Alter Ego

Another major university also lost it-top official last week. But unlike Chicago, Columbia University was not taken by surprise. The trustees had long ago picked the man who would take over on the day President Dwight D. Eisenhower was called back to active duty (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS).

The man they picked is a trim, 47-year-old political scientist and onetime Ohio high-school principal named Grayson L. Kirk, who arrived at Morningside Heights as an associate professor of government only ten years ago. At Columbia, Grayson Kirk soon showed that he was a first-class administrator as well as teacher, with a talent for making things hum. He threw himself into the work of the Academy of Political Science, headed Columbia's Institute of European Studies. He was also a member of the U.S. delegation staff at Dumbarton Oaks and helped set up the U.N. Security Council at San Francisco. By 1949, he had so impressed the trustees with his executive ability that they appointed him provost and later vice president as well.

As such, said the trustees, Grayson Kirk would be Eisenhower's "alter ego," acting in the president's behalf during "necessary absence or in the event of emergency." Last week, when the emergency came, Alter Ego Kirk stepped easily into the university's top job as Columbia's president in everything but name.

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