Education: Goodbye, Messrs. Chips

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Each year, U.S. colleges and universities must say goodbye to many a famed and favorite figure. Among those retiring in 1958:

Indiana University's slight, white-haired Kenneth Powers Williams, 70, who began teaching mathematics at Indiana in 1909, since 1944 has found a second field of excellence—writing Civil War history. That year he decided to follow an old interest, write a short book on the war's last year. Commencing work at 6 a.m., teaching classes in an authoritative, no-nonsense fashion in the afternoon and writing more history at night, Mathematician-Historian Williams began to produce something far different—an orderly, exhaustive study of Northern command: Lincoln Finds a General. With two volumes out, the work was assessed as potentially "the soundest military history of the North yet written," earned similar high praise with succeeding volumes (the sixth and last is already outlined).

Illinois Institute of Technology's Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 72, architect of stark, skeletal glass and steel skyscrapers. Widely reckoned to be one of this century's three most influential architects (with Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier), German-born Mies was trained as a stonemason. He headed Germany's revolutionary Bauhaus group of artists and architects from 1930 until Nazi pressure forced him to close it in 1933, migrated to the U.S. in 1938. Popular renown came, along with occasional harsh words from Wright and other critics, with Mies's design of Illinois Tech's clean-lined campus, a gaunt set of Chicago apartments, and his career-capper, Manhattan's glass and bronze Seagram building (TIME, March 3). Replies thickly accented Mies to attacks on his decoration-bare style: "I don't compromise. I would rather sell potatoes.''

Princeton's energetic Sir Hugh Stott Taylor, 68, noted physical chemist who headed the department of chemistry from 1926 to 1951. has been dean of the university's Graduate School since 1945. Lancashire-born Chemist Taylor studied with Nobel Prizewinner Svante Arrhenius at Sweden's Nobel Institute for Physical Chemistry, has stayed in the U.S. since he came for a "brief visit" in 1914. Known for his work in catalysis, photochemistry, radiochemistry and chemical kinetics, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1953.

The University of Michigan's Elizabeth Caroline Crosby, 69, topflight neuroanatomist and the first woman to be appointed a full professor at Michigan's medical school. For five years after she got her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1915, intense, energetic Elizabeth Crosby served as principal and superintendent of schools in Petersburg, Mich., at one point also coached the boys' basketball team. She began teaching at the U. of Michigan in 1920, during her years there wrote and edited some of medicine's basic works on neuroanatomy, gathered probably the largest collection of sub-mammalian and mammalian brains in the world. At Ann Arbor, she earned a sparkling set of honorary degrees and a sentimental tag from student physicians: "Angel of the medical school."