Service Station

Around a long table in a long room at Ohio State University last week gathered six men and a woman, the university's board of trustees. They began to wrangle, as they had at every meeting for 18 months, about a new president for Ohio State.

When George Washington Rightmire retired as president in 1938, the faculty, confidentially polled, proposed as his successor slim, efficient James Lewis Morrill, vice president of the university, or (second choice) Howard Landis Bevis, a Harvard law professor who had been an Ohio Supreme Court judge and finance director for two Governors. The trustees, unable to agree on Morrill or Bevis, considered more than a score of bigwig outsiders, deadlocked on some, were turned down by others (notably Chicago's famed Physicist Arthur H. Compton). Last week, after an angry hour and a half, peace, as it must to all squabbles, finally descended, and Howard Bevis was elected as Ohio State's seventh president.

Tall, ruddy, leathery Howard ("Stick") Bevis, 54, a Methodist and a Democrat, was born a farmer's boy in Bevis, Ohio, studied and taught law at University of Cincinnati, first won fame as a Cincinnati political reformer. At the urging of a classmate, Alma Murray, whom he eventually married, he got a woman elected to Cincinnati's school board for the first time, later helped clean up Cincinnati politics by drafting a new city-manager charter. His next big feat was to cut Ohio's budget from $86,000,000 to $48,000,000 as Governor George White's financial director. After a term as Supreme Court judge, he went to Harvard in 1935, was surprised last week to hear of his election. Ohio State was surprised, too, congratulated itself on having got a good financial manager who knows the university well.

State University. When Howard Bevis goes to Ohio State Feb. 1, he will take on a big job in a big industry which many believe is still in its infancy. Ohio State, the nation's fifth largest university, has 13,231 students, is still growing. Of the biggest ten U. S. universities,-- eight are State institutions. In the eyes of their severest critic, University of Chicago's President Robert Maynard Hutchins, the upstart State universities are outstripping the great private universities, may eventually crowd them out of the picture. State universities believe that their growing preeminence is explained by a name Mr. Hutchins once scornfully called them--Service Stations.

Ohio State likes to be called a Service Station. Most of those who drive up--the sons and daughters of poor farmers, salesmen, teachers, storekeepers, railroaders, small-town doctors--are not particularly well prepared for college. But the university, compelled by law to admit any graduate of an approved Ohio high school, welcomes them all, tries to make even jalopies go. Boys, job-minded, usually study teaching, farming, business, welding, engineering (a four-year course), veterinary medicine. Less than a fifth enroll in the arts college. Chief service the university performs for girls: to introduce them to eligible husbands.

Although expenses are small (under $500 a year for tuition, board, room and books), nearly half of Ohio State's under graduates have to work to meet them. For 425 of its smartest boys, the university provides barracks-like sleeping quarters and meals under its stadium seats at $120 a year.

Campus. Ohio State's nondescript buildings, sprawling around a horseshoe-shaped campus, are barren of ivy and Gothic furbelows. But its undergraduates have some traditions, some fun. Ohio State's Orton Hall sounds the Westminster chimes each quarter-hour. Ohioans cheer lustily for their championship football, basketball, swimming teams. Their 60 fraternities, 20 sororities (enrolling a third of the student body, who can live in them for $5 a month more than in a rooming house) give frequent dances. Each after noon undergraduates gather in Hennick's, across High Street, for sodas and 3.2 beer. Other customs: strolling down the Long Walk, which bisects the campus; necking on the banks of sulfur-smelling Mirror Lake.

Not rich in tradition, money, or great teachers, Ohio State counts among its graduates many an important cog in the nation's work. Star alumni: Inventor Charles Franklin Kettering, president of General Motors Research Corp., who worked his way through; Humorist James Thurber (see p. 49).

Jacks for All Models. Youth is not all that Ohio State serves. When it was founded in 1870 as a land-grant college, one of its main jobs was to help farmers. Agricultural research is still a prime concern, but today Ohio State has many other functions. To it, for conferences, advice, information, last year went 30,000 people. Some services:

>Medical students in Ohio State's hospital delivered some 2,000 babies. The babies' mothers then got instruction in infant care.

>To its veterinary clinic, farmers took their ailing cattle; a zoo, its ailing lions.

>People with toothaches went to its dental clinic (see cut, p. 74).

>Needy litigants went to its Legal Aid Clinic.

>450 parents went to study family relations.

>50 policemen went to learn how to police.

>400 high-school football coaches went to a football clinic.

>200 newspapermen went to talk shop.

>150 apple marketers went to confer.

>5,000 high-school musicians went for a musical contest.

>Ohio State's business research bureau reported monthly on Ohio employment, retail sales.

>Its entomologists developed two new insecticides.

>Its radio station, WOSU, conducted a radio junior college for 40,000 listeners.

>Its Professor Jacob Bacchus Taylor was drafted to head the State Liquor Board.

Not a whit abashed by Robert Hutchins' pained protest that all this activity has nothing to do with education, Ohio State's Vice President Morrill likes to quote University of Minnesota's late, great President Lotus D. Coffman: "The State universities hold that there is no intellectual service too undignified for them to perform."

*California, 26,004; Minnesota, 15,301; Columbia, 14,211; Illinois, 13,510; Ohio State, 13,231; N. Y. U., 12,745; Michigan, 12,098; Wisconsin, 11,268; Washington, 10,129; Texas, 9,872.

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