Education: Report Card

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¶ President Thomas J. Watson Jr. of International Business Machines Corp. announced that in memory of his father ("Think"), IBM is launching one of the largest scholarship programs ever undertaken by a single company. With the help of the National Merit Scholarship Corp., IBM will each year pick (on a competitive basis) 25 children of employees and 25 seniors from secondary schools all over the U.S. for four-year scholarships of varying amounts. In addition to the scholarships. IBM will provide a special cost-of-education gift to each school chosen by its winners. The average annual tab to be picked up by the company once it has 200 students under its wing: $250,000.

¶ The 1,000 seniors of Northwestern University decided upon a new kind of senior-class gift for their alma mater: a plan to raise $4,000 to boost faculty salaries during the coming year. Wrote Class President Walter W. Doren in the Daily Northwestern: "The campuses of America are filled with benches, gates, clocks and similar senior-class gifts which have little or nothing to do with higher education's actual needs. Our class does not want to memorialize itself with a plaque. We wish instead to make a meaningful contribution to tomorrow."

¶ In the midst of lecturing in the U.S., Sir John Tresidder Sheppard, former provost of King's College, Cambridge University, issued a blunt warning to U.S. literature teachers. "This custom you have of the quiz." said he, "is very dangerous. To read with a view of being examined is impious. It's wicked! It's impossible to read with happiness when you're looking out for what the old boy, or the old girl, is going to ask."

¶ Appointment of the week: J. (for John) Paul Leonard, 55, to succeed the late Stephen Penrose Jr. as president of the American University of Beirut. A Ph.D. from Columbia University and onetime professor of education at Stanford, Leonard became president of San Francisco State College in 1945. moved his 800 students from four drab buildings in downtown San Francisco to a modern $18 million campus near Lake Merced, saw enrollments rise to 9,200, the prestige of his college grow to such an extent that the California legislature has just okayed a $14 million expansion program. At Beirut (2,040 students at university level) he will face even bigger problems. The A.U.B. (which has produced such statesmen as Lebanon's Foreign Minister Charles Malik, and former Prime Ministers Mohammed Fadil al-Jamali of Iraq, Faris al-Khouri of Syria and Sayed Ismail el-Azhari of Sudan) now runs at an annual deficit of more than $400,000, has the increasingly difficult task of attracting Arab students away from their own growing state-supported universities.