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 1953's retirements:

Duke's William T. ("Lap") Laprade, 69, who started teaching history at Durham's little Trinity College in 1909, went right on without turning a hair as the college vanished in a cloud of tobacco smoke and emerged as one of the richest and most gothic of U.S. universities. A specialist on the 18th century, Lap paced about his platform, waved his arms, laced his lectures with gossipy bulletins about the scandals and scoundrels, the brains and bunglers, of the courts and cabinets of yore. Pretending never to be satisfied ("Well," he would say of the best of papers, "this isn't as bad as it could be"), he was happiest holding forth in his own parlor, laughing squeakily at his own jokes, acting out the great scenes of history (his most impressive performance: the routing of the Armada) and merrily stuffing his student guests with quantities of Mrs. Laprade's cookies, cakes and coffee.

Indiana's Geologist Jesse James Galloway, 70, expert on foraminifera (a group of microfossils) and the first man to give a course in micropaleontology. In his 24 years at Indiana, he taught hundreds of students how to tell a fossil's age, was always so fascinated by his own subject that he once flabbergasted the officials of a busy bank by crawling about on his hands and knees, searching for fossils in the marble wall. Though a tough teacher (during an examination he strolled among his students whistling Have You Forgotten So Soon?), he had an unorthodox contempt for scientific gobbledygook: "If it looks like a dog, smells like a dog and bites me," he would say, "well, I call it a dog!"

Harvard's Joseph Hudnut, 67, dean of the Graduate School of Design. A shy, mild-mannered man, Hudnut started out as a designer of gothic churches, later, in disgust, switched to modern ("I could never manage romantic old graveyards"). He denounced many a U.S. public building: the National Gallery was a "death mask of an ancient culture," the Jefferson Memorial "an egg on a pantry shelf in . . . a geometric Sahara," Grant's Tomb a "ponderous, huge monster." With Architects Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, he turned Harvard into the top school of modern architecture in the U.S.

Howard's Alain Locke, 66, a fussy little (5 ft. 4 in., 104 Ibs.) man with a shabby old briefcase, known to scholars all over the U.S. as the foremost Negro philosopher. At Harvard Locke studied under Royce, James and Santayana, went on to Oxford as the first Negro Rhodes scholar. Since 1912, his pince-nez quivering on his nose, he has prodded and cajoled two generations of students into raising the intellectual sights of their race: "A minority is only safe & sound in terms of its social intelligence . . . When you're up against the mass irrationality of racism, social sanity is the only antidote."