A Different Kind of Methodist for Boston U.

Sprawled along the Charles River near Harvard and M.I.T., Boston University has had little of the national attention paid to its more famous neighbors. Nonetheless, with 15,031 full-time students, B.U. is now the nation's third largest private university, after Brigham Young and N.Y.U. Last week, to succeed retiring President Harold Case, Boston U.'s trustees named Arland Christ-Janer, 44, who for the past six years has been president of Iowa's Cornell College.

The top man on B.U.'s list of 275 nominees, Christ-Janer represents something of a break with the school's presidential tradition. All five of his predecessors were both Methodist ministers and teetotalers; the son of a Nebraska Lutheran schoolteacher, Christ-Janer was a Presbyterian layman before becoming a Methodist--and he does take a social drink now and then. He majored in Greek at Minnesota's Carleton College, has a law degree from the University of Chicago as well as one in divinity from Yale.

Christ-Janer takes over an institution that has come a long way since its founding as a Methodist theological seminary in 1869. (B.U. is still considered a Methodist-affiliated school, but gets no support from the church.) Under Harold Case, the university expanded from a modest school with buildings scattered all across town to a bustling university concentrated on a strikingly modern 45-acre campus. Strong in medicine and law, B.U. is no longer mainly a commuter school, and more than half of its students come from out side Massachusetts.

The appointment of Christ-Janer adds to the growing reputation of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (Beloit, Carleton, Coe, Cornell, Grinnell, Knox, Lawrence, Monmouth, Ripon and St. Olaf) as a breeding ground for major-university presidents. In 1964, Grinnell's Howard Bowen stepped up to the University of Iowa, while Lawrence has lost two former presidents to other and larger institutions--Nathan Pusey to Harvard and Douglas Knight to Duke.

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