Education: Lost Leaders

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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 (one predecessor: Josiah Royce). The goal: to plumb "who we are, what we know, and how we know it." A Greek immigrant who worked his way through Harvard as janitor of the Lampoon building, Christian Platonist (The Philosophy of Plato) Demos roiled Cambridge with Socratic questioning for 45 years. The aim of education, he argued, after Socrates, is to become more human by learning "the depths of one's ignorance." Demos abhorred specialization, the cult of knowing more about less.

Philosopher Demos was a great questioner, but good ones abound in all fields. One such is the University of Chicago's Vienna-born Friedrich Hayek, 63, professor of social and moral science, a noted traditionalist whose "radical" theories first drew national attention in a 1944 best seller, The Road to Serfdom, and later in The Constitution of Liberty (1960). Now returning to Austria to teach, Hayek was a burr under many a U.S. intellectual sad dle. Almost alone, he argued that welfare-state planning, however well intentioned, inevitably leads to expediency, coercion and loss of liberty.

Also departing are some great synthesizers, for example, Harvard's protean Henry A. Murray, 69, professor of clinical psychology, who spent four decades probing human personality from every conceivable angle. A Groton graduate and captain of the Harvard crew ('15), Murray went on to become a Manhattan surgeon, a Rockefeller Institute embryologist, a Cambridge University Ph.D. (biochemistry), a personal student of Psychiatrist Carl Jung. He ran the Harvard Psychological Clinic, designed the personality-assessing Thematic Apperception Test, won a Legion of Merit medal for his work in the wartime OSS, and conducted impeccable personal research into everything from fear, fantasy and humor to religion, myths and Melville's novels.