Education: The Extracurricular Clout Of Powerful College Presidents

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The Extracurricular Clout Of Powerful College Presidents

A REDOUBTABLE fellow nowadays is the university president: he commands the vast expertise of his institution and knows how to organize intellect. As a fast-changing society increasingly values these qualities, the influence of the presidents is soaring. They have become a kind of fifth estate, half educators and half national policymakers.

Their influence reaches worldwide; they have no time to spend up in ivory towers because they are so often up in jet planes. On a recent trip to see how well the University of the Philippines was using an improvement grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, Notre Dame's Father Theodore Hesburgh and Michigan State's John Hannah discovered that Princeton's Robert Goheen and Cornell's James Perkins had just left, after checking up on the use of U.S. foreign-aid funds. While there, they met Indiana's ex-president, Herman Wells, back from an advisory mission to Bangkok.

It is a routine thing for Hannah—when not chairing the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights—to field questions from Civil Service Commission Chairman John Macy about a prospective appointee to a high federal job. Atlanta University's Rufus Clement keeps a card file near his desk on every U.S. Negro that he considers worthy of a high position in Government and education, for queries from Washington.

Mostly, however, the presidents influence society and the Government by serving on powerful advisory groups. Within education, for example, 22 university consortiums now direct projects too big for any single school to handle, such as the operation of a nuclear reactor. Other key boards counsel the Government on foreign-aid, education abroad, relations with emerging nations, and poverty programs.

The effect is that the same names keep surfacing in an informal interlocking directorate. Among the chief boards are the National Science Foundation (Hesburgh, Clement, M.I.T.'s Julius Stratton, Bryn Mawr's Katharine McBride), the Rockefeller Foundation (Hesburgh, Goheen, Caltech's Lee DuBridge), the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (Perkins, Goheen, Stratton, Hesburgh, McBride, Minnesota's O. Meredith Wilson, North Carolina's William Friday, U.C.L.A.'s Franklin Murphy, Illinois' David Henry), the Institute of International Education (Wilson, Hesburgh, Murphy, McBride, Henry).

The 41 university presidents whose schools belong to the Association of American Universities form the elite of U.S. higher education, even if that lofty organization, as one of the presidents puts it, is "not action-oriented." Many of these men are committed to the defensible proposition that their duty lies almost solely with administering their own schools. But about a third of them assume more off-campus commitments, believe more deeply that universities must contribute in concert, as well as individually, to U.S. goals and progress. They tend, by their energy and conviction, to nominate themselves—which often means coming to the attention of such committee pickers as HEW Secretary John Gardner or his chief education assistant, Francis Keppel. The current inner group is pictured and described on these pages.