Goodbye, Messrs. Chips

Each year U.S. colleges and universities must say goodbye to many a famed and favorite figure. Among those retiring in 1956:

P: Ohio State's Howard L Bevis, 70, since 1940 the University's affable but hard-driving president. A graduate of the University of Cincinnati ('08) with a doctorate from Harvard Law School, Bevis served as state finance director under two Ohio governors, after a stint on the state Supreme Court and five years at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration arrived at Ohio State to usher in its era of greatest prosperity and controversy. He aroused student and faculty resentment by insisting that he screen all campus speakers, earned the censure of the American Association of University Professors by firing Physicist Byron Darling for invoking the Fifth Amendment before a House investigating committee. He made bitter enemies ("He only talks about money and buildings. He's not an educator") and loyal friends ("He has the good will of all. I don't know anybody who isn't his friend"), all in all managed to chalk up quite a record: in 16 years, the University's research increased tenfold, its campus grew by $79 million worth of new buildings, its enrollment rose from 13,000 to 22,000.

P: Harvard Law School's debonair Zechariah ("Zack") Chafee Jr., 70, an expert on equity law who won both popular and academic acclaim as one of the nation's most lucid authorities on freedom of the press and civil liberties. A classmate of the late Senator Robert Taft at Harvard Law School, Chafee later joined the faculty to find himself teaching such promising young men as Dean Acheson, Archibald MacLeish, Joseph N. Welch and Kenneth Royall, was so handy with the apt anecdote that he became known as "the Scheherazade of the law school." He gradually emerged as the calm and persuasive crusader against all temptations to curb the free interplay of ideas. "I am," he said, "one of the large number of old-fashioned Americans who care a good deal about our Bill of Rights and about maintaining American traditions of freedom and tolerance. We like the country in which we grew up, and we want it to stay that kind of country for our children and grandchildren."

P: University of Michigan's round, bouncy Harley Harris Bartlett, 70, director of the university's botanical gardens and one of the top botanists in the U.S. Bartlett scoured Formosa, Sumatra, Mexico, Guatemala, British Honduras and the Philippines for his botanical specimens, but to a large part of the university his chief claim to fame rested closer to home. He kept open house for his students, helped so many with their problems (and their bills) that hundreds of Michigan men and women came to know him as "Uncle Harley"--a typically absent-minded bachelor professor with a penchant for forgetting speaking engagements, a taste for collecting Liberian stamps, and a passion for hosting woodland picnics for the children of the neighborhood.

P: Columbia's Carl William Ackerman, 66, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism, which has turned out such noted news and magazine men as Lester Markel of the New York Times, Co-Editor Bruce Gould of the Ladies' Home Journal, and Columnist George Sokolsky. A graduate of the school's first class in 1913, Ackerman became dean in 1931, turned the school into a one-year graduate institution with as stiff requirements and standards as any in the country. He helped found the American Press Institute and the Maria Moors Cabot awards for journalists who serve inter-American understanding. His own Gresham's Law: in a free press, "good news, meaning truthful information, always has and always will drive bad news, meaning false information, out of circulation."

P: Yale's Botanist Edmund Ware Sinnott, 68, who as director of the Division of Sciences and dean of the Graduate School has as much as any man led the way in eliminating narrow specialties at Yale and in making sure that all Yalemen get in common the broad "background of all human knowledge." A gentle-mannered man who signs his amateur paintings "Edmund Ware" and is an authority on old Connecticut tombstones, Scientist Sinnott has spent a lifetime trying to heal the split between science and faith. "The two roads to truth . . . the way of science, confident in reason, and the way of faith, depending on the insights of the spirit, do not follow the same course." Yet man should not "regret these differences but rather rejoice in them. They are the two halves that make men whole; from tension between them, character is born."

P:Johns Hopkins' Kemp Malone, 67, brother of Biographer Dumas (Jefferson and His Time) Malone and himself a top authority on Old English literature. Because of his musical ear and his knowledge of phonetics, scholarly Kemp Malone could charm his classes by making the Canterbury Tales sound as if Chaucer himself were reading them. He could also terrify his students by storming at them over the slightest mistranslation. He continually failed to recognize even the brightest English majors, seldom entertained his colleagues, seemed to have an ingrained aversion to lunch at the faculty club. But for all his crotchets, he commanded his full measure of respect, and on his retirement the university paid him an unintentional compliment. Henceforth, it announced--with no Malone around to make it worthwhile--Old English will be dropped as a requirement for a Ph.D. in English literature.

P: New York University's Ernest O. Melby, 64, for eleven years dean of the School of Education. A Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, Melby rose from small-town teacher and school superintendent to be dean of Northwestern University's School of Education, president of Montana's State University, and finally, chancellor of Montana's higher educational system. But it was not until he got to N.Y.U. that he came into his own as a kind of senior defense counsel for the U.S. public school against those who insisted that it had sacrificed its intellectual content. He set up N.Y.U.'s Center for Human Relations Studies and its Center for Community and Field Services, stumped the country for a school that would be merged with the community. "In this human-centered universe," said Melby, "there is no perfect hierarchy of truth, there are no criteria beyond the realm of experience . . . Anything to be learned must be lived . . . The building of a bridge may be more effective in teaching Johnny Jones to think than the study of Plato."

P: Syracuse University's gangling T. (for Thomas) V. (for Vernor) Smith, 66, whose wise and witty lectures induced hundreds of students to expose themselves to philosophy. As a full professor at the University of Chicago, red-haired Philosopher Smith served in the state senate, later was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, was so staggered by the plethora of bills born each session that he demanded Congress "practice birth control." An intellectually humble man who called his students "my junior colleagues," he once said: "Knowledge eventuates as wisdom only in those who claim no monopoly on knowledge. Wisdom is the true lord and seldom fails of the deference that true lordship deserves."

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