Education: $800,000 Commission

In appointing one more commission to study the "youth problem" last fortnight, Dr. George Frederick Zook, poker-faced Director of the American Council on Education, reassured Washington newshawks: "This will not be just another survey." Last week the new commission, made up of President Robert Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago, onetime President Henry Ingraham Harriman of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, Novelist Dorothy Canneld Fisher, Newton Diehl Baker and ten others, met with its creator. For it Dr. Zook had two presents which gave his boast solid foundation. One was an $800,000 bankroll, put up by the (Rockefeller-endowed) General Education Board. The other was President Homer Price Rainey of Bucknell University, whom the commission elected as its di rector. Dr. Rainey promptly resigned as Bucknell's president.

Bucknell might have railed at Dr. Zook for stealing its perfectly good president if that Baptist institution had not stolen Dr. Rainey from the presidency of small Franklin College four years ago. Twelve years before that Education had stolen him from professional baseball, a career on which he launched, immediately after his graduation from Austin College (Sherman, Tex.), as star pitcher of the Galveston team in the Texas League. A top-notch tennist, Dr. Rainey has often been seen wandering through the dormitories of whatever college he happened to head, looking for a student to trim. In his four years at Bucknell he has made news by scrambling the curriculum to make room for more creative work in art, music, literature.

The Zook-Rockefeller-Rainey Commission will begin with a survey of all the youth, recreation and health programs in the country, try to bring some order into them. To drum up interest it will hold public forum meetings and when it has made up its mind about improvements, it will establish demonstration centres to popularize them.