Dean of Deans

"You have shown the wisdom of your calling in declining a score of college presidencies,'' said the president of Williams College last June as he awarded an honorary doctor of letters. It was a tribute, at once wry and heartfelt, that could go to only one man in the U.S.: William C. DeVane. 64, who has announced that he will retire next June after a quarter-century as dean of Yale College.

DeVane's calling has little relation to that of the standard Hollywood dean, who is usually pictured sobering a wayward student with a paternal lecture, or wading manfully into a crowd of panty-raiders. In many of America's great universities, where the president has to operate and finance a gigantic organization, the dean has become the chief educator.

His battles are with burgeoning graduate schools that threaten to bury the undergraduate college, with rival universities that want his best teachers and with a curriculum that can always be improved.

Scholar of Education. In this tradition, the dean of deans has long been William DeVane. In a poem for a 1960 Yale Daily News banquet honoring DeVane, former Harvard Dean McGeorge Bundy (now a White House janizary) described him as

This wiser dean,

Adviser-dean

To deans by dozen--this soft-spoken Kaiser-dean.

Except for four years as chairman of Cornell's English department, DeVane has been at Yale ever since he arrived as an undergraduate from South Carolina. He graduated (Phi Beta Kappa) in 1920, was appointed assistant professor when he received his Ph.D. in 1926, and returned from Cornell in 1938 as Emily Sanford professor of English literature as well as dean of Yale College. A first-rate scholar of Browning and Tennyson, the new dean became equally expert on faculty and curriculum, quietly carved out the reports and studies that have served as the basis for undergraduate education at Yale--and many another college.

Yale's intensified honors majors are now taken by a quarter of each class; another group takes divisional majors, which cut across departmental lines into such fields as politics and economics. The Directed Studies program provides exceptional underclassmen with a fixed, integrated two-year curriculum taught by some of Yale's leading scholars. At another extreme, a dozen seniors are selected Scholars of the House--freed from all classroom obligations in order to complete one major project.

The Long View. These programs, however, are only imaginative alternatives to the broad base of Yale undergraduate education that DeVane accepts as his primary responsibility. Noting the "increasingly fierce specialization of the graduate schools"--which eventually draw 75% of Yale College graduates--he insists on maintaining the breadth of liberal arts. "We have no time for the transient or the immediately applicable and quickly advantageous," he once explained to a gathering of Yale parents. "We aim to give the student the solid and permanent studies of man's concerns, a long view of man's life and a vision of the greatness to which he may aspire."

To maintain a faculty for this task, DeVane has shown a genius for academic administration and a quiet competitive fervor based on a simple goal: Yale preeminence in every field. One of his new problems, ironically, is the new national value placed on professors. Too often, says DeVane, "professors are absent from the classroom and often have abdicated from what they think is the humbler part of their calling." Instead, they are "in Washington on some policymaking committee, in a think-tank on a mountain in California, in New York at a commit tee meeting of their learned association. They're riddled by money, shot full of fellowships.''

Unterrified Amateur. DeVane himself, to his occasional regret, was one of the early philosophers of the system that provides much of the money and fellowships. He helped write a report that established policy for the Ford Foundation, still serves on the Rockefeller-financed General Edu cation Board. Nor has he been free of learned associations; he was chairman of the American Council of Learned Societies and is now president of Phi Beta Kappa.

In New Haven DeVane is a campus legend who is not a campus character. The story of how many university presidencies he has declined to remain at Yale--im pressive enough in non-legendary form--often grows unchecked, since few would broach such a subject to the unassuming dean. Says Yale President A. Whitney Griswold: "A wise, kindly, modest man with learning in his marrow, he has represented to us all the good things for which we entered the teaching profession in the first place."

Scholar DeVane says he feels like an "unterrified amateur" among the professional, clean-desk deans. Of his own desk-cleaning method he admits, "I prefer to wait for a high wind." No wind having struck in the past few years, he has been forced to a small table in front of his loaded desk. There he works in longhand, or leans back to chat in soft, faintly Southern tones. The conversation is always gracious but, says one Yale official, contains "a gentle dig every few paragraphs just to let you know he's on to your game."

After retiring as dean, DeVane will continue to teach, hopes to finish another book on Browning--but not before completing one on a subject he has mastered as well: higher education in America.

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