Education: Lost Leaders

Each year U.S. universities invoke the iron rule of retirement to uproot deadwood professors. In this proper process, some rare and ageless men are always lost — activists who spurned ivory towers, scholars who truly enlarged human under standing, professors who really professed.

This year is no exception. Among the giants who have become emeriti are many who seem almost irreplaceable.

Common to all of them is long devotion to the goal set by that gentle needier, Raphael Demos, 70, holder of Harvard's imposing Alford professorship of natural religion, moral philosophy and civil polity...