U. of Illinois

Last week, tall, thin-thatched, efficient, good-natured President Harry Woodburn Chase of the University of North Carolina sat in his office at Chapel Hill and pondered. He was not thinking about the university of which he has been the chief executive for ten years, but of a vast educational plant 650 miles away of which he had just accepted the presidency--the University of Illinois.

The responsibilities which he must take up next autumn have been borne for the past decade by 65-year-old David Kinley, a member of the Illinois faculty since 1893, oldest state university president. Situated in the neighboring towns of Urbana and Champaign, not far from the geographical centre of the state, the University of Illinois squats down and spreads out over 1,548 acres of campus and farm land. In Chicago, three hours by rail to the north, are the great medical schools (Pharmacy, Dentistry, Medicine).

Every two years President-elect Chase will receive from the State Legislature ever $12,000,000 which he must spend wisely on the upkeep of 14 schools and departments, in addition to whatever appropriations he will be able to coax from purse-wary politicians to finance further pedagogical projects. There will be a faculty of some 1,400 teachers and research ers' to bully, cajole, flatter. Greatest trust of all will be a student body, 14,000 strong, which lives in 124 fraternity and dormitory houses, goes to watch "Big Ten" football games in a $2,000,000 cement basin which seats 70,000, and gave Footballer Harold ("Red") Grange to the world.

Besides the things physical of the uni versity he must become quickly conversant with the facts which represent Illinois in the realm of scholarship and science. When he, with his wife and daughter, takes up residence in the president's house on Urbana's Nevada street next autumn, he will meet Professor Samuel Wilson Parr of the Chemistry department. It is to Professor Parr that Illinois chemists turn for solace and inspiration in chemical experimentation. More important than his own work in the chemistry of coal, is the part Professor Parr played in encouraging the sort of research which ultimately led Professor B. Smith Hopkins to discover Element No. 61. This, the only element so far revealed by a U. S. chemist, was named Illinium.*

Nor may President Chase permit himself to forget that Professor Arthur Cutts Willard, investigating the ventilation of long ducts, made possible the construction of such tubes as Manhattan's Holland Vehicular Tunnel or that Professor Roger Adams has been working on the synthesis of chaulmoogric acid, the most effective remedy yet known for leprosy.

The president must also pick up the few threads of Illinois' fame in the field of Art and Literature. Hallowed is the name of that conservative critic, the late great Stuart Pratt Sherman, and vital is the influence of Sculptor Lorado Taft, an alumnus, who is a non-resident professor of art.

And while no Illini has been a U. S. President or tycoon of the first magnitude, he will learn to share alumnal pride in j such figures as President Samuel Wesley Stratton of M.I.T., who took his B.S. at Illinois; Senator Otis F. Glenn of Illinois; Motormaker Ray Graham.

*But Dr. Fred Allison and Edgar Jackson Murphy of Alabama Polytechnic Institute are close to isolating another element, called tentatively eka-cesium (TIME, Feb 17).

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