An Act of Involvement

When successful Ivy League administrators change jobs, they usually move on and up into government or business rather than back down into the world of small liberal arts schools. Last week Harvard College's highly popular Dean John Usher Monro, 54, announced that he will give up his post this summer to become director of freshman studies at Alabama's tiny (1,000 students), all-Negro Miles College (TIME, Nov. 8, 1963). Among his duties will be directing workshops to help prospective students overcome high school deficiencies and revamping the freshman curriculum. "If you do the job right in the freshman year, you put pressure on the whole college," he explains. His successor will be Fred L. Glimp, 41, who has been Harvard dean of admissions since 1960.

Monro's new job is in keeping with his longtime interests at Harvard. As director of financial aid there, he actively recruited Negro students in the early '50s, broadened the college's enrollment by promoting more scholarships based on need, organizing part-time student jobs and instituting no-interest loans. Promoted to dean in 1958, Monro was well liked by the students, despite his 1963 public complaint that "wild parties" and "sexual intercourse" were commonplace in the Harvard dorms. He later conceded that he had overstated the problem and allowed that "a degree of companionship is very important in a large impersonal college." Monro also designed Harvard's freshman seminars, served as an effective middle man between students and other top administrators. Modest but outspoken, he upgraded the vaguely defined deanship to make it one of Harvard's most influential offices.

Monro will take an undisclosed cut in salary at Miles, but he insists that he does not consider the shift any kind of personal sacrifice. He has helped advise Miles on its problems since 1963, becoming increasingly involved in its struggles to survive and grow. "By the act of involvement," says Monro, "each individual begins the lifelong process of paying his own dues, being a member in good standing of the society that sustains him."

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