Robert Gordon Sproul

Robert Gordon Sproul was born on May 22, 1891, in San Francisco, California, to Robert Sproul, an immigrant from Scotland, and Sarah Elizabeth Sproul, a native of New England. His younger brother, Allan Sproul, served as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In 1913, he earned a B.S. in engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, where his classmates included future Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren. ==Career==

In 1913, Sproul started his career briefly as an efficiency engineer in Oakland, California. During the Great Depression, expansion of facilities stopped. After World War II, he served on the Committee for the Marshall Plan. Sproul started to speak of UC's missions as "teaching, research, and public service", California governor Earl Warren asked Sproul, his former classmate and fellow 1911 member of the University of California Band, to place his name in nomination for Vice President of the United States at the 1948 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Sproul retired in 1958. He became active in the Save the Redwoods League (after being a member since 1921) and in the East Bay Regional Park District and served on the National Park Advisory Board. Before and during Sproul's presidency, the University of California's bureaucracy was highly centralized in Berkeley, but that was no longer politically viable by the time he retired. After 1900, the skyrocketing population of Southern California meant that Southern Californians were becoming the majority of everything—the state's population, then the state legislature, and then the Board of Regents—and they were fed up with long-distance micromanagement from Berkeley. UC Berkeley Chancellor Clark Kerr succeeded Sproul in 1958 with a clear mandate for change from the southern regents. Oddly, Kerr kept Sproul around as president emeritus and allowed him to sit on the committee which developed the actual plans for decentralizing the university's bureaucracy—that is, for dismantling the empire in Berkeley which Sproul had carefully protected for so many years. Sproul participated in the committee's meetings, but had enough dignity to know when he had been beaten fair and square. He put up no opposition and all committee votes were unanimous. From Sproul's office as president emeritus, he gave a speech during the 1967 Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, by which he "contributed one of the few notes of humor in an otherwise grim confrontation." When student demonstrators broke into his office and scattered his papers, he told a reporter, "Nonsense. Nobody messed up my office. It always looks that way." ==Personal and death==

On September 16, 1916, Sproul married Ida Wittschen. They had three children. (now Delta Chi Abracadabra), the Order of the Golden Bear, and the Bohemian Club - he sponsored Ernest Lawrence's membership in 1932. {{cite book He died age 84 on September 10, 1975, at home in Berkeley, California. ==Honors, awards==

Honorary degrees: • 1926: LLD from Occidental College • 1930: LLD from University of Southern California • 1930: LLD from University of San Francisco • 1931: LLD from Pomona College • 1932: LLD from University of Oregon • 1935: LLD from University of Nebraska • 1935: LLD from Yale University • 1938: LLD from University of Maine • 1938: LittD from Columbia University • 1940: LLD from University of New Mexico • 1940: LLD from Harvard University • 1943: LLD from Mills College • 1947: LLD from Princeton University • 1949: LLD from Tulane University • 1949: LLD from St. Mary's College • 1958: LLD from University of California at Berkeley • 1958: LHD from the University of California at Los Angeles • 1958: LLD from University of British Columbia • 1958: LLD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute • 1959: LLD from Brigham Young University Foreign honors: • Officier de l'Ordre National de la Legion d'Honneur (France) • Knight of the Order of the Iron Crown (Italy) • Royal Order of the North Star - Commander Second Class (Sweden) He was given the Benjamin Ide Wheeler distinguished citizen award by the city of Berkeley, 1933; made an honorary fellow of Stanford University, 1941; and named "Alumnus of the Year" by the California Alumni Association in 1946. (All honors and awards listed come from the University of California History - Digital Archives.) ==Legacy==

Achievements At his death, the New York Times reported that the University of California owed its pre-eminence in science to Sproul, who transformed the school system from "a merely large institution" to "the biggest in the Western world... sprinkled with Nobel Prize winners." By the time he left office in 1958, the University of California, Berkeley, was a distinguished university recognized worldwide for the excellence of its programs and the University of California had a total of eight campuses from Davis to Los Angeles. Its student population had risen from 19,000 to 45,000 students. Its library had quadrupled to four million volumes. Its state support had risen nine times to $75 million. Research The research vessel R/V Robert Gordon Sproul, used by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California, San Diego is named after him. It has been in service to the University of California since 1984. {{cite web ==References==