The Brushoff

In the 16 months since the forced resignation of President George Stoddard, the trustees of the University of Illinois have searched far and wide to find a man able enough--and still willing--to be his successor. Last week it looked as if they had practically chosen their man: David Dodds Henry, 49, executive vice chancellor of New York University and former president of Detroit's Wayne University. Then, just as the trustees seemed all set to vote, Henry told them--in polite, academic language, of course--to go to hell.

To most of the trustees, David Henry was fully satisfactory. As executive head of Wayne from 1939 to 1952, he had seen enrollments rise from 11,800 to a peak of 18,300. He added $20 million worth of buildings to his plant, watched Wayne's one-block campus spread out to cover 20. But like most college presidents of the postwar years, he had also brushed with controversy. To at least one Illinois official--Vernon Nickell, the state's superintendent of public instruction and powerful ex officio member of the board that made Henry highly suspect.

Among other things. Nickell was disturbed by a mimeographed letter from an organization called the Michigan Education Information Service. Though no Michigan official had ever heard of the service or could find any trace of its existence, Nickell decided to investigate the letter's charges that Henry had once appointed an ex-Communist to the Wayne faculty and that two other teachers were suspended last year for refusing to answer questions before a congressional committee. Nickell also wanted to know why in 1947 Henry had been so slow to ban the campus chapter of American Youth for Democracy. The fact that Henry did ban it as soon as the FBI made it clear that the A.Y.D. was an offshoot of the Young Communist League did not seem to faze

Nickell. Nor did the report of a special Illinois faculty committee which had already investigated such charges and found nothing "adverse'' to Henry.

The tales of Nickell's probe plans spread beyond the Illinois campus. Finally, last week, Henry decided he had had enough. "The search for a new president,'' he wrote the trustees, "which began on the highest professional and ethical level, has degenerated into a process of public review which repudiates the board's own procedural method." As for the presidency, he would not take it even if it were offered.

Last week, as the Illinois trustees got set to try again, Henry's old friends in Detroit had a few words to say about the sort of charges made against him. Said Wayne's President Clarence Hilberry: "A vicious, unsubstantiated and anonymous attack." Added a Detroit board of com merce official: "There are whispers that the trustees at Illinois don't want a leader. They want somebody they can boss around. That's not for Henry."

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