Word: bowker
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Political Agility. In the middle of the mess was C.U.N.Y. Chancellor Albert Bowker. With his mumbling speech and rumpled suits, the 51-year-old scholar may not have suggested the image of an urban savior. But Bowker came to the problem with impressive credentials. Born in Winchendon, Mass., he was a respected mathematical statistician with an undergraduate degree from M.I.T. and a Ph.D. from Columbia. As dean of the Stanford graduate school for five years, he had pushed his faculty to the top in national ratings and drawn the attention of New York City's board of higher education...
Long before the City College outburst, Bowker proved his agility in New York's political jungle. During one power struggle with the board, he coolly resigned, taking two C.U.N.Y. college presidents with him until the trustees capitulated. The graduate studies improved apace: C.U.N.Y. now enrolls 28,500 graduate students. Partially because of pressure from two teachers' unions, salaries rose to $11,960 for instructors and to $29,800 for full professors. A few prestigious scholars, like Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., pull down $50,000, compared with Bowker...
Expanding Brainpower. Carefully consulting with community groups to determine local needs, Bowker pushed C.U.N.Y. into offering a host of services for the city, including research in welfare problems and the oceanographic vessel Atlantic Twin, which studies pollution in New York harbor. C.U.N.Y. now trains teachers' aides and paraprofessional nurses. It retrains retired cops and firemen to fill critical shortages in nursing, teaches city planning to neighborhood leaders and runs eleven centers for teaching thousands of jobless adults such skills as how to repair air conditioners and mold plastics...
...worked to expand New York's brainpower, which is C.U.N.Y.'s most important function, Bowker has presided over incredible growth; since he took office, his university has added three four-year campuses and three community colleges to its units scattered throughout the city (see map). Two more will open next fall. They range from Georgian-style Brooklyn College and Park Avenue's Hunter College to raw two-year schools in poverty areas and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice for New York policemen. C.U.N.Y.'s 195,000 students make it the third largest institution...
...CUNY experiment works, it will almost certainly set a pattern for other urban campuses. "Failure is possible," Bowker conceded last week. But at a time when the gap between blacks and whites is widening, he added, "the unpardonable sin would have been...