Prexy with a Prescription

Once before, at the age of 75, President Hamilton Holt of Florida's coeducational Rollins College had tried to say goodbye. "It is better," he said, "to quit when they want you to stay than to stay when they want you to quit." But the trustees disagreed, persuaded Hamilton Holt to serve one more year. Last week, at commencement time, the year was up. "Prexy" Holt was made an honorary member of the Class of '49, and like his new classmates, he said his last goodbye.

For Rollins, the second goodbye was no easier than the first. In 24 years, the college had grown fond of its tennis-loving, piano-playing president, his flashy sport shirts and his flashing ideas on education. When he first came to Rollins, he had found it little more than a playboy's paradise, "so far down the education hole, that the only place it could go was up." By last week, a long way up, Rollins had made a name for itself as a lively, unorthodox pacesetter among U.S. colleges.

New Concoction. "It was more or less an accident," Holt once said, "that I became a college president." The son of a Manhattan judge, he had begun as a journalist, for eight years was editor and owner of the magazine Independent. With William Howard Taft he helped found, in 1915, the League to Enforce Peace, ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1924. He still found time to concoct a few theories on what a modern college should be. In 1925, Rollins gave him a chance to try them out.

From the beginning he ruled out lecturing--a spoon-feeding system of teaching, he thought, which "was probably the worst scheme ever devised for imparting knowledge." The "quiz or recitation system," thought Holt, was little better. His own prescription: instead of ordinary classes, constant informal conferences, at which teachers and students could think and talk together.

Holt never cared how many degrees his teachers had (of 105, only 21 have Ph.D.s) or how many A's his students got. He believed that students should "major in the subjects easiest for you, and minor in the hardest," that they should be graded for originality and self-reliance as well as for book knowledge. They were individuals, he thought, with differing aims; they should to a large extent decide for themselves how fast they ought to go.

New Prosperity. To some educators, such easygoing methods seemed close to madness. Holt was not concerned. His conference plan seemed to work, and more & more other colleges were using plans like it. Rollins itself prospered. Hamilton Holt was able to raise enough money to build 25 new Spanish-style buildings and quintuple the meager endowment (now over $1,250,000). He boosted enrollment from 240 to 625, built a Walk of Fame lined with stones bearing the names of poets and statesmen.

In 24 years, Holt never altered his methods, nor changed his ways. He was always the amiable autocrat who collected antiques, breakfasted in his four-poster bed (George Washington had slept there), was forever popping into classrooms to see how things were going. Last week, as he said farewell, he delivered an autocrat's final warning: "If the Rollins faculty reverts to the lecture and recitation system with their inevitable grades and examinations, all of which tend to make the professor a detective and the student a bluffer, then you may hear the creaking sound as I turn over in my grave."

Hamilton Holt's own idea for a successor was "either an old man of renown, or a young man with promise." Last week, the trustees voted for youth. At 31, big (6 ft. 1 in.), jut-jawed Paul Alexander Wagner, businessman and former instructor in education at the University of Chicago, will be the nation's youngest college president. When Rollins found him he was No. 2 man at Chicago's Bell & Howell Co.

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