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hear his informal remarks. I remember his gentle but commanding six-and-a-half-foot figure, and howexercising the sure instincts of an old actorhe sidled into the most brightly lit spot on the stage. Guthrie talked about his work as director at the Old Vic, at Stratford-on-Avon, in London's West End, at the Metropolitan Opera, on Broadway. He enjoyed working in the United States, he said, but he was disenchanted with what he called "Broadway's tawdry commercialism " and hoped to start a new theater in the tradition of the classic British repertory companies. He had already helped establish one great North American acting ensemble: the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario. Now he wanted a theater "in the provinces " as he called everything beyond the Hudsonand his visit to the Midwest was part of an exploratory tour. Guthrie's other concern was the hand-to-mouth financial condition of resident theaters in the U.S. He

it a federation, a merger, a consolidation, or an amalgamation. Whatever the nomenclature, two private institutionsone strictly a school of science and engineering, the other known for its strong liberal arts and professional programs pooled their resources in 1967 in what still stands as one of the most important cooperative moves ever made in American higher education: Case Institute of Technology and Western Reserve University, next-door neighbors in Cleveland, became Case Western Reserve University (CWRU). John S. Millis, president of Reserve for 18 years prior to federation, called it "the first non-shotgun marriage of two educational institutions in the history of America." Other mergers have been prompted by the imminent bankruptcy of one or both institutions. This one was motivated, as the board of trustees at Reserve framed it in a 1966 resolution, by a wish "to bring into being a nationally recognized community of academic excellence." That was during the Golden Age of higher education, when colleges could luxuriate in noble aspirations untainted by fiscal considerations. As it later turned out, though, the Case-Reserve federation was a lifesaver when the financial crunch came. "If we hadn't federated, the hard times of the 1970s would have pushed us over the cliff," says Louis A. Toepfer, CWRU's president since 1970. "I don't see how we could have survived individually." Today CWRU is a unitary institution. On the local level, it is a source of unabashed civic pride in a community beset by such indignities as an attempted mayoral recall and a bankrupt public school system. On the national level, it has a reputation both in the sciences and in the humanities even more solid than its components formerly enjoyed. On a practical level, it is the envy of countless private institutions; it is deficit-free (quite miraculously, considering its stormy fiscal history). It appears to have solved most of the problems stemming from federationapprehension on the part of administrators, faculty, and nonacademic staff who woke up one morning to discover that they were duplicate (and perhaps dispensable) personnel; alumni who bristled at change; and, of course, the massive task of combining finances. A few problems still persist. Some of them are frivolous: What can you do about a university whose name is cumbersome when recited in full and whose acronym students insist upon pronouncing "Screw U "? Others are more profound: Why does everyone still seem embarrassed over the forced resignation of CWRU's first president, who was one of the architects of federation? Western Reserve College, forerunner of Western RUTH FISCHER has written for magazines ranging from Playboy to The New Republic, The Nation, Consumer Reports, and Change. Formerly an associate editor of Change, she now is an editor for Atlas World Press Review.