Stassen for President

He didn't claim to be an educator, but he did have a big name and he was temporarily out of a job. To at least four universities who were looking for a president (Stanford, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, and Pennsylvania), that made Harold Stassen a likely presidential prospect.

An emissary from the University of Pennsylvania first sounded Stassen out a day after the G.O.P. convention ended--without indicating what uniyersity he represented. He found Stassen receptive. A week later Penn offered him the presidency. Last week, "after careful consideration," Harold Stassen accepted. He would report for duty next fall, he promised--if he had finished his speaking tour "on behalf of Governor Dewey."

At 41, Harold Stassen will be the youngest president in Penn's 208 years. Like Columbia's Eisenhower, he was hired for his personality and his proven administrative ability by trustees who regard big universities as corporations which need executives, not educators, to run them. He will have charge of a faculty of 1,862, a student body of 18,600, and responsibility for raising $32 million for new buildings. Stassen's predecessor, George William McClelland, had resigned the presidency because of ill health, but would still be around as chairman of the university.

Why did Stassen take the job? Not for political reasons, he said ("No, honestly, I don't think so"). But he does "bear in mind" that in Philadelphia he will be close to Washington and New York. He also warned the trustees that he would not give up his "vigorous interest in public questions." Beyond such distractions, the University of Pennsylvania could count on having an able and popular administrator as president--for at least four years, or until he got an offer he liked better.

Last week, Johns Hopkins picked another sort of president, right off the campus Harold Stassen will run. He is Detlev Wulf Bronk, 51, a top scientist.

At Pennsylvania for 19 years, he spent his days directing the university's Eldrige R. Johnson Foundation for Medical Physics, many of his nights experimenting in his own laboratory. Though not an M.D., he is a physiologist and chairman of the Government's National Research Council. For his wartime work in aviation medicine, the U.S. gave him a special award, the British gave him the Order of the British Empire.

When Johns Hopkins asked M.I.T.'s Karl Compton to submit a list of candidates, he sent back only one name--Bronk's. Largely on Compton's say-so, the university scarcely considered its 100-odd other candidates. Johns Hopkins was getting a man who once advised universities to hold firm against those who thought they "should assume the functions of a trade school or provide entertainment for the masses," and against parents who, having failed to bring their children up properly, "insist that the university become a school for manners or an elite reformatory."

But more important for both Homewood (the university) and Hospital (the medical school), Johns Hopkins would be getting a man with the twin talents of a scientist and administrator. Said retiring President Isaiah Bowman: "Nothing could please me more."

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