Hum in Illinois

The campus of the University of Illinois was overrun last week with visitors trying hard to keep up with a set of programs. The programs offered an astonishingly wide choice: a show of 136 examples of modern American painting from

Koerner to Motherwell, a concert of Hindemith music with Composer Paul Hindemith conducting, plus lectures, documentary films, original plays and a lot more concerts.

Champaign-Urbana (pop. 62,000) was not surprised by the activity; the University of Illinois was simply launching, for the fourth year in a row, its annual Festival of Contemporary Arts. Before the festival is over, the university expects to play host to 30,000 people--not a big crowd for a homecoming football game, but a big gathering for a culture fest on Illinois' eastern plain.

The Illinois festival is just one of the new ideas that have been making the university hum since 1946. The man behind the hum is President George D. (for Dinsmore) Stoddard, 53.

A Good Monument. President Stoddard arrived at Urbana just as the tidal wave of ex-G.I.s began. He thought he knew their frame of mind. "They were like a lot of men coming to see a monument," he says. "They would have been glad to see any monument at all, but we decided that we would show them a good monument."

Stoddard insisted that every department re-examine its courses. Moreover, though enrollments have more than doubled, to 24,394, he wanted classes kept small (ideal: no more than 30 students). To keep classes small, Stoddard more than doubled the faculty, and brought in some top men while he was about it. Among them: Physicist Louis Ridenour of the University of Pennsylvania, Physiologist Andrew C. Ivy of Northwestern, Pianist Soulima (son of Igor) Stravinsky. Stoddard set up a new department of preventive medicine and public health, an institute, of public affairs and an institute of labor and industrial relations.

Tenth in size before the war, Illinois is today the seventh largest university in the U.S. It has the fourth largest university library (after Harvard, Yale and California), a fat research budget, and an overall operating budget that has jumped from $16 million to $42 million in five years.

Old Moon Face. The man who sits in the president's chair and runs all this started out to be a chemist. Later George Stoddard switched to psychology, went to the University of Paris in 1921 and got fascinated by the work of the famous Alfred Binet (intelligence tests). It was as a tester and child psychologist, at the University of Iowa, that Stoddard made his first reputation. In 1942 he switched again, to administration. Before Illinois summoned him to the $20,000-a-year president's job, he was a dean at Iowa and, for four wartime years, New York State's commissioner of education.

Jovial George Stoddard (whose five children irreverently call him "Old Moon Face") rules his new domain with a mixture of Rotarian good humor and an insistence on standards He takes easily to picnics and poker but he also keeps a scholar's eye on teaching and research.

The arts festival, biggest event of its kind in the Midwest, reflects Stoddard's idea that no university can discharge its duty merely by following the twin preoccupations of size and science. A scientist himself, he believes that since "science is strictly nonmoral, culture must be blended with and superimposed upon its progress."

The Stoddard brand of culture involves more than a static study of the past. The Greeks, says he, "studied their own contemporary architecture and art and their own poets. That is what we are doing here. The new classicism doesn't neglect the classics, but uses them as an insight into the past to create new art forms. A university is not a dictionary, a dispensary or a department store."

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