Goodbye, Messrs. Chips

Each year U.S. colleges and universities must say goodbye to some of their famed and favorite figures. Among this year's faculty retirements:

Bryn Mawr College's Helen Taft Manning, 65, two-time dean (1917-19, 1925-41) and two-time acting president (1919-20, 1929-30), who might well have been president had she not preferred to stick to her first love, studying and teaching history. The only daughter of William Howard Taft, Helen was an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr when, at the age of 18, she was called to serve as her father's hostess in the White House. Three years later she went back to take her bachelor's degree, followed by graduate study at Yale, marriage to a Yale historian, and finally a job at Bryn Mawr. She had an alarming habit of mislaying spectacles, important documents and salary checks, and a curiously housewifely approach to research ("I always put different topics on different colored pages. If I haven't a pink paper, I take a white paper and write 'PINK' on the top"). As a teacher she inspired a generation of girls with a love of history, as a scholar added considerably to what is known as the story of the British Empire, as an administrator was largely responsible for the college's exacting honors program.

The University of Texas' Professor of Education Frederick Eby, 82, white-maned elder statesman of Texas public education, father ("Well, maybe baby sitter") of the state's junior colleges, lifetime opponent of the teachings of Philosopher John Dewey. While a student at the University of Chicago in 1896, where Dewey held sway over the philosophy department, Eby was assigned to teach Dewey-style manual training to a four-year-old lad named Archibald MacLeish. Soon disillusioned ("A good thing Archie didn't catch on; he might have become a carpenter instead of a poet"), Eby declared his independence of the master by taking a course in Christian ethics rather than Dewey's course in pragmatic philosophy. In 1909 he landed at Texas, not only pioneered in the junior college movement but also in the fields of religious and esthetic education. Often caustic, he roundly denounced psychologists ("They have built a maze, mistaken it for the universe and have succeeded only in getting lost in it"), current teaching methods ("There has never been a generation so severed from tradition. They don't even know the lullabies"), once ended a lecture with a one-sentence summary of his own credo: "A little knowledge leadeth a man away from God, much bringeth him back."

Harvard University's birdlike Frederick Merk, 69, grand chronicler of the American frontier. The grandson of an immigrant German cooper, Merk graduated from the University of Wisconsin, eventually moved to Harvard. There, in the quietest of voices and with the gentlest of manners, he gave the course known to the catalogue as History 162 but to the campus as "Wagon Wheels," which annually reopened the frontier not only to thousands of Harvard students but also to Nieman Fellowship journalists such as A. B. Guthrie, who was inspired by Merk's sweeping narratives to write The Big Sky.

Lawrence College's Economist Mandell Morton Bober, 65, intense, deadpan expert on Marx, general iconoclast and most quoted man on the Appleton (Wis.) campus. Sample Boberisms: "If God were half as nice to us as we are to him, we'd be living in paradise," "Businessmen have as much competition as they cannot get rid of," "Once we went to market with money in pocket and came home with goods in basket; now we go to market with money in basket and come home with goods in pocket," "If every man carried his cross, mighty few women would walk." To his students he growled: "When you leave this room I want you to feel that you have learned something. Don't go out and just develop a personality."

The University of Michigan's Lithuanian-born Reuben Kahn, 69, chief of the University hospital's serology laboratory. A shy, brilliant man who can rarely get through a night without waking to jot down some idea that has popped into his mind, Kahn developed a test for syphilis that largely replaced the cumbersome Wassermann, in 1951 published a theory that could be a major step toward the early detection of disease. His "universal blood reaction" theory: a healthy person's system produces antibodies in a definite, ascertainable pattern. In a sick person antibodies form faster and in different patterns. If science can determine how the pattern changes from health to various diseases, doctors will be able to identify the disease long before recognizable symptoms appear.

Smith College's Howard Rollin Patch, 67, for years one of the most formidable figures on campus ("Examinations should be written as if the students were under gunfire"). A Harvard Ph.D., Patch became an authority on Chaucer, was so identified with his hero that a student once greeted him, "Good morning, Mr. Chaucer." His composed reply: "Just call me Geoff." Looking, as one colleague put it, "like the president of a country--almost any country," erect, white-haired Howard Patch not only charmed and terrorized students ("they have to submit to the possibility of ridicule, stand up under criticism"), but also implacably lampooned shortsighted administrators (his sarcastic advice to facultymen: "If you want to get ahead, go slow") and all such vulnerable aspects of the academic life as the faculty meeting ("A hey-nonny-no and a hey-nonny-yes/Whatever's accomplished is anyone's guess").

Stanford University's Thomas S. Barclay, 65, who for some 35 years gave life and color to his political science courses through his experiences as a practicing politician (delegate to three Democratic conventions, assistant to onetime Democratic Postmaster General Jim Farley). An expert on Western politics, Barclay gave hours each week to advising students on "practically everything but marriage." When he paid tribute recently to one of his own mentors, he might well have been describing himself. "One of the most humanistic men I have ever met," said he of Historian Charles A. Beard, "a man who would spend hours with his students, perhaps more than he should; but that is a sign of a great man."

Catholic University of America's Breslau-born Anthropologist Martin Gusinde, 70, longtime friend of and leading authority on the world's pygmies. In 1934 Father Gusinde took up residence in the jungles of Central Africa in a community of Bambute pygmies about whom almost nothing was known. "From that time," says he, "I was in love with my pygmies." He decided that the Hottentots and Bushmen of South Africa are not true pygmies (they are too tall). He lived with the Aetas, pygmies of the Philippines, and the beetle-munching pygmies of North-East New Guinea's Schrader Mountains. Though for obvious reasons his courses have not been jammed with students ("It is not a job that promises much to students. It is not as engineering, no?"), he has fascinated many a future anthropologist with the pygmy's mysterious and often endearing ways. "They embraced me," he recalls of one of his visits to the Schrader pygmies, "and invited me immediately to see their people. Imagine if one of them was dropped into the middle of Washington society."

The University of Wisconsin's Edwin E. Witte, 70, onetime Wisconsin farm boy who became a leader of the institutional school of economics that concerns itself not with the "timeless, placeless laws of economics" but with practical solutions to everyday problems. Though round-faced Economist Witte regarded himself as "an old-fashioned teacher" who was never really happy away from the campus on which he had studied and taught so long, he helped draft many a progressive law for his state, wrote the Federal Social Security Act of 1934-35, campaigned constantly against colleagues who were so bent on appearing scientific and mathematical that they succeeded only in not being read.

Yale's Economist Edgar Furniss, 67, for 20 years holder of the delicate and demanding position of provost of the university. A sort of buffer zone between the faculty and the corporation, Furniss' office in the Hall of Graduate Studies was the bright hope for any professor with a new idea, a sympathetic court of appeals for any with a problem. No major change has taken place at Yale without first getting the provost's consent, and probably no university official has been so open to new projects. Once a professor suggested that the university publish an esoteric journal of musicology. "What will the circulation be?" asked Furniss. "Four hundred," replied the professor meekly. "Good," said Furniss, "it's scholarly"--and the journal was approved.

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