Universities: Cleveland's Big-Leaguer

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Virtually unnoticed at the time, Cleveland's Western Reserve University and Case Institute of Technology quietly merged ten months ago into a single school. Only last week, in the festivities formally installing its first president, Robert Warren Morse, 46, did the new institution finally allow itself some of the fanfare appropriate to its status.

For with the formation of Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland now boasts one of the nation's largest private universities—a science-minded school that ranks ahead of Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago in both faculty size (1,200) and graduate enrollment (4,547), and ahead of both Dartmouth and Duke in terms of endowment ($138 million).

To Case and Western Reserve, which have occupied adjacent campuses for 83 years, the merger brings benefits far beyond the prestige that comes with increased size. It makes for better overall balance by pooling the respective strengths of each school—notably medicine for Western Reserve and engineering and physics for Case. It creates more muscular academic departments, including 45-member faculties in both chemistry and physics. And the federation, as their get-together is officially called, also eliminates the competition between Case and Western Reserve in raising funds.

The Plumbers. Despite their natural rivalry, the neighboring schools had long been moving closer together. Over the years, they have cooperated by using the same tennis courts and football fields, sharing their geology and astronomy departments, even arranging class hours so that students could attend courses at both schools. Back in the 1940s, symbolically enough, the sturdy Cyclone fence that long separated the two campuses was torn down and replaced by a less conspicuous steel chain —and even that stands today only in spots.

Yet many of Case Western Reserve's 6,376 undergraduates are unhappy over federation. Western Reserve students still call Case's engineers "plumbers," while Case students, who have traditionally prided themselves on higher academic standards, continue to refer derisively to "Western Reverse." A Western Reserve coed, unmoved by the fact that all but a few Case students are men, complains that "all they want to talk about is chemistry." Counters Reuben DeBolt, 20, a Case junior: "As far as I'm concerned, I'm still going to the Case Institute of Technology."

New Athens. But most Clevelanders welcome the new arrangement. The eighth largest U.S. city, Cleveland has long qualified as one of the nation's leading cultural centers, thanks largely to its prestigious museum and symphony orchestra. Both are housed in "University Circle," a 488-acre civic complex that Cleveland citizens proudly refer to as "the modern Athens." Until the formation of Case Western Reserve, however, the city's higher education lagged behind its cultural achievements. "It was an idea whose time had come," says one of the new school's trustees. "It gives Cleveland a university in the big leagues."