The Professor

At Brown University in Providence, R.I., one day last week, a tall, studious-looking man of 40 was escorted into Manning Hall for the purpose of being formally "introduced" to a special meeting of the faculty. Actually, no introduction was necessary: everyone in the room knew Barnaby C. Keeney as the able onetime dean of the Graduate School, and since 1953 the dean of the College. This time, however, Keeney had a new title. "With enthusiastic unanimity," the university's corporation had just elected him to be the successor to retiring President Henry Wriston (TIME, April 11).

It was, as blunt Henry Wriston said, "an admirable appointment." A tough-minded scholar with often unattainably high standards, Barney Keeney has long seemed marked for success. At the University of North Carolina he was a star trackman and the top student in his class. After taking his Ph.D. at Harvard, he joined the faculty, was one of the most promising young men in the history department. Then, the day after Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Army, and because of his fluency in French and German, was eventually assigned to combat intelligence. To those who had known him before, it came as no surprise that he won the Silver Star for (among other things) advancing under heavy fire with three enlisted men to capture a forward enemy observation post along with nine enemy soldiers.

Though an erudite specialist on the 13th century, Keeney proved early that he was a talented administrator. But more important, he also turned out to be much the same sort of plain-speaker as Henry Wriston. He railed against students who shun controversy for fear of losing some future Government clearance ("If silence is the price of Government service, it is too high a price to pay"), and against scholarly stuffiness ("It must clearly be understood that the scholar does not lose dignity by being intelligible"). He is also a relentless crusader against the growing theory on many U.S. campuses that a democratic education must be equated with the accommodation of mediocrity. "It seems to me," he once said, "that the colleges in this country must once again begin to teach college work and to require college performance . . . The scramble to get into college is going to be so terrible in the next few years that students are going to put up with almost anything, even an education."

Last week he told his faculty that he had no "dramatic" plans in mind for Brown (3,600 students, 450 on the faculty). But he has made himself one promise that, if kept, will make him a rare sort of president indeed. "In 1949," says Keeney, "Provost Paul Buck of Harvard wrote me that I would do all right as an administrator as long as I continue to think as a professor. That's the spirit in which I intend to carry on."

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