Search for Professors

Of all the jokes about the Ph.D., the least funny is that remarkably few Americans earn one. Debatable as the notion may be, a doctorate is considered the desirable qualification for college teaching. In the next decade, colleges will need at least 27,000 new teachers a year. But the present total Ph.D. output is 9,000 a year, and less than half become college teachers.

Nonetheless, the Ph.D. shortage is being tackled with burgeoning success by the Princeton-bred Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, which aims to make professors out of able college students as fast as possible. The recruiters are 900 faculty members throughout the country, who help nominate bright seniors for hard-eyed grilling by 15 regional committees of scholars. The prize: one year of graduate study at any university in the U.S. or Canada. No small change, the award carries a $1,500 stipend, family allowances and the full cost of tuition.

Farmers & Flyers. Last week the foundation announced a rich crop of 1,259 winners, selected from 8,800 nominees at 861 schools. They proved that potential professors can spring from almost any source. Indiana University's Ernest Lockridge, 21, son of the late novelist Ross (Raintree County) Lockridge Jr., will teach English after studying at Yale or Harvard. Ontario's Waterloo University College produced Robert Hett, 32, who quit work in a rubber company to study history, and will now go to Cornell. Shelby Faye Lewis, 19, of Louisiana's Southern University, is a pretty Negro coed and one of seven children of a barber in Plain Dealing, La. (pop. 1,321). She will study political science at the University of Illinois, hopes to "improve our people's knowledge of their country." And there are hundreds more, from a former Hungarian freedom fighter at Illinois' Monmouth College, who could barely speak English three years ago, to a onetime Louisiana truck farmer, now studying advanced history at the University of North Carolina.

Launched in 1945 by Whitney J. Gates, chairman of classical studies at Princeton, the fellowships began modestly with four newly demobbed veterans, who might not have become college teachers at all. One of them was Robert F. Goheen, a Princeton man and recently discharged Army light colonel, who aimed at a State Department career. He became a classicist instead, and wound up after eleven years as president of Princeton. The 1946 Fellows were diverted just as neatly from other careers. Frank Wadsworth, a wartime test pilot who wanted to go on flying, is now a Shakespearean scholar at the University of California. And William M. Meredith, poet and English professor at Connecticut College, was won away from his prewar reporting job on the New York Times.

Seller's Market. What put the show on the road was a $24.5 million grant from the Ford Foundation in 1957. The operation is still based at Princeton, under President Sir Hugh Taylor, dean emeritus of Princeton's graduate school. But its recruiting setup now spans the nation; 3,000 of the 4,000 fellowships given so far have been awarded since the Ford grant. On U.S. campuses today, the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship is fast becoming a domestic version of the Rhodes Scholarship--a peak of academic distinction.

Key to the effort are the recruiters, whose methods vary. English Professor Francis J. O'Malley, a legend at Notre Dame (65 fellowships so far), concentrates on stirring students to "first-rateness, a real sense of the truth." The result is that many soon want to emulate O'Malley, become teachers themselves. California's Pomona College (36 fellowships) has an unusually bright, small (1,000) student body to work on. Says English Professor Frederick Bracher: "The kids we get here are devoted to what they're doing now, and they want to keep on doing it." At the University of Pittsburgh, Psychologist Samuel Roy Heath, director of counseling services, pursues promising freshmen from the moment they arrive. And more and more need no convincing at all. "Intellectual activity is fashionable now," says Heath, and it promises a living as well. "I can now tell them that there is going to be a real seller's market for teachers."

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