Education: Hello, Mr. Chips

Eleven years ago, the old gentleman was put out to academic pasture at Stanford University. At 76, he likes to sit about knitting afghan squares; he makes popovers and feijoa jam at his modest home on the Palo Alto campus. He owns one business suit and supports a rusty 1946 Ford on his pension of $3,200 a year.

These sad-sounding facts add up to a hilariously inaccurate picture of energy-rich little (140 Ibs.) Bayard Quincy Morgan, Stanford's former chairman of Germanic languages, author of 40 books and countless articles—and the nation's most frenetic fumigator of the myth that every Mr. Chips is...