Universities: New Broom for Emory

Atlanta's ambitious Emory University, which had searched a year for a new president, last week snagged just the man. He is Sanford Soverhill Atwood, 50, pipe-smoking provost of Cornell University. In grabbing Presbyterian Atwood, the trustees, who by charter are two-thirds Methodists, happily broke a tradition of Methodists as presidents that goes clear back to the school's founding 127 years ago. Atwood simply "swept this campus by storm," said Acting President Judson C. Ward.

Agronomist Atwood is a Phi Beta Kappa out of the University of Wisconsin, where he simultaneously earned B.A. and M.A. degrees, later got his doctorate in plant cytology. He went to Cornell in 1944 as an expert on developing new kinds of hay and other forage crops, became dean of the graduate school in 1953 and provost of the university in 1955. Popular with the faculty, Atwood might have succeeded Cornell's retiring President Deane W. Malott. This spring the job went to an outsider, Carnegie Corporation Vice President James A. Perkins, and Emory feels all the richer.

Refreshing Pause. Atwood credits Emory with "the greatest potential of any private university in the country." New presidents always talk that way, but Emory has plenty of promise. Named for an early Methodist bishop, it was horn a country college in Oxford, Ga., had a heady rebirth in 1915 after the Methodist Church divorced Tennessee's Vanderbilt University. Having dumped Vandy, the Methodists launched two new universities—Emory and Southern Methodist in Dallas. Atlanta's Coca-Cola King Asa G. Candler gave land and $1,000,000—leading to a short-lived suggestion that Emory be renamed for Thomas Coke, another early bishop. Thus lured to Atlanta, Emory still drinks from the same bottle. Coca-Cola money accounts for about half its $70 million assets, and the current Coke king, Alumnus Robert Woodruff, is Emory's biggest single angel.

An odd pile of Italian Renaissance buildings huddled on a sweeping, 500-acre campus, Emory has 4,200 students, one-third of them women. Graduate students set the pace, and sports are played down, giving Emory a bookish sobriety. Last fall it beat down in the courts a Georgia law threatening its tax-exempt status if it integrated. This fall it expects to enroll half a dozen Negroes, including Hamilton Holmes, the University of Georgia's first male Negro graduate, who will become Emory's first Negro medical student.

Law & Medicine. Emory has the Deep South's first fully accredited law school and a topflight medical school that supervises six hospitals, delivers 7,000 babies a year, has a $3,000,000 research budget. Medical alumni include two of the world's leading cancer fighters: Drs. John R. Heller Jr. and the late Thomas M. Rivers. The university also produced three noted historians—Yale's C. Vann Woodward, Virginia's Dumas Malone, Stanford's David Potter —plus Columbia Classicist Moses Hadas (see story below), Golfer Bobby Jones and the late Veep Alben Barkley.