Reed's Choice

Portland's Ernest Boyd MacNaughton was a man of many affairs: president of the daily Oregonian, chairman of the board of Portland's First National Bank, lay moderator of the American Unitarian Association. When he took over the presidency of Reed College in 1948, he firmly announced that he would serve only pro tempore. "I am a businessman," said he. "Any time you find an academic man qualified, I'll step aside." Last week, at a sprightly 71, "Mr. Mac" did step aside. The academic man who takes his place: Duncan Smith Ballantine, 40, associate professor of history at M.I.T.

Reed searched six months before it decided on Dr. Ballantine, and everyone agreed he should feel at home on the erudite little (600 students) campus. A lanky, likable scholar who got his Ph.D. at Harvard, he served as a wartime logistics expert with the Navy, eventually became a top apostle of M.I.T.'s experimental general education program.

At Reed, Ballantine will face another sort of problem. In spite of the college's academic standing (among its former professors: Paul Douglas, Karl T. Compton), it still has more than the usual trouble raising money. Among the reasons: some local citizens, with no justification whatsoever, unfairly suspect its reputation for lively liberalism, and some still labor under the false suspicion that Communist John Reed founded it* and that its first president, William T. Foster, was really Communist William Z. In four years, Mr.

Mac has succeeded in pulling Reed out of the red, but he has never quite finished the job of pulling its reputation out of the pink. That, says he, will be something for the academic man from Cambridge to do --"And I say to him: snap to it, brother."

* The man who did give his name to the college: Portland steamboat and mining Tycoon Simeon Gannett Reed, who put up the first money.

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