Erb to Oregon

Since 1932 two presidents of the University of Oregon have resigned. Dr. Arnold Bennett Hall, who took the job in 1926, quit six years later. Last June his successor, frail, scholarly Dr. Clarence Valentine Boyer, said his poor health would not allow him to continue as president.

Rivalry for funds and prestige between the University and Oregon State Agricultural College, both units of the State's System of Higher Education, is the thorn that makes the president's seat uncomfortable at University of Oregon. Two years ago Dr. Frederick Maurice Hunter was brought from Denver as Oregon's Chancellor of Higher Education to quiet a raging political dogfight. But the University still feels itself the underdog. It lacks a full-fledged science department and other requisites of a self-respecting university.

Thanks to Chancellor Hunter's tact, however, five candidates for the $7,500 job of president last month endured the spotlight of the press and examination by the State Board of Higher Education. Last week the board made its choice. 37-year-old Dr. Donald Milton Erb, youngest man ever to head the University.

President-elect Erb (son of Dr. John Lawrence Erb, now head of the music department at Connecticut College For Women), is a University of Illinois graduate, a Harvard Ph.D. and a crack economist. He was a professor of economics at Oregon for six years, in the last year had been acting head of the economics department at Stanford University.

Sandy-haired Donald Erb, a keen football fan, golfer and fisherman, last week made a diplomatic beginning. Said he: "I do not feel that I am stepping into a political cauldron."

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