Education: Presidents' Week: Jun. 12, 1939

Last week the right man with the right backing might have had his pick of several big educational jobs. Smith College, Ohio State University and University of Colorado, among others, had arrived at the end of an academic year during which their presidents retired with no successor in sight. At Ohio State and Colorado the reasons for the regents' indecision were largely political. But when it came to picking a new president, none of these colleges or universities found it easy, because none knew exactly what kind of president it wanted.

Unlike U. S. industrialists, who are worried about their markets but satisfied with their product, U. S. college presidents are dubious about their product, are tinkering with new methods of manufacture. Higher education is a rapaciously competitive industry in which small colleges compete for teachers, students and money with big ones, State universities with private, city colleges with country. Threatening the whole established order of higher education are two radical, current experiments: Stringfellow Barr's St. John's College in Annapolis, Md., which has a fixed curriculum of 100 classics, and presidentless Black Mountain College in North Carolina, which has no required courses, seeks to promote learning mainly through art, music and dramatics.

Meanwhile, many a panicky conservative institution, not knowing quite where to shoot, has laid aside its rifle and taken to firing buckshot. William Preston Few's Duke University, for example, offers no fewer than 739 undergraduate courses, has 35 separate courses in Greek alone.

Last week as the U. S. commencement season opened, college presidents, who differ from other manufacturers in shipping their goods only once a year, began to show their 1939 product. They expected to turn out about 155,000 graduates (a few more than last year), only slightly damaged by war scares and goldfish gulping. But observers who wanted to evaluate contemporary U. S. higher education turned their eyes not on these untried graduates but on the college presidents themselves (for a representative group, see adjacent columns).

Some presidential activities last week:

> Proudest president was Father Arthur A. O'Leary of Georgetown University, on the Potomac's banks in Washington, D. C., as Georgetown celebrated its 150th anniversary. Founded by John Carroll, a friend of Benjamin Franklin and the first Roman Catholic bishop in the U. S., Georgetown is the oldest U. S. Catholic college. For the occasion President O'Leary staged elaborate ceremonies, gathered many a bigwig for kudos and speeches (among them: Speaker William B. Bankhead, U. S. Attorney-General Frank Murphy, head G-Man J. Edgar Hoover, American Bar Association President Frank J. Hogan). To President O'Leary and the 7,000 other celebrants came an Apostolic Blessing from Pope Pius XII.