Education: Goodbye, Messrs. Chips

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Yale's Ralph Henry Gabriel, 68. Sterling Professor of History, and deveoper in 1931 of a pioneer course in American thought and civilization. To such students as A. Whitney Griswold. now Yale's president, Gabriel presented a systematic, thought-prodding evaluation of the history of ideas in the U.S. Writing summers in a shack in the New Hampshire woods, he has filled a shelf with basic texts in American history, including his widely read The Course of American Democratic Thought. He lit few Roman candles while lecturing, nevertheless attracted up to 400 students to his classes.

Johns Hopkins' William Foxwell Albright, 67, expert in Palestinian archaeology. Big (6 ft.), bald Sand-Sifter Albright began to explore Palestine in the days when such explorations consisted chiefly of dismounting from one's camel and commencing to dig. A scholar instead of a treasure hunter, he painstakingly collected and fitted together pottery fragments scorned by some earlier diggers, succeeded in bringing a large measure of order to the history of Palestine in the 3,000 years before Christ. Among his qualifications for archaeology: great physical durability and a command of some 25 languages, including enough man-in-the-oasis Arabic to keep his workers in line. Albright was in the U.S. when the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, but photographs were airmailed to him, and he was the first scholar outside the Holy Land to verify their age and authenticity. His observation, bearing the Scrolls in mind: "Of all sciences, the two making the most progress today are nuclear physics and Palestinian archaeology."

Ohio State's lofty (6 ft. 3 in.), legendary John Woodworth Wilce, 70, who piled up a record of 78 wins, 33 losses and 9 ties as football coach from 1913 to 1928, then gave up muscle nurture to practice medicine, has headed the university's health service since 1934. Himself a seven-letter man at the University of Wisconsin and an all-Western fullback in 1908. Dr. Wilce did more than any other coach to give Columbus a permanent football mania, led his teams to three Western Conference championships. He studied bone mending between sessions of bone breaking, earned his M.D. in 1919, went on to do research on the effect of athletics on the heart (conclusion: no permanent damage). Wilce had an intellectual's approach to football, once experimented by painting State's locker room bright red to inspire his meat eaters.

Columbia's Allan Nevins, 68, De Witt Clinton Professor of American History and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for his biographies of President Grover Cleveland and U.S. Secretary of State Hamilton Fish. A stumpy, explosively energetic man who impatiently brushes away his age and anything else that interferes with his 6:30 a.m.-to-11:15 p.m. workday, he has written some 25 volumes, edited a dozen others. Historian Nevins was an editorial writer on the New York World and other papers until 1931, joined Columbia's staff as a full professor that year. but never found time to take a Ph.D. Among Nevins' projects: American Heritage Magazine, which he helped to found and Columbia's Oral History program for recording the views of history-worthy living Americans.