Protestants: Successful Misunderstanding

In 1926, the young Presbyterian minister Henry Pitney Van Dusen wrote a congratulatory letter to his friend and mentor, Henry Sloane Coffin, newly elected president of Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary. In it, Van Dusen, a recent past president of Union's student body, innocently offered his assistance to Coffin in any matter concerning the students. Although Van Dusen had no thoughts of an academic career, Coffin with mistaken shrewdness concluded that the young cleric was fishing for a job. Later, Coffin wrote Van Dusen, urging him to take an instructorship at Union, and made the offer so warmly courteous that Van Dusen accepted, believing that his revered adviser really wanted him to do so. "And so," says Van Dusen, who years later unraveled the confusion, "I got on the faculty through a misunderstanding."

That kind of mistake sometimes produces a classic mating of man to institution. Shortly after he presides at Union's 127th annual Commencement this week, Van Dusen will retire, after 37 years as instructor, professor and (since 1945) president of the nation's leading nondenominational seminary. Earnest, vigorous "Pit" Van Dusen, 65, will live with his wife Betty in a home they bought last year in Princeton, but is not likely to settle merely for the "three Rs" he once proposed as ideal for his state of life: rustication, reading and reflection. As a farewell gesture of respect, Union named Van Dusen to a brand-new traveling professorship, which will start by taking him on a tour of churches and seminaries in Africa.

Constellation of Scholars. A committee has spent more than a year vainly trying to find a new president, hopes to get its man by June 30, when Van Dusen leaves. The long search stems partly from the seminary's rigidly high standards, partly from the fact that few men alive can match Van Dusen's diverse ecclesiastical talents. A superb administrator, he has seen Union's faculty change from a sometimes tempestuous aggregation of individual stars (including Harry Emerson Fosdick and Bible Scholar James Moffatt) to what he calls "a constellation of scholars in intimate fellowship." During Van Dusen's presidency, Union's enrollment doubled (to 640), its endowment grew by $10 million, and bright new scholars inaugurated lively departments dealing with psychiatry and religion and religious drama.

Van Dusen was almost as active outside Union's quadrangle as within it. He is one of the century's undisputed ecumenical giants—a chairman of the Study Program for the World Council of Churches' first two General Assemblies, a major force in the negotiations that fused the Council and the old International Missionary Council in 1961. After office hours, Van Dusen has been a popular, effective preacher—his grainy bass baritone still seems capable of shattering stained glass —and a prolific theological writer: he has edited nine books, contributed to at least 14 others, and the 15th volume in his own uncollected works, The Vindication of Liberal Theology (Scribner's; $3.50), came off the presses last week.