Education: New Faces

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Last week three good men took over three schools as different as themselves. Installed:

¶ C.(for Charles) Easton Rothwell, 57, as eighth president of select (enrollment: 726) Mills College for women, "the Vassar of the West," in Oakland, Calif. Historian Rothwell succeeds Historian Lynn White Jr., who quit after 15 years to teach medieval history at U.C.L.A. A stocky, balding Westerner, raised in Montana, Easton Rothwell graduated from Portland's Reed College (1924), taught social sciences at the University of Oregon and Stanford. He switched to the State Department in World War II, became a top adviser to Cordell Hull, went on in 1947 to Stanford's famed Hoover Institute of War, Revolution and Peace, where he became director in 1952. His goal at 107-year-old Mills is "tough minds," a sharp upgrading of liberal arts. Last week Mills announced the end of its B.S. degree and home economics courses. Rothwell's aim for his girls: "A sense of the wholeness of learning, the ability to locate oneself in a world that is fragmented in its knowledge."

¶James Payson Dixon, 42, as 15th president of "study-plus-work" Antioch College (enrollment: 1,300) in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Physician Dixon succeeds Samuel B. Gould, who became the first chancellor of the University of California at Santa Barbara. A genial, rugged down-Easter, raised on a Maine farm, Dixon is an Antioch graduate (1939). He did the school's part-time circuit (alternating terms of study and work) by night clerking and bus building, went on to Harvard Medical School and a career in public health. Dr. Dixon did a notable seven-year job as Philadelphia's commissioner of public health, became known as an able administrator with a keen sense of politics. At Antioch, which has some reputation for progressive preciousness as well as for successful schooling, Dixon announced that he aims to "invade the frontiers of the status quo."

¶ Edgar Finley Shannon Jr., 41, as fourth* president of the 140-year-old University of Virginia (enrollment: 4,468). He succeeds retiring Colgate W. Darden Jr., who nearly doubled the school's physical plant in twelve years. English Professor Shannon was a whiz-bang scholar and crack half-miler at Washington and Lee (1949). A Navy gunnery officer in World War II, he survived the sinking of the cruiser Quincy, won eleven Pacific Theater battle stars and the Bronze Star. He specialized in Tennyson at Harvard, earned his doctorate as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford's Merton College. Shannon began teaching at Virginia only three years ago. His new job: matching the school's academic standards with its physical expansion. "I reaffirm the Jefferson tenet," he said last week, "that the University of Virginia be not only an exceptional state and regional university, but also a great national university."