Education: Academe's Exhausted Executives

W. Clarke Wescoe, chancellor of the University of Kansas since 1960, announced last week that he will resign in June. He is only 48. Two weeks ago, Vernon R. Alden revealed that he will leave the presidency of Ohio University after just six years. He is 45.

Within the past year countless other heads of U.S. colleges and universities have also quit, well before retirement age. They include U.C.L.A.'s Franklin Murphy, 52, Indiana's Elvis J. Stahr, 52, Swarthmore's Courtney Smith, 51, Kentucky's John W. Oswald, 50, San Francisco State's John Summerskill, 43, and Hawaii's Thomas Hamilton, 54.

One reason for the resignations was admitted openly by Florida's J. Wayne Reitz, 59, who left his post last year after suffering what he called "presidential fatigue." Not all of them were literally too exhausted to carry on. Most emphasized that the satisfactions they found in leading intellectual centers of action and argument outweighed any personal agony. But all agreed that the pressures on campus presidents are too much for one man to bear for long. Last week in interviews with TIME correspondents, a number of present and former academic leaders discussed the strains—and satisfactions—of their jobs. Had they all been in one room, the dialogue of their complaints might have sounded like this:

U.C.L.A.'s Murphy: The job is a physical, emotional and creative drain. You have to be sadistic to ask a man to stay on more than ten years. A man makes his greatest impact the first six to eight years on the job. After that, he becomes more of a housekeeper and less of a creative force. After a while you even get tired of hearing yourself talk. There are nights when you want to say to hell with it all.

Miami's Henry King Stanford: The demands on a university president are limitless. A man comes into the presidency like a bride: everybody's cheering him, the honeymoon is on. Then he reaches the burnt-toast stage in the romance as he has to make decisions and people become disaffected. Yet he can't run a university out of his hip pocket any more. He has to have a kind of radar, always sending out signals to see what bounces back.

Mills' Robert J. Wert: The decision-making process has changed over the past ten years. A president now has to lead rather than dictate. He has to work for a consensus. You have to be something of a politician, and no academic can take too much of that. There also has been a shift in student tactics, which are now designed to evoke a heavyhanded response from the university. Activists demand something they know in advance that the uni versity cannot yield, then scream bloody murder when it is not delivered. More and more, it is the confrontation and not the issues which are important.

Earlham's Landrum Bollinq: There's a kind of grimness about students now. They tend to come to college with the feeling that the administration is the enemy. There are days when I ask myself, "What am I spending my time doing this for?" You feel yourself sometimes torn into a thousand fragments, and you wonder how any man can go on in this business.