Rare Days at Wayne

"When I tell people I'm from Wayne State University," jokes one professor, "they usually answer, 'Ah, yes. Fort Wayne, Indiana.' " The error is unlikely to persist. Not only has Detroit's fast-growing Wayne (21,260 students) become the nation's 16th-biggest university, but few other state schools are getting better so fast. The secret is that Detroit, auto maker to the nation, is in the midst of a cultural revolution. And no one is hungrier for intellectual horsepower than Wayne's students, the sons and daughters of the men who build the autos.

More than 90% of Wayne's students are from lunch-bucket Detroit, a cauldron of every conceivable ethnic strain, salted by rising expectations. They are the sons of Armenians, Syrians, Greeks, Poles, Czechs, Ukrainians, Irish and Germans. They are the daughters of Southerners, black and white, who migrated north to the assembly lines. They are overalled machinists and off-duty policemen (one cop this year won a Woodrow Wilson fellowship). And 72% of them work in order to study--the average graduate takes nearly six years to earn a diploma.

If a few rich kids go to Wayne, its students go on to all sorts of success. Wayne's alumni include former U.S. Surgeon General Leonard Scheele, TV's Hugh Downs-and Broadway Director Lloyd (Raisin in the Sun) Richards. Wayne produced not only the union brothers Reuther, but also G.M.'s Vice President Louis G. Seaton, who sits across from Walter at the bargaining table. "To get through Wayne," says Seaton, "I worked eight hours a day as a sign painter. It was a down-to-earth, hardworking place then, and it still is. I feel awfully good about Wayne."

Plunked down in midtown, Wayne in every way is the heart of polyglot Detroit. The chaotic, 80-acre campus borders two auto-choked expressways and the city's two finest museums. Its buildings include Charles Addamsish mansions that once housed Detroit's wealthy. Its students fill the classrooms 14 hours a day, and some of them have to meet in a garage. Yet everywhere loom the cool creations of famed Detroit Architect Minoru Yamasaki (TIME, Nov. 17, 1958), who is turning ugly Wayne into a graceful "superblock" of imaginative buildings.

Adventurous Students. Only four years ago, Wayne was a city-run college (founded in 1868) that focused largely on training Detroit's schoolteachers. But ever since it got too big for the city to support, state-run Wayne has steadily lifted its sights. By all the evidence, it now ranks academically above Michigan State University (22,000 students) though still below the University of Michigan (28,000). And it has all of a younger brother's problems. Fortnight ago, the state legislature announced that next year it aims to give Wayne only 64% as much money as Michigan State, less than half as much as Michigan. Snapped Wayne's angry board of governors: "Shameful and destructive."

Wayne is angry because it has a unique opportunity to serve Detroit's growing passion for culture and research. Oberlin-educated President Clarence Hilberry, 57, has as his models Harvard and California. Already Wayne has one of the country's best language departments, a fine medical school, and a new university press that publishes six learned journals, including the lively Midwest Journal of Political Science. Last year U.S. foundations gave Wayne $4,724,000. Ford alone gave $700,-ooo to launch Wayne's vibrant new Monteith College, an experimental liberal arts school designed for intellectual independence and "adventurous students."

Astonished Teachers. More than ever, Wayne's students are after an education, not prestige or parties (only 5% belong to fraternities and sororities). They pack talks by such visitors as Dame Edith Sitwell and Poet Karl Shapiro, snap up tickets for the touring New York Metropolitan Opera, jam campus productions of Shakespeare and Chekhov. The athletic department (budget: $55,000) is overwhelmed if a football game draws 1,500 spectators. "They seem to think culture is part of their education, and not just something they should do," says one faculty member. "They're paying their way through college, and they want their money's worth."

To Wayne's astonished teachers, many of them refugees from big-name colleges, the atmosphere is reminiscent of the days when World War II veterans hit the campuses. What delights Anthropologist Richard Waterman, for example, is his students' experience-bred theses, on subjects that range from the effects of automation to a study of Detroit's homeless men. "The kids keep asking questions," says Waterman. "And where else could you get 200 state university students to turn out for a little-advertised talk by some New School cat from New York?"

Adds Assistant Vice President William Birenbaum, who came to Wayne from the University of Chicago: "These are rare days here. Goethe said: 'Nothing is so powerful as an idea arriving at the right time.' That's what's happening. The people of Detroit are graduating from materialism. Wayne is no longer a factory-town university, because Detroit no longer considers itself just a factory town."

-Who still owes $45 in back tuition.

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