Led Rowan campus' evolution in Camden

"It's a different world here," Eric B. Clark, director of the Camden Urban Center, told a reporter in 1982.

Though undergraduates at what was Glassboro State College were mostly white teenagers, the reporter wrote, those at the college's Camden center were "blacks or Hispanics in their 20s and 30s, and many are married, hold jobs, and speak English as a second language."

In 1974, the center admitted its first freshmen who spoke English as a first language. In 1984, New Jersey named the site a branch campus of Glassboro State, now Rowan University.

Through it all, Dr. Clark was credited with bringing the hope of a college education within reach of the disadvantaged of Camden and beyond.

On Wednesday, March 30, Dr. Clark, 65, a fixture at what is now Rowan's Camden campus from 1970 through 2009, died of complications from pancreatic cancer at Underwood-Memorial Hospital in Woodbury.

Dr. Clark not only headed the Camden campus but also ran one program to help its students and another to help future students.

Robert Zazzali, vice president for employee and labor relations for Rowan, said in a phone interview: "If it were not for Eric Clark, I don't think the Camden campus would be what it is today . . . a valuable resource and opportunity for students who might not have that opportunity at the main campus."

Zazzali, a 1970s student at the main campus who became Dr. Clark's colleague and neighbor, recalled that "the Camden campus was Eric's heart and soul."

In a 1998 Inquirer story about a study of dropouts who would have graduated from Camden's Woodrow Wilson High School in 1997, Dr. Clark spoke about the sort of students he seemed to have made his life focus.

"A lot of kids have intense pressure to make money, to support their family," said Dr. Clark, who had written the study with Vernon Hill, coordinator of the Camden Education Initiative.

"They needed jobs, and they had no parental support to stay" in school, he said. "No one saying, 'I'll give you spending money.' No one saying, 'I'll get you up in the morning.' "

Glassboro State set up the Camden Urban Center in 1969 after state budget cutters killed plans for others in Atlantic City and Cumberland County.

Dr. Clark began at the center in October 1970 as a worker for the federal VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) program.

"The Urban Center was actually a part of his dissertation work" for his doctorate, said Tyrone McCombs, dean of Rowan's Camden campus.