uptown "where a common freshman year could serve all the professional schools . . . with a single admission standard for the whole complex."(8) Either plan would expand his power, and neither was acceptable to the faculty and administration of the Baruch School. A partnership with Manhattan Community College was seen by them as an absolute anathema. Given their long-standing feelings of inferiority and the lesser status of the two-year colleges, the one thing the students, faculty and administration of the Baruch School did not want was to share space, even brand new space, with a community college.(9)

A year later, apparently convinced that the School would not accept Manhattan Community College as a co-tenant, Gallagher tried to distract Jack Poses, a member of the City College Committee of the Board of Higher Education, from a plan to unite the two institutions at "Litho City," a "finger of land over the west side New York Central railroad tracks" between 66th and 70th Streets. His method was to suggest an alternative site within the Civic Center redevelopment area then under construction on Park Row. Manhattan Community College, he said, could then have the old School of Business building, and the new site would be available for undergraduates as well as for graduate work in business and public administration.

Hoping to remove the west side site completely from the picture, Gallagher appealed to Board of Higher Education vanity, declaring that a skyscraper should be built over the huge multitiered parking garage proposed for the site and that it should house both the Board and the School of business--a recapitulation of their neighborliness in the thirties. His prose became positively grandiose: "A properly executed building [in the Civic Center] could give to the City University its proper status as a close ally of City government and symbolize to the entire world the rightful place of the City University in the cultural life of the metropolis."(10)

The letter was carbon-copied to Dean Saxe, then at his summer pursuits in the Poconos, but not too occupied to dash off an immediate, handwritten and irate response to Gallagher's suggestion. His haste was dictated by the latter's imminent departure for Geneva, Switzerland, and his anger was directed at Gallagher not only for taking the intiative on a matter of such great importance to the School but for favoring a location over a parking garage where fumes and heavy traffic would pose dangers to the health and safety of students and faculty alike. In addition, the garage would take desperately needed storage space from the School. Finally, he had little wish to rejoin the Board of Higher Education. Saxe insisted that the Baruch School must stay where it was until it got adequate space adjacent to 17 Lexington Avenue or a "complete new building elsewhere" in midtown above 14th Street. His own preference was to move AAS and nonmatriculants to Manhattan Community College, wherever it finally located, and to purchase the Remington Rand building, a tall, well-planned structure at 24th Street and Park Avenue South which could be acquired for about $500,000 if the present owner would present it to the School as a tax-deductible gift.

Gallagher hastened to reply, interrupting his own vacation to dictate a letter via transatlantic telephone from Switzerland. Characteristically, he retreated in the face of Saxe's fury, saying that he agreed with his objections to the Civic Center location, had not given up on acquiring a site near 23rd Street (although Remington Rand had thus far shown no interest in the gift idea) and had suggested the Park Row site to Poses as a ploy to get him away from the idea of moving the School to the far west side.(11)

All of the sound and fury precipitated by the Cottrell report did not result in any improvement in the physical condition of the School of Business, but it did have considerable significance. The idea of separation had emerged into the open, where it grew in importance until finally, five years later, it became a reality. Aspects of the Cottrell report as well as other studies done in the mid-sixties, when combined with the fast moving events of that era, led to the inescapable conclusion that an independent college was best.

The Separation Crisis: First Stages

In the sixties, the Baruch School of Business and Public Administration was confronted with the question of finding the right place within what was rapidly becoming a multi-university. That was a problem unique to itself, but at the same time, along with its sister business schools all over the United States, it was confronted with the need to answer questions related to collegiate business education in general. The Ford Foundation had been interested in the education of businessmen since the late forties and in 1957-1958 had founded "Centers of Excellence" at Carnegie Tech, Harvard, Columbia, Chicago and Stanford, in the expectation that changes made at these prestigious institutions would percolate down into lesser schools. In case this did not happen naturally, they engaged Robert A. Gordon and James E. Howell to disseminate the results via a widely read book called Higher Education for Business. At approximately the same time, the Carnegie Foundation, with an even longer history of interest in education, funded another scholar, Frank E. Pierson, to conduct his own study, which was entitled The Education of American Businessmen. Both books appeared in 1959.

Although they differed on some points, both studies found that collegiate business education had serious weaknesses: curriculum, students and faculty. The data offered in the two reports was damning, presenting evidence that unimaginative, nontheoretical faculties were teaching from practice-oriented texts to classes of second-rate vocationally-minded students! Specifically, Gordon, Howell and Pierson found that the collegiate schools of business were guilty of causing their students to be overspecialized in business and undereducated in the liberal arts, that undergraduate and graduate courses overlapped, that very little research was being done by the faculty, too few of whom had earned the doctorate, that the burgeoning Ph.D. programs were at best mediocre and that nationwide, although their absolute numbers remained high due to increases in college attendance generally, the proportion of students enrolling in business had dropped. The understated thrust of the reports was that undergraduate education for business should be eliminated and that graduate study should be upgraded.(12)

To what extent was this indictment true for the Baruch School? Cottrell, who was cognizant of the problems identified in the nationwide studies, found many similar ones at 23rd Street. The bulk of his report was devoted to recommendations for their solution. He started with the premise that business education at the School of Business had to educate for a successful first job, because a good job right after graduation was a "must" for the working-class students who comprised the bulk of the School's population.

Cottrell was reiterating a theme that had become central to all of the municipal colleges. Absence of tuition meant that a working-class child could go to college, but not for a "gentleman's education." The family would do without the income a student might otherwise earn for several years, but when the sheepskin was bestowed, in most cases the new graduate was expected to support himself or herself and perhaps to contribute to the family income. He or she was also expected to do this by means of the white-collar job or profession that a college education had made possible. Was the Baruch School preparing the working-class student well enough?

In general, yes. Cottrell approved of the School's curriculum, although he recommended that it modernize its liberal-arts offerings and add more mathematics and behavioral science. He also suggested broadening the business base with a business policy course, offering fewer specializations and preventing students from taking additional specialization courses as electives.

He had many other recommendations as well, all of which were designed to buttress his basic conclusion that the School of Business (preferably as a college) be the center of undergraduate and graduate business education for the City University. To more accurately reflect what he hoped would be a broadened professional curriculum, he recommended that the BBA degree be changed to a BS in Business Administration. To improve the quality of the student body and enhance the School's image, he urged the faculty to raise the entry requirements to those of the other senior colleges. Aware of the service role played by the liberal-arts departments at the Baruch School and the discord that resulted from this, Cottrell suggested the development of programs that bridged business and general education.

He did not think that the School should try to educate people from the AAS through the Ph.D. Instead, he suggested that they give all their AAS programs (including police science) to the proposed Manhattan Community College, which he hoped would share a new building with the School of Business, and use the money and space to expand and improve graduate education at both the master's and Ph.D. levels. Knowedgeable about problems in the evening-session graduate program, notably the shortage of full-time faculty who held the Ph.D., Cottrell suggested that the evening-session degree be a highly specialized, clearly vocational Master of Science (MS), leaving the broader MBA to the day session alone, and that the Ph.D. wait until the two master's programs became fully operative.

The author of the report was convinced that New York City could easily absorb the graduates of an expanded, upgraded, multilevel business education program; indeed he argued that it was essential for the city's prosperity. As a result, he forecast a substantial increase by 1978 in enrollment in both undergraduate (3,000) and graduate (4,200) programs. His projections raised eyebrows because, as we have seen, the recent track record of the School had not been encouraging. Cottrell and Heskett, however, looked at the expected increase in high-school enrollments for 1965 and thereafter, due to baby boomers reaching their teens, assumed that continuing prosperity would enable more of them to go to college and believed that Baruch would get its share.(13)

Two years later, the 1964 City University Master Plan Report to the Regents of the State of New York, required by the legislation that had established it, echoed Cottrell's optimistic forecasts and projected a 50 percent increase in enrollment by the end of the decade. Their reasons, however, were somewhat different from his. Although worse was to come, the "urban crisis" of the sixties was already recognized. Minority protests and black militancy were on the rise, and there was growing awareness of serious educational problems in the lower-income, primarily nonwhite areas of the city. The Board of Higher Education, under Chancellor Albert Bowker's prodding, saw a role for the City University in all this. Quoting Thomas Jefferson's statement that "a mass of talents lie buried in poverty," the 1964 Master Plan promised to uncover and develop those talents.(14) By lowering entry scores and providing remediation, they would admit one fourth of all high school graduates by 1966.

But where would they house them? The School of Business was not the only unit of the City University to suffer from a lack of space and outmoded facilities, although it certainly seemed to have the lowest priority. The Master Plan did not say anything about the need to "provide advanced technical leaders for the commercial and business interests of the city" until the educational needs of all the other municipal colleges were explained. Plans for a new building for the Baruch School were mentioned on page 23, following a dozen pages devoted to building plans for the other senior colleges.

The plan could be amended each year and was to be completely revised every four years. In the 1965 update, the Board of Higher Education asked for a larger sum to acquire a site and construct a new building for the Baruch School; in 1966, reflecting the inflation resulting from Lyndon Johnson's "guns and butter" policies, they asked for much more. All of the requests made between 1964 and 1967 were simply items on a list, not explained or defended. The last plan of the series, however, did offer a glimmer of hope.

Fearing that the city, even under liberal Mayor John Lindsay, would never be able to come up with enough money for the planned expansion, the Administrative Council of the City University, composed of all the presidents, hoped to shift the burden of financing the capital budget to the state by the creation of a City University Construction Fund empowered to borrow $400 million and get the capital construction projects underway. They also suggested that tuition be imposed as "collateral," but, as we have seen, public outcry defeated that part of the proposal, at least for the time being.(15)

Their efforts bore fruit on July 1st, 1966, when the legislature passed the City University Supplemental Aid and Construction Act. Chancellor Bowker hailed the occasion as "the most important day in the history of public higher education in New York City." The law promised "increased and steady support for the University operating budget," as well as for capital expenditures; it would make it possible to offer higher education to the least prepared high school student as well as to candidates for the Ph.D. Or so the public relations booklet, "A Greater University for a Greater City," authored by Bowker in December 1966, promised. By 1967, the fund was a reality and gave rise to the expectation that by using the construction expertise of the previously established Dormitory Authority and the money provided from the new source, the physical needs of the expanding university could be met.(16)

The glimmer of hope did become reality for several units of the City University, providing new buildings at the main campus of City College, at Queens College and a renovated graduate center. At 23rd Street, however, it only provoked a crisis. Starting in May 1966, when it seemed certain that the University would get its construction fund, including the money for a new building for the School of Business, Gallagher conducted three special faculty meetings on "the location and future" of the Baruch School.

At that moment, he said, the Board of Higher Education's site of choice appeared to be the former Washington Meat Market area on the lower West Side, but Manhattan Borough President Constance Baker Motley and Percy Sutton, who would follow her in office, as well as other black leaders, wanted both the Baruch School and the still homeless Manhattan Community College to move to Harlem. Their reasons were both racial and vocational. A highly specialized educational facility would be of great value to the young people of the ghetto and, since presumably business studies would continue to be attractive, white students would come from other parts of the city to study there, thus promoting interracial understanding.

Having presented the faculty with this information (which we can be sure gained him their undivided attention), Gallagher went on to present his view (known, but not openly stated in earlier discussions), that the School of Business should move to the main campus. He did not say so, but one might conclude that he opened with news of the Harlem alternative in order to make his own plans more acceptable. St. Nicholas Heights was enough a part of Harlem to satisfy the black leadership but, at the same time, was an enclave apart; thus it was probably a more desirable option for most of the personnel at 23rd Street than a location in central Harlem would have been. Taking a major complaint of Saxe and the faculty and turning it around to justify his own plans, Gallagher said that there was never enough money in the City College budget to provide good maintenance at both centers, but if the School of Business shared staff and supplies with its sister schools on the main campus, conditions would be much improved. His other point related to liberal arts.

Hoping to enlist the very unhappy arts and sciences instructors, Gallagher said that a move uptown would mean no more postings to "Siberia," but rather increased opportunities to teach upper-level and graduate courses and an easier road to promotion and tenure. Since for many in his audience, 23rd Street was a haven, not an exile, and because they did not believe promotion and tenure could ever be easily acquired from their uptown peers, this part of his message did not have much effect. He tried other arguments. Because freshmen would take their first two years in the School of Liberal Arts, that unit's higher entry requirements would apply, and the caliber of students to be taught in the professional courses would also be better. Because it was cheaper to build on an existing campus, the new building would be done sooner. Also, the blacks who made up so large a proportion of evening-session students would welcome a move closer to Harlem. Finally, recognizing a subject of enormous importance to the School of Business, Gallagher pointed out that, freed of the costs of running a four-year institution, the School could hire many more full-time professional faculty and meet the criticisms of the AACSB. He went on in this vein until Saxe got a chance to respond.(17)

The dean saw no reason to expect that the Liberal Arts Personnel and Budget Committee uptown would welcome and reward their strays from 23rd Street; indeed, based on recent decisions, he anticipated the opposite. Uptown or downtown, basic liberal-arts courses (the only kind most business students took), were usually taught by part-timers, so nothing was to be gained by dismantling the existing liberal-arts structure. A new building on the main campus would be slow in coming, because there was only so much room on St. Nicholas Heights, and the other Schools of City College had needs and plans of their own. The Washington Market area, said Saxe, was the best place for the Baruch School because, among other things, it provided easy access to the centers of banking and finance, thus providing students with part-time jobs and the School with practitioners for their faculty.

The uptown campus, on the other hand, was the worst location for Baruch students. Echoing Cottrell, Saxe pointed out that most of the students lived in Brooklyn and somewhat fewer in Queens. A much smaller number came from Manhattan and the Bronx, the boroughs closest to St. Nicholas Heights. Furthermore, although day-session students might be willing to make the long trip uptown, evening-session students would not: 69 percent of these men and women worked below 80th Street and would not be able or willing to add the additional travel time to their already very long day.

For this and other reasons, including a reminder to Gallagher that Cottrell had recommended a separate college four years earlier, the president's arguments were not accepted by the majority of the faculty, who, with one exception, voted to remain a four-year school at all costs. No one wanted to move to the main campus. In spite of what appeared to be a definitive vote, however, it was decided, on the initiative of a cautious accounting department and a much respected leader, T. Edward Hollander, that further exploration was needed. Saxe thereupon appointed a Task Force on the Future of the Baruch School and asked all the departments to send him their views on separation in order to aid the task force in its deliberations. Gallagher had the last word: he hoped that the task force would play fair and give all sides in their report.(18)

Gallagher did not get what he wanted. The task force issued a unanimous decision for separation, providing that tenure would be protected, sufficient OTPS money (for other than teaching or personal services) be made available and that Bernard Baruch's bequests remain in the coffers of the new college. Emphasizing altruism and their desire to do good, they cited societal needs for their decision: great changes in business such as automation and computerization required better managers, there was increased need for personnel to staff the expanding public programs of the Great Society era and public administration was ideally suited to raising the position of the disadvantaged. Optimistically, they forecast the disappearance of difficulties in recruiting good liberal-arts instructors to a business college (frequently cited as a reason to dismantle the four-year structure), once tenure decisions would be taken out of the hands of the uptown departments. They also expected great improvements in student life when the registrar, deans and directors at 23rd Street became full-fledged administrators. Far from presenting all sides, their report was a ringing endorsement of separation.(19)

Gallagher should have been prepared for this. In a long, angry "aide-memoire" prepared after the spring 1966 meeting, Saxe had reiterated his own opposition to a move uptown. Gallagher understood the situation at 23rd Street well enough to know that the dean did not speak for himself alone. Saxe did not mince words. Although he disclaimed "personal animus," he told Gallagher that "your own plans for the development of the u/t campus are so vast that you fear the amount [listed in the Master Plan for Baruch] . . . would hamper them seriously. " He went further and asked, "Why can't a substantial building be given at long last to Baruch to accommodate its entire load?" The building site he had in mind was the old Children's Court, now the Student Center, which he wanted to raze and replace with a sixteen-story building joined to the existing one at 17 Lexington Avenue.

The twelve-page, handwritten memorandum expressed the dean's anger and bitterness in no uncertain terms, focusing especially on the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Reuben Frodin, whom he held responsible for the uneven quality ("he sends us mostly rejects") of the liberal-arts faculty downtown and for monopolizing money that should have come to the arts and science departments at 23rd Street. Based on information supplied by his assistants, Saxe told Gallagher of the hostility expressed by Frodin, exemplified in statements such as "the best you [the Baruch School] can have is a couple of lecturers for a year or two until they get their degrees" and "why can't Baruch students come uptown in the afternoon or on a Saturday for their science laboratories so you can close the ones downtown?" Saxe ended with the ultimate in exasperation: "Things can't go on this way any longer." Since there was no chance of fair play from the man who held the power but "was the enemy of the School," separation from City College was best.(20)

Given the fact that a summer vacation period intervened, the task force reported with record speed to a series of faculty meetings held in late October and early November 1966. The intervening months had given the whole faculty time to think about their future and as a result, when they reconvened, they were far less unanimous in their desire for separation. Many concerns surfaced. Would a new college have its own School of Liberal Arts and Sciences to (perhaps) woo students from business studies? Would the School of Education have a place at 23rd Street? Would the Board of Higher Education protect tenure rights? Would small liberal-arts departments be drowned in a sea of accountants? Two leaders of the liberal arts faculty, Andrew Lavender of the English department and Robert Stranathan of Mathematics tried to bolster their colleagues' resolve by saying that nothing could be worse than the contempt in which they were presently held by their peers at the main campus.

These remarks led Gallagher, who was presiding, to urge his listeners to rise above selfish interests, but his plea fell on deaf ears. Ignoring their president, the faculty returned to the issues that troubled them most. A strong argument against separation was made by Professor Abraham Briloff of the accounting department, who was not the most senior instructor at the Baruch School but who had already established himself as someone to whom attention should be paid. Fearing that the reputation of the School would decline if it was separated from City College, he urged that the evening and extension divisions remain at 23rd Street but that day-session undergraduates be moved uptown.

Briloff's major concern was echoed by others. In spite of Saxe's point that a new Baruch College would be anchored to the City University and would not an be an academic orphan, many of the faculty were not reassured. Two members of the history department were pessimistic on other grounds. They doubted that an independent business college could recruit high-quality liberal-arts faculty and said that there was no reason to believe that expanded liberal-arts electives would be attractive to students whose major interests were in business. Their statement was backed up by Agnes Mulligan, who said that it was not uptown control but student disinterest that kept more humanities courses from being offered at 23rd Street.

Sheldon Zalkind of the psychology department thought that the connection with City College brought research money that could not be acquired by a new, unknown college. This statement was challenged by a supporter of separation, Conrad Berenson of Marketing, who said that adequate laboratories, equipment and released time, none of which had been fairly allocated by the main campus, were more important factors in getting research grants than the name of an institution.

Saxe and Gallagher, wishing to bring the prolonged discussion to an end, seized on Ted Hollander of the accounting department's statement that the chance for separation, if turned aside, would not come again. They asked for a straw vote, which came only after the faculty voted 58 to 32 to protect the rights of the liberal arts and education faculty. The final tally was illuminating:

	yes	no
move uptown:	10	118
autonomy within City College	50	73
separation	92	35
autonomy if separation was denied	111	6

Given their druthers, even at this late date, a majority of the voting faculty at the Baruch School would have preferred not to cut the umbilical cord. Briloff set the tone: "Let us seek every possible way to prevent Alma Mater from being dismembered by her sturdy sons and daughters."(21)

What was the view from outside the ninth-floor conference room where the Baruch School faculty was deliberating? The Engineering School was not very interested, but their dean responded to Gallagher's request for an opinion by recommending autonomy and more money but not separation. The School of Education was strongly opposed to independence for the Baruch School, as were the alumni, who believed that a new building would solve all of the School's problems. Evening-session students were very much in favor of separation as were the members of Sigma Alpha, the service fraternity, but day-session students tended to more cautious. A Ticker referendum, taken shortly after the previous faculty meeting that discussed the task force's report, showed that with about half of the student body voting, 40.2 percent favored separation, 29.9 percent wanted to keep the status quo with greater autonomy, 26.2 percent preferred a move uptown and 1.9 percent supported the idea of an upper-division college.

The latter was also the solution preferred by the liberal-arts faculty at the main campus, who gave the matter more attention than any other unit outside of the Baruch School itself. After disclaiming any concern about possible injury to the City College as a whole if the ungrateful Baruchians departed, they reiterated the familiar statement that good liberal-arts education could not be achieved at a business school.(22)

Separation Crisis: Second Stage and Resolution

Various opinions on the future of the Baruch School, solicited or otherwise, were given during the winter of 1966-1967 when the City College Committee of the Board of Higher Education was considering the matter. It was a worrisome time for the people at 23rd Street. The committee's recommendations, although subject to change by the full Board of Higher Education, would nonetheless carry great weight. Hoping to counter an unfavorable report, the leaders of the School of Business sought the support of the chancellor. Unfortunately, the City College Committee did not take guidance from Bowker, nor did it heed the wishes of a deputation from the Baruch School with whom they met in February. Instead, on March 9, they issued a "Report and Recommendations" that confirmed the worst fears of everyone at 23rd Street.

Starting with well-known facts about the inadequacy of the building and the equally familiar charge that the liberal-arts faculty was of poor quality, the committee went on to add some new reasons to justify their overall position that the current situation at the Baruch School would have to be changed. Thanks to the City University Construction Fund, the senior colleges would soon have enough space to admit all of the students who applied to them. This meant that Baruch would lose the advantage of its lower cut-off score, because now students could enroll at the liberal-arts colleges they really wanted to attend, rather than enrolling in the business school because it was the only tuition-free option open to them. In addition, the growth of the City University meant that much of what was now offered at Baruch would be offered at the community colleges, removing another reason, vocational training, that had previously attracted students to the School of Business. Their final recommendation was that the Baruch School should become an upper-division unit with a graduate school to be located in downtown or midtown Manhattan and continue to be a part of the City College.(23)

An outside observer might see the committee's conclusion, if not the harsh criticism that preceded it, as quite reasonable, but the people at 23rd Street were not capable of such detachment. In January, while the Committee had been deliberating, word that they were leaning toward removing the lower limbs of the School had leaked out, and the Task Force on the Future of Baruch, hoping to head them off, had hastened to draft a memorandum opposing such a plan. Avoiding a frontal attack, they suggested that they understood that it was meant to be a compromise between those who think that liberal arts courses can only be taught in a liberal arts college and those who believe that the City University ought to create an independent College of Business and Public Administration [but] respectfully suggest that so literal a Solomonic compromise did justice to neither side.(24)

Their main arguments revolved around the idea that liberal arts and business must be intertwined throughout the entire four years a student spent in the School (or College, as they hoped) of Business. The committee's plans would prevent a junior or senior from taking any liberal-arts courses and require the professional faculty to compress all business courses; base and specialization, into two years, an unmanageable task. Furthermore, given the difficulties of transfer and the loyalties built up in a student's first two years, relatively few would leave the liberal-arts college where they began, and undergraduate enrollment at the professional school would dwindle to the point where the specializations that had enabled thousands of working-class students to move into the middle class would no longer be available. This latter argument was based on a very old fear. As we have seen, in the late forties the faculty had been most unhappy when the veteran influx forced the School of Business to keep its freshmen uptown for a semester. Two full years of exposure to the arts and sciences posed a much greater danger and might be fatal to the School. None of these arguments, however, had any effect on the committee's decision to create a two-year professional school.(25)

The faculty was shocked and dismayed, but they soon rallied. Aware that the full Board of Higher Education would not necessarily accept the City College Committee's recommendation, everyone at the School mobilized for a war to be waged on all fronts. Right after the committee's report was released and duly reported in the New York Times, a faculty resolution informed the Board of Higher Education of its intention to fight the proposed move. This action was followed by an emotional letter from Emanuel Saxe to David I. Ashe, the chairman of the City College Committee and thus presumably the author of the offending report, in which he reminded him of the faculty's willingness to accept autonomy if separation did not receive the board's approval. After reiterating most of the arguments in the January memo, he concluded by saying, "Do not make the irretrievable mistake which will destroy the good work of our hands, minds and hearts. "(26)

Although everyone knew that Saxe could be trusted to put up a good fight, dismemberment--the worst danger the School of Business had ever face--was too important to be left to the dean alone. Thus, a special faculty meeting was called, and Marc Berman, the president of the Student Council, spoke on behalf of the student body in opposition to the City College Committee report. Berman also pushed hard for a Faculty-Student-Alumni Committee to Safeguard the Future of the Baruch School and, after a long discussion, such a committee was established. David Valinsky of the statistics department was the chairman.

The committee proceeded to the attack. They wrote and funded a full page advertisement in the New York Times that asked New Yorkers to "Save Our School" by completing and sending to the Board of Higher Education a coupon which said "I strongly object to the proposals before you which would convert the Baruch School into an upper division college." They also organized parents and students into a letter-writing campaign and generally coordinated the battle to reach the full Board of Higher Education before it considered the committee's report.

That hearing was to be held on April 4, 1967, and thus the Safeguard Committee scheduled a march to the Board of Higher Education headquarters on the preceding Thursday, March 30. Their press release said that in order to dramatize their position, participants would wear black suits, carry a coffin labeled "Baruch School" and be accompanied by a bugler playing "Taps." The march was followed by a 400-student demonstration at board headquarters on the day of the hearing, marked at the School itself by a boycott of classes. A powerful editorial in the Ticker, entitled "The Report Nobody Asked For," rebutted all the reasons given for an upper-division college; many of its arguments had been made at the faculty meeting held a day earlier.(27)

The protests brought expressions of sympathy and support; possibly because of this, the April 4 hearing did not lead to an immediate decision. Instead, the board referred the report to a special Committee on the Future of the Baruch School, made up of five of their members and headed by Francis Keppel, former dean of the Harvard School of Education, former United States Commissioner of Education and currently vice president of the Board of Higher Education. They were instructed "to consider all alternatives hitherto advanced and such other proposals that the Special Committee itself might formulate."(28)

One committee member, Louis Nunez, was considered to be a likely supporter of the independence alternative most favored by all factions at 23rd Street. The Committee to Safeguard the Future sent him a fifteen-page memorandum detailing the arguments for a separate four-year college and demolishing the justifications given for a move uptown. It relied heavily on the Cottrell Report, which had recommended a four-year school in midtown, and cleverly quoted the City College Committee Report out of context to show that even those who would truncate the School understood that a move uptown would cause severe injury to the evening session and graduate division.

The implication (from the city college committee and, on another occasion, from President Gallagher) that the Baruch School was an unattractive alternative choice for many of its students was assailed, and most of the earlier defensive positions taken by the faculty, administration, students and alumni were reaffirmed in the memorandum. Charges that an independent business college could never attract a good liberal-arts faculty were vehemently denied. The alternative argument--that once freed from uptown control, a brilliant faculty could be assembled at 23rd Street--was only a pious hope. Most people at the School knew that, at best, after the "rejects" retired, better teachers could be hired; in the opinion of much of the professional school, that was all that was really needed. Brilliant scholars, however, even though they would have access to new City University Ph.D. programs, as Saxe said would be the case, would not be likely to find a program of introductory courses and an infrequent elective very stimulating.(29)

It took six months for the Keppel Committee to reach a decision in favor of an independent four-year college and for the Board of Higher Education to agree. The committee deliberated all through the tension-filled summer of 1967 when urban riots, school boycotts and burning ghettoes dominated the news. Perhaps because the outside world was so intrusive at this point in New York City eductional history, Keppel and his colleagues, unlike previous groups that had studied the future of the Baruch School, felt a need for external advice. At their invitation, Gilbert W. Fitzhugh, chairman of the board of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company; Earl B. Schwartz, former member of the Temporary Committee on City Finances; Leonard S. Silk, vice-chairman of Business Week; James L. Hayes of the Duquesne University School of Business and Public Administration; and Dwight Waldo, Distinguished Professor in the Maxwell School of Public Administration at Syracuse University, considered the question away from the internal arguments that had dominated the controversy so far.

As a result, the final Keppel report cited New York's expanding role as a corporate headquarters center, the growth of public services (these were the years when an expansionist trio, Lyndon Johnson, Nelson Rockefeller and John Lindsay, dominated New York City's public life) and the increasing prominence of information systems as reasons to justify a fifth senior college. They also gave another reason: "The ethnic composition of the high school population is changing rapidly and there is a need for a new commitment of resources to educate students from minority groups so they might function effectively. "(30)

The appearance of the Keppel report and the Board of Higher Education's approval which followed was, of course, a great relief to everyone at 23rd Street, but the Special Committee had done more than just force a much-needed decision on the Baruch School's future: it had also developed a blueprint for a new kind of urban college. As the School embarked on the necessary planning for the transition and the future, a good portion of the faculty was determined to turn the ideas of the committee into reality. The most important of these ideas was that liberal arts should complement business but also develop programs of its own that were clearly committed to the "urban mission" of the new college.

No longer would the arts and sciences perform a mere service role. The Keppel Report expected that the future student body of Baruch College would be "equally divided" between candidates for the BA or BS degree and those who aimed at the BBA. In addition, they expected the new college to increase its programs for disadvantaged students. Baruch would also provide a bridge between the city's ghettos and its business community through part-time jobs, thus showing ghetto youngsters the "visible, direct payoff of a career oriented course of college study."(31)

Idealists all, Keppel and his associates did not know enough about the condition of public education in the Empire City in 1967 to understand that most of the students who graduated from a New York City high school (the minimum requirement for entry into college) did not need to be shown the value of a college education; it was the thousands who dropped out long before graduation who needed convincing. But how could the municipal colleges reach them? And how much could they do for youngsters who had never mastered the basic skills? The tensions of the time made everyone look for quick solutions; perhaps a new senior college could make a difference. Many people at Baruch knew better but saw, correctly, that the urban crisis provided an opportunity that might not come again. They also recognized a quid pro quo when they saw one: independence in exchange for accepting a mission to uplift the disadvantaged.

The Keppel Report ended with an exhortation to the Board of Higher Education to give more money to the new college immediately and to acquire a site in downtown Brooklyn on which to erect its new home. Why downtown Brooklyn? First, because of its proximity to the financial district in lower Manhattan, to which it was linked by excellent transportation. Second, because studies, starting with Cottrell's, demonstrated that two-thirds of Baruch's student body lived in Brooklyn and Queens and that those two boroughs were expected to show the greatest population increases in the next four decades. There was a third reason. Long Island University was looking for a buyer for its Brooklyn division, and what could be better for a new college than 62 acres of campus in "move in" condition? Truly, acquiring such space would have been a quick solution to the most intractable problem the sorely tried people at 23rd Street faced, but it was not to be.

Moving a college may not be as difficult as moving a mountain, but it is hard enough. As Bowker reported to the Board of Higher Education on March 25, 1968, acquisition of the Long Island University campus involved more than money. Its faculty and students (generally assumed to be of less than top quality), for example, would become the responsibility of the new college, and no one welcomed this. Students and staff at Long Island University were understandably panicked and managed to get the mayor and the governor on their side, but Bowker, who was very anxious to consummate the sale, assured the State Board of Regents that Baruch College and the City University would do anything required to safeguard the position of the Long Island University faculty and students. On the strength of this, the regents approved the move.

Close reading of their letter, however, revealed that the approval was based on the condition that the new college adopt new admission procedures in order to admit students who would not meet its usual requirements. This was a constraint that, in spite of the Keppel Report's emphasis on educating the disadvantaged, was not welcomed by anyone at 80th Street or 23rd Street. When the mayor guaranteed that an alternative site in Brooklyn would be available, the Board of Higher Education ended its discussions with Long Island University. From hindsight, since two years later the entire City University dropped its own admission requirements and twenty years later Baruch College has not yet acquired a campus of its own, this may have been an error.(32)

Lindsay kept his promise and proposed another Brooklyn site, the Atlantic Terminal Renewal area, but this also intensely displeased the faculty and students at Baruch, largely on the grounds of convenience. Rightly or wrongly, they wanted to stay in midtown Manhattan. The mayor, however, was a strong supporter of the move, as was the Downtown Brooklyn Development Committee, which made an almost desperate appeal, hoping that construction of a new City University campus in their deteriorating area would spur a general renewal.

Proponents at the Board of Higher Education, such as Vice-Chancellor Seymour Hyman, who was in charge of campus development, tried to win Baruch faculty support by describing an elaborate twenty-acre campus that would cost $50 to $70 million to erect. It would not be ready for six years, but when it was done it would include dormitory space for students (to change the harmful home environment of the underprivileged students Baruch was expected to enroll) and faculty (so they would not have to face the hazards of a troubled neighborhood, especially at night). Hyman, echoing the prevailing thinking of the period, saw the troubled neighborhood as a positive reason to settle in downtown Brooklyn. Because of the Atlantic Terminal's proximity to depressed neighborhoods, he said, disadvantaged students could easily reach a college located on that site.(33)

Strong opposition from 23rd Street killed the proposed move in the short run, but the Atlantic Terminal location remained in the City University's Master Plan for another two decades. At various moments it was seriously considered. Periodically, department chairpersons were consulted by architects hired to draw up blueprints for a new campus on the site, but these plans never got off the drawing board. Uncertainty about its permanent home, compounded by a space crisis after Open Admissions began in 1970, clouded the early years of the new college.

Transition

Under the best of circumstances, those years could not have been easy. The transition period alone, September 1967 to July 1, 1968, was an extraordinarily difficult time. Furthermore, it was too short a time to make new arrangements for faculty, students, administration, finances, buildings, equipment, curriculum and degrees. No one knew what lay ahead better than Emanuel Saxe who, because he expected considerable difficulty, was eager to begin the transition process. When it seemed that Gallagher and Bowker did not share his urgency and were ready to wait until a president for the new college was chosen, he prodded them with a blunt letter saying that since there was no way of knowing when the Search Committee would report, a group composed of Gallagher, Bowker and ad interim, himself, should begin to resolve the problems involved in the transitional process. Unstated in this memorandum but well known was Saxe's desire to receive the nod of the Search Committee. The committee included three Baruch faculty members who, although they could not vote, were certain to voice their support for the dean. This, combined with his long experience, was expected to make him the first president of Baruch College.

Gallagher, after ascertaining that it met with Bowker's approval, half-heartedly accepted the dean's suggestion. The chancellor preferred to wait until a president was selected but grudgingly admitted that separating Baruch's share of the City College budget for 1968-1969 was urgent. He appointed Vice-Chancellor Benjamin Mintz, accountant and Baruch alumnus, to head a committee whose other members would be Gallagher and Saxe or their representatives. The only Board of Higher Education action taken during this crucial period in the fall of 1967 was the appointment of a temporary Administrative Committee for Baruch College. In March 1968, Saxe was appointed Provost.(34)

Meanwhile, back at 23rd Street, a large Ad Hoc Committee on the Transition was chosen. It was large because it was carefully balanced between the professional and liberal-arts faculty. Friction between the two groups had already appeared and was certain to grow. Only a sizable group, representing all the divisions in the School, could be expected to devise arrangements that the faculty as a whole would accept.

One of the first matters to be addressed was the fate of the tenured liberal-arts faculty (tenured members of the professional departments would, of course, remain at 23rd Street). Gallagher explained their options: they had the right to go to the main campus and could not be refused even if their return "bumped" an untenured colleague. If they chose to stay with the new college, their tenure would be transferred and their promotions, when appropriate, would be decided by their own yet-to-be-formed Personnel and Budget Committee. During the transitional year faculty who would be eligible for tenure would be at the mercy of the uptown Personnel and Budget Committee, but if they were rejected there, they could remain at 23rd Street and acquire tenure later, always assuming that their downtown colleagues wanted them. Virtually the same arrangement, including the option to go or stay, applied to the administrative, clerical and library staff. All decisions had to be made by March 31, so that the lines vacated by those who chose to move to the main campus could be filled by the time the new college got underway in July.

Many opted for City College, but there was certainly no mass flight. Predictably, members of departments that had followed the rotation method of staffing classes at 23rd Street were most eager to leave. Only two members of the history department, for example, remained downtown when the spring 1968 semester drew to a close. Other arts and sciences personnel who had been at the Baruch School for years and had put down strong roots, however, never thought of leaving. The main campus was hostile territory; 17 Lexington Avenue was home. In retrospect, it would appear that they made the wiser decision. Although few had predicted it, City College became an intensely troubled institution in the next few years. Black militance and lack of preparation for Open Admissions led to great change, often hasty and ill considered, at the flagship college of the City University. In the process of adapting to these changes, many departments were severely damaged. At Baruch, on the other hand, the changes, although slower to come, were in many respects positive.

Graduating seniors also had to make decisions. Those who would be eligible for the degree between 1968 and 1971--because they had entered the college when it was the Baruch School--could have their diploma read "Baruch College (formerly the Baruch School of City College)" or simply "Baruch College."After 1971, all diplomas would be in the name of the College. Other matters, mostly of symbolic importance, also needed to be settled. What should the College's colors be? Its motto, seal, logo and mascot? These were delightfully novel matters to consider. Others, such as preparing the first Bulletin, getting State Department of Education approval for their curriculum (temporarily granted in May), and arranging a summer session, which would begin in June under the aegis of City College's Baruch School and conclude in August, when it would be part of the new Baruch College, were less interesting but also not difficult to accomplish.(35)

Finding a place for the Department of Education at the new college was somewhat more complicated but was solved at an early January meeting between Dean Saxe, Dean Bortner, who headed the School of Education at the main campus, and members of the department assigned to 23rd Street. It was decided to make the preparation of teachers of commercial subjects an integral part of the new college. Bortner agreed to transfer the lines of tenured faculty already at Baruch and make a full professor's line available to Gerald Leinwand, who was to come down to the new college from the main campus in June.

At the meeting, Saxe indicated that Leinwand was invited to Baruch to head a possible separate School of Education because, among the (hoped-for) large number of liberal-arts students coming to the new Baruch College would be many who planned to teach in subject areas other than business. A full panoply of education courses would therefore be required, and only a full-service School of Education could meet the need. Although it was done for other reasons, five years later, a separate School of Education at Baruch College became a reality.(36)

The knottiest problems Saxe had to face were of a budgetary and physical nature. The 1968--1969 City College budget had to be divided so that the lines and funds planned for the Baruch School went to the new college. Given the ill-will that existed between the mother institution and what was seen as an ungrateful child, this was extremely difficult to do. Frequently irate, Saxe doggedly insisted on a fair share for the new college. By analyzing the budget in great detail, he managed to extricate enough money to meet the needs of the College's first year.

As the spring of 1968 wore on, the newly named provost had even more to do. Bank accounts had to be established, the School's buildings and contents, dilapidated as they were, had to be made the property of the new College, and student academic records had to be transferred to 23rd Street. By working sixteen to eighteen hours a day, Saxe managed to accomplish the many tasks involved by the end of May. In June the Board of Higher Education put its imprimatur on his completed work, and on July 1, 1968, Baruch College came into being as an independent unit of the City University of New York.(37)

This action, welcome as it was, did not solve the pressing problem of space. Even if the Atlantic Terminal site was finally approved, it would not relieve the immediate physical needs of the new College. Two other initiatives, however, might help. The Board of Higher Education agreed to rent additional space at 257 Park Avenue South where the Graduate Division had been ensconced for several years; the board was also pursuing the purchase of an entire building at 155 E. 24th St. between Lexington and Third Avenues, one block from 17 Lexington Avenue. Due to bureaucratic inertia and real estate complications, the pursuit took more than a year, but finally ended with success.

The previous owner, the RCA Corporation, had offered to sell the building in September 1967, shortly after the Board of Higher Education had decided to create the new college. By the following April, the board had agreed to purchase the building and requested approval from the City University Construction Fund. That body agreed and asked the Dormitory Authority to arrange the sale. The board, hoping to have the building renovated and usable by the start of the spring 1968 semester, asked the Dormitory Authority to speed matters up by using its power of eminent domain to condemn the property. The authority agreed to do this but because of a change of lawyers, six weeks were lost while the new legal advisors became acquainted with the matter. In the interim, a neighboring institution, United Cerebral Palsy (UCP), although they knew that the Baruch School was planning to acquire it, purchased the RCA building and suggested that the two institutions share its seven floors.

This move was met with disappointment, frustration and outrage at 23rd Street, but it was difficult to "go to the mat" with an organization that did as much good as United Cerebral Palsy. Fortunately for Baruch, the fire department ruled that UCP must use the first three floors, a decision that precluded sharing, since the College needed more than the four remaining floors. At this point, UCP lost interest. In November the Board of Higher Education finally acquired the building, and the renovation needed to make it suitable for an administrative center began.(38)

Nothing about the transition was easy, but arranging the internal structure of the new college proved to be the most difficult problem of all. Indeed, the matter was not finally decided until well after separation, a delay that did not auger well for the future. In a fruitless attempt to have the matter settled before the date of separation, some members of the carefully balanced Transition Committee, headed by much-respected Herbert Arkin of the statistics department, presented a rather complicated proposal in June. Its general outlines suggested two schools, one for business, economics and the behavioral sciences and another for humanities and sciences. There would also be a general faculty and a separate Graduate Division. Each School would have its own budget and would control the curriculum for its specializations, but other courses would be considered by a joint committee of the general faculty. Recruitment of faculty, promotion and tenure were to be the joint responsibility of the constituent schools and a College-wide Personnel and Budget Committee. It appeared to be a well-thought-out plan, but there were indications that a prolonged struggle lay ahead. In addition to the Arkin proposal, the sixteen-member committee produced twelve other plans for faculty consideration!

Briloff wanted a unitary Faculty Council composed of somewhat untraditional groupings. One would be entitled "Microeconomic Studies" and be the "umbrella" for the Departments of Accounting, Administrative Science, Law, Marketing, Statistics and Computer Science. Another would be called "Ecological Studies" and contain the Departments of Economics, Finance, Political Science, Public Administration, Health Care Administration, Sociology and Transportation. There would be other groupings for the humanities, sciences and so on. Dean Cohen also favored a unitary approach, but would divide the Council differently and give some departments, such as Economics, Mathematics, Psychology, Sociology and Statistics, dual membership. Henry Eilbert of Marketing wanted two separate schools and a general faculty but wished to include a number of safeguards to prevent "intense parochialism" and the possibility that one group could be overrun by another. Louis Levy of Speech shared Eilbert's fears but came to the conclusion that a unitary approach would be more protective. David Newton agreed that one Faculty was desirable to "eliminate conflict, competition and controversy," but he maintained that AASCB requirements made it essential to have two curriculum committees.

David Valinsky favored a very tight structure, including a separate Graduate Division. Michael Wyschograd of Philosophy advocated considerable autonomy for each School. Robert Love, in a report that provided the framework for what eventually became the structure of the College, wanted two equal and semi-autonomous schools with representives of each school on the other faculty and a number of top-level administrators, especially a provost, to unify it all. The most grandiose, even arrogant plan was proposed for the Graduate Division by Cohen, Conrad Berenson and Robert House on the grounds that 4,000 master's candidates and 200 Ph.D.'s would be enrolled in the next five years. In their opinion, such expansion required the division to have its own budget and control over lines, teaching loads and curriculum.

This supermarket of plans, whether the issue was openly addressed as Eilbert and Levy did or masked by presumed educational considerations, was the product of almost forty years of scarcity, mistrust and denigration that had marked the relationship between the School and the faculty and administrators on the main campus. There was little precedent for cooperation and less reason to believe that the professional faculty could be fair to their colleagues in the arts and sciences or vice versa.

The discussions preceding separation had done nothing to decrease long-standing suspicions. Much anxiety, moreover, was created by the absence of "Business and Public Administration" from the title of the new college, implying that it was a general, not a specialized institution. Perhaps it really would attract students who were not very interested in business. In that case, what would happen to the professional departments? On the other hand, if they did not enroll arts and science candidates, how could the liberal-arts departments defend themselves from the same lowly status that had afflicted them while they were part of City College? Which group would control a unitary faculty? What would happen to the outs? Given all the uncertainties, the faculty simply could not make up its mind and adjourned for the summer without deciding on a structure for the College.(39)

In August, the secretary of the faculty, Andrew Lavender, urgently called his colleagues to three all-day meetings. By this time, Robert Weaver, Harvard-educated economist and secretary of Urban Development in Lyndon Johnson's cabinet, the first black to attain such eminence, had been chosen to be the first president of Baruch College. Although not yet installed, Weaver agreed to attend the morning session of the first day's meeting. Perhaps foolishly, Lavender asked for further plans and got several more, all divided on the same issue of a unitary structure versus separate schools.

Unlike the others, however, the new chairman of the Department of Education, Gerald Leinwand, used the invitation to describe extensive plans to expand the program of his department. These added up to a grandiose wish list not likely to endear him to his already combative colleagues. In an attempt to make an end run around their hostility, he took the floor at the September meeting and tried to pin President Weaver to a commitment to a School of Education. This was a mistake. Weaver evaded the issue, and Leinwand's unorthodox approach aroused the anxiety and irritation of his colleagues.

On the main issue before the meeting, Weaver said that he favored two schools and a strong Graduate Division. Straddling the great divide, he also came out for a strong liberal-arts program (to be created) and a strong business program (to be preserved). He had been well briefed on the importance of accreditation and said that he would do everything he could to preserve it. All of this was quietly received by his listeners, most of whom had never seen or heard him before, but when he said that the size of each School was immaterial, the faculty realized that their new president did not understand very much about Baruch College. Weaver left, the discussion went on and finally a motion to approve the general outlines of Arkin's original plan was approved by a vote of 77 to 20. The details were to be worked out during the coming year.(40)

By the time this meeting was held, Emanuel Saxe had become Dean Emeritus and was enjoying a full-pay half-year sabbatical, certainly well earned. Before he left he wrote a long memo to Weaver in which he explained what he had done during the transitional year and warned him of the pitfalls, largely budgetary, that lay ahead, concluding with the dignified but sad words, "I have done all in my power to make possible a smooth transition. "(41)

Although the City University establishment had not given him what he wanted most--the presidency of the new institution he had done so much to create--Saxe was honored in other ways. After his sabbatical, he returned to teach as a Wollman Distinguished Professor of Accountancy and subsequently as a University Distinguished Professor with additional compensation over his regular professorial salary. Furthermore, his colleagues, alumni and students recognized his extraordinary contributions to the Baruch School by funding the Emanuel Saxe Distinguished Chair in Accountancy in his honor.

Saxe and Gallagher, the latter boasting that the main campus was to get a new School of Architecture as well as one of Nursing (announcements designed to show former School of Business colleagues that their departure was no loss to City College), said good-bye at the end of June, leaving a vacuum of leadership because Robert Weaver had made it clear that he would not arrive until after the upcoming presidential election. If his mentor Hubert Humphrey won, he could almost certainly remain in Washington. On the other hand, if Nixon was the victor, he had a good job and an apartment waiting for him in the Big Apple. Weaver could not lose, but the College might be injured. In their anxiety to have him, however, the Board of Higher Education acquiesced to his terms. Samuel Thomas was appointed Provost and asked to keep things going until the new president took over in February 1969. Other administrators, such as Cohen, Newton and Saidel, also remained in office for the time being. However, an academic institution, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and the absence of the man at the top left many questions unanswered. It was a poor beginning for a new college.(42)

Weaver's postponed arrival was one of several reasons he was not a popular choice at 23rd Street. His absence (he appeared at 23rd Street only once, for less than an hour, in the four months that separated his appointment on May 15, 1968, and his brief attendance at the September faculty meeting) during the College's crucial organizing period was much criticized, especially since it appeared that he might not have accepted the appointment in good faith. Other reasons for his lukewarm reception were a mixture of regret that Saxe had not been appointed and resentment caused by the belief that Weaver's appointment was more the result of his race than his qualifications. This was not an unreasonable assumption; the statement that accompanied his appointment said that a black economist with a "commitment to the solution of urban problems" made him the ideal leader of a new college with an "urban mission. "(43)

Perhaps so. The times were certainly changing and the appointment of the first black as president of a CUNY senior college was a recognition of this. It was also an expression of the hopes held by many liberals of all races during the sixties, namely that more and more blacks would be attracted to higher education and use it to move into the middle class. Those New Yorkers who were less concerned with racial justice had other reasons for approving Weaver's appointment: 1968 was a terrible year for the city, marked by campus violence, teacher strikes, school boycotts and racial tension that permeated even the cloistered halls of the Metropolitan Museum.

As the anxiety level rose, all sorts of remedies were proposed, including the appointment of an experienced economist and administrator to lead a college of business and public administration. This proved to be a chimera. Although Weaver's credentials were excellent, there was little reason to believe that he would be successful as a mentor or role model for the black students expected to appear in large numbers at 23rd Street. His middle-class background (he was a Harvard graduate and the recipient of many honors) placed him very far from the young blacks who had received their preparatory education in ghetto schools and whose lifestyles were shaped by their poverty. Common ethnicity, alone, could not bridge the gap.

This became quite clear early in his administration. The most militant black student organization at Baruch, the Society of the Koromante, demanded that black instructors be hired to conduct programs in Afro-American Studies, including one course on the black community that all students would have to take. Weaver's response was tepid, to say the least. According to the New York Times, he told the students that the "horrible" budget he had inherited made such changes impossible to implement.(44) At the end of his third semester at 23rd Street, in June 1970, budgetary problems, student unrest and the looming problems of Open Admissions led the man who was expected to have a special commitment to urban blacks to resign his office.

Notes

(1) Ticker, October 2, 1956; September 16, 1957; March 5, 1958; Reporter, September 7, 1955; May 6, 1958; College of the City of New York, Baruch School of Business and Public Administration, Dean's Discussion Group, "Minutes," February 3, 1961; Lexicon, 1957; College of the City of New York, Baruch School of Business and Public Administration, "Faculty Minutes," May 13, 1966, pp. 769-770.

(2) Middle States Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools Commission on Higher Education, "Report of the Evaluation of the City College, New York," May 1956, pp. 2, 8.

(3) College of the City of New York, Baruch School of Business and Public Administration, Dean's Discussion Group, "Plan for the February 3, 1961 Faculty Meeting"; Board of Higher Education, Committee to Look to the Future, "A Long Range Plan for the City University of New York," Thomas C. Holy, editor, 1962, pp. 280-281.

(4) Donald P. Cottrell and J. L. Heskett, Education For Business in the City University of New York, a report prepared for the Board of Higher Education of the City of New York (New York, no publisher listed, March 1962), p. vi.

(5) Cottrell, Education, 5-6, 78; College of the City of New York, Baruch School of Business and Public Administration, draft for a "Summary of the Discussions of the Cottrell Report by the Instructional Staff of the Baruch School," prepared by Henry Eilbert, chairman of the Study Committee on the Cottrell Report, October 1962, p. 20-21.

(6) "Summary of Discussions," 18; "Faculty Minutes," October 24, 1962, p. 662.

(7) College of the City of New York, Baruch School of Business and Public Administration, Student Council, "Summary and Evaluation of the Cottrell Report". February 8, 1963, p. 9.

(8) Memorandum from President Buell G. Gallagher to the City College Committee of the Board of Higher Education, no date but probably late February 1962.

(9) Memorandum prepared by President Buell G. Gallagher for the Board of Higher Education, May 28, 1962.

(10) Buell Gallagher to Jack Poses, July 3, 1963.

(11) Emanuel Saxe to Buell Gallagher, July 5, 1963; Buell Gallagher to Emanuel Saxe, July 22, 1963.

(12) Steven Schlossman, Michael Sedlack, Harold Wechsler, "The New Look: The Ford Foundation and the Revolution in Business Education," in Selections 4, no. 3 (Winter 1978) 12-23; Dean's Discussion Group, February 23, 1960; Address by Joel Segall, President of Baruch College, to the City University Faculty Senate, March 24, 1987.

(13) Cottrell, "Education for Business," 1-2, 4,5, 26-27, 35, 43-44, 45,46.

(14) Board of Higher Education, Master Plan for the City University of New York, a report prepared for the New York State Legisature (New York, no publisher listed, 1964), p. 3.

(15) Board of Higher Education, Master Plan, 1964, p. 11, 1965, p. 12, 1966, p. 40; Fred Hechinger, "Education: University Issue, City and State," New York Times, November 21, 1965, 82:1.

(16) Albert Bowker, "A Greater University for a Greater City," December 1966, pp. 2-3. This was a publicity release intended to gain support for expansion of the City University of New York.

(17) "Faculty Minutes," May 13, 1966, p. 771; May 20, 1966, p. 789; June 3, 1966; New York Times (February 9, 1967) 38:3.

(18) "Faculty Minutes," May 13, 1966, p. 772; May 20, 1966, p. 793; June 3, 1966, p. 798.

(19) College of the City of New York Baruch School of Business and Public Administration, Task Force on the Future of the School of Business, "Report," October 28, 1966.

(20) Saxe to Gallagher, "Aide Memoire," spring 1966; Author's interview with Emanuel Saxe, April 4, 1986.

(21) "Faculty Minutes," October 28, 1966, p. 821.

(22) College of the City of New York, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, "Report of the Committee to Consider the Position of the College of Liberal Arts vis-a-vis the Future of the Baruch School," November 2, 1966; "Memorandum from Dean William Allen to President Buell Gallagher," October 30, 1966; Sigma Alpha, position paper on the proposed separation from City College, December 5, 1966; Ticker, December 13, 1966.

(23) Board of Higher Education, "Report and Recommendations on the Baruch School of Business and Public Administration," March 9, 1967

(24) Task Force on the Future of the Baruch School, "Memorandum," January 9, 1967.

(25) Ibid.

(26) "Faculty Minutes,"March 14, 1967, pp. 892, 894, 900, 903; Emanuel Saxe to David Ashe, March 14, 1967.

(27) "Faculty Minutes," March 14, 1967, pp. 893, 895; New York Times (March 31, 1967) 40:2; (April 1, 1967) 47:1; (April 2, 1967) 92:4.

(28) Board of Higher Education, Special Committee on the Future of the Baruch School, "Report and Recommendations," September 27, 1967, p. 1.

(29) Unsigned "confidential" memorandum (probably the Committee to Safeguard the Future of the Baruch School) to the Honorable Louis Nunez, April 19, 1967.

(30) Special Committee, "Report," 2.

(31) Ibid., 5.

(32) Ibid., 4; Board of Higher Education, "Minutes," March 25, 1968; Albert Bowker to Joseph McGovern, February 5, 1967; Board of Higher Education Executive Committee, "Minutes," April 22, 1968.

(33) Board of Higher Education, File "B. M. Baruch College, (General), letters from organizations and individuals supporting the move of Baruch College to the Atlantic Terminal site"; Evening Session Student Council President James O'Connors to Chairman of the Board of Higher Education Porter R. Chandler, May 17, 1968; "Faculty Minutes," May 14, 1968.

(34) Saxe to Gallagher and Bowker, October 30, 1967; Gallagher to Bowker, November 6, 1967; Bowker to Saxe, November 7, 1968.

(35) "Faculty Minutes," December 12, 1967, pp. 930-932; March 27, 1968, p. 943; May 14, 1968, p. 947; June 3, 1968, p. 951.

(36) "Minutes" of a meeting between the Department of Education and Dean Saxe, January 12, 1968.

(37) Interviews with Emanuel Saxe, spring 1986.

(38) Seymour Hyman, "Memorandum to file," November 1, 1968, November 6, 1968; Board of Higher Education, "Minutes," June 24, 1968; "Minutes" of a meeting of the Board of Higher Education and the Committee on Campus Planning and Development, November 20, 1968.

(39) "Faculty Minutes," June 3, 1968, p. 953; "Report of the Faculty Committee on the Transition," May 1, 1968.

(40) Andrew Lavender, "Call to Meeting of the Faculty to Discuss Structure," August 15, 1968; "Faculty Minutes," September 14, 1968, p. 1. Sequential numbering ceased with June 3, 1968 "Minutes."

(41) Emanuel Saxe to Robert Weaver, May 27, 1968.

(42) "Faculty Minutes," June 3, 1968, p. 954.

(43) Board of Higher Education, "Minutes," June 24, 1968.

(44) New York Times (February 22, 1969), 16C:6.