Education: TAKE-OFF UNIVERSITIES

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AMERICANS dream of college as an ivied campus in the country. But more than 70% of them now live in urban areas, and the urban university is their cultural home. It is art's gallery, music's concert hall and industry's researcher. It cures the sick, trains the lawyer, and retreads the housewife. It lures the country boy weary of milking machines, and holds the city girl living on a budget. Today "unknown" urban universities are blossoming across the land, and if none of them are yet another Harvard, Chicago or University of California, some of them are poised for take-off in that direction.

Most "take-off" universities start with one strong suit — typically, a good medical school. What marks them is a new effort to strengthen their other schools, to pool their resources with former rivals, to serve the community in some striking way, to install strong leadership and keep moving. Though worried because they lag in undergraduate education, they nonetheless see graduate study as their rising role in a knowledge-hungry society. More than ever they are ready to use money effectively. At least four such schools, all private, have now outstripped their regional reputations and stand ready for national recognition.

Western Reserve University

The name, which comes from Connecticut's onetime claim to Ohio as a "western reserve." suggests the school's founding date: 1826. It was not until 1882 that Western Reserve (enrollment: 8,059) moved from the sleepy hamlet of Hudson to Cleveland, now the nation's eighth biggest city (pop. 870,000). It boasts eight graduate and professional schools that far overshadow its three undergraduate colleges (one for boys, one for girls, one for adults). President John Millis calls this pattern "what we think a university should be," but he also frets over lack of unity: "We are an aggregate of almost independent professional schools."

Most notable is the medical school (one prof: Dr. Spock, the famed pediatrician), where all subjects are correlated and taught together; every student is apprenticed to a family to learn the bedside manner. Western Reserve is biggest in science, has 450 research projects, spent $3,000,000 on a new lab just to lure two star biologists from Cornell. Also thriving: the school of library science, an automation-aimed academy specializing in the new arts of "information retrieval."

Faculty pay is surprisingly poor at Western Reserve, but a new scholarly spirit is banishing an old Babbittry and attracting able researchers who like the labs as well as the living. Western Reserve also offers the pooled cultural riches of Cleveland's rising "University Circle," a 488-acre complex costing $175 million that includes everything from hospitals to Case Institute of Technology to the Cleveland Orchestra. Western Reserve has more than tripled endowment since 1949 to $69 million, sharing a happy windfall: the 1% of income before taxes that Cleveland corporations two years ago began voluntarily giving to Cleveland higher education.

University or Rochester