Education: Brookings the Broker

"A man can no longer operate on what he learned in college. Ours is a fluid society in which men move into positions of responsibility requiring training not previously received. Educational gaps become apparent at an age when a return to the classroom is no longer feasible." So says Robert Calkins, president of Washington, D.C.'s famed Brookings Institution, whose business it is to fill in the educational gaps of big men in the U.S. Government.

Last week Brookings. acting in its role as "broker in ideas and men." dedicated a new $3,900,000 Center for Advanced Study to bring together scholars, officials, politicians, businessmen and journalists—all of them sorely in need of a chance to see the forest for the trees. Under a plan costing $13 million in all, Brookings aims to create Washington's first real Delphi—a place for probing the hidden patterns of modern society and assuring the "intellectual preparedness" of key Americans.

Troubled Tycoon. Brookings has "given thought to coming events" ever since it was founded 34 years ago by Robert Somers Brookings, a patriarchal St. Louis woodenwares millionaire. Around the turn of the century he was among those troubled tycoons who tired of avarice and yearned for service. He was 46, unmarried, uneducated and worth some $6,000,000. Quitting business, Brookings gave the rest of his life to educating himself and others; he married for the first time at 77, died at 82.

After revitalizing St. Louis' Washington University, Brookings served as Woodrow Wilson's price chief in World War I, and was appalled at the lack of trained people in Washington. In 1919 he went to work for the Institute for Government Research, later helped found the Institute of Economics and began a graduate school to train men for public service. In 1927 he merged all three organizations as the Brookings Institution, envisioned it as a supergraduate "capstone to the education al arch of the country." Passionately Objective. Brookings was never quite that under its scholarly first president, Harold G. Moulton. It granted only 74 doctorates before dropping the program in 1936. But its economic research had a profound effect on national policy under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Brookings experts clarified and defined nearly every function of Government, from Indian affairs to forest control. Later they deflated many New Deal ideas, notably the theory that only pump-priming could make the economy grow. During World War II, Brookings went into everything from manpower allocation to postwar reconversion. In 1947, when Congress scrapped on foreign aid proposals, Brookings settled the fight with a plan that became the basic charter of ECA.

Since 1952 Brookings has broadened its scope underable President Calkins, 57, onetime dean of Columbia University's School of Business. Passionately devoted to objectivity, its staffers tackle anything tariff reduction, the Federal Reserve or U.N. organization. The main product: books on any problem of "broad public interest," all of them the last word on a subject. With U.S. problems mounting, Brookings is now producing at least a dozen hefty volumes a year. In the works are books on everything from higher education to the 1960 election.