Rising Man

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In Grant Wood's famed picture of him, Parson Weems peeps from behind a curtain as George Washington admits he chopped down the cherry tree. His friends would never recognize egg-bald George Dinsmore Stoddard as the parson; Grant Wood put a wig on him when he posed.

Not many Americans would recognize the name of George Stoddard either, but he is one of the fastest rising men in U.S. education. At 49, he has already been, in succession, one of the nation's top child psychologists, New York State Commissioner of Education, chairman of the U.S. Education Mission to Japan, and one of five U.S. delegates to UNESCO. Last week, after ten months on the job, he was inducted as president of the University of Illinois, second largest in the U.S.*

One friend, recalling Stoddard's boyhood in Carbondale, Pa., has called him "one of the finest by-products of the anthracite industry." When gregarious George was a Penn State undergraduate, the only way his mother knew how many visiting fraternity brothers would be down for breakfast during vacations was to count the strange hats on the hall tree.

I.Q.s Can Change. At 32, Stoddard was a full professor and director of Iowa's Child Welfare Research Station, had begun his revolutionary researches into "the meaning of intelligence" (TIME, July 11, 1938). His conclusion: I.Q.s (supposedly fixed at birth) can be altered by environment. Stoddard found that bastard children of feeble-minded mothers, placed in good homes, turned out quite bright; normal youngsters, kept in overcrowded orphanages, "deteriorated."

In 1936 he became dean of the University of Iowa's graduate school, which outraged academic conservatives by awarding graduate degrees for creative work (novels, symphonies, paintings) as well as for learned theses. A believer in "corridor education" and plenty of relaxation, Stoddard dragged students and faculty, including Artist Wood, off to weekend house parties.

As New York's education commissioner, Stoddard pushed through a $3,000,000 bill to set up a chain of junior colleges. Stoddard considers them the likeliest answer to a ticklish problem in a democracy: what to do with students who don't belong in college or can't get in, but still need more schooling. He also campaigned—unsuccessfully—for a New York state university.*

Advice to the Victim. On the way to Japan, on the U.S. Education Mission, Stoddard kept insisting to his colleagues that the Emperor ought to be hanged or at least jailed. But in Tokyo, he found himself recommending to his unsuspecting "victim" the right U.S. woman tutor (Mrs. Elizabeth Gray Vining) for the Crown Prince. And he also helped draft democratic reforms for Japanese education: popularly elected school boards, a simplified alphabet,wider public schooling.

George Stoddard handles all his jobs by split-second scheduling. Last week, at his induction, he had to gallop from Chicago and the emergency Navy Pier campus he had made available for 3,800 ex-G.I.s, to Urbana-Champaign, 120 miles away, where he educates 18,500 more students. The high point of the day was a speech by Veterans Administrator Omar Bradley, a Stoddard friend and an old math teacher himself.