Goheen Goes

At 15, Robert F. Goheen coolly announced that he was going to become president of Princeton University. Born in India, the son of a Presbyterian medical missionary, he then swept (cum laude) through Princeton's feeder prep school, Lawrenceville. He worked his way through Princeton selling football tickets, graduated in 1940 with the school's top honor prize. After earning his doctorate (thesis: "The Imagery of Sophocles' Antigone") at Princeton, he joined the faculty and became head of the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Program, which aids future college teachers. When Princeton's trustees began looking for a new president to replace Dr. Harold W. Dodds, they decided they had only two choices: Goheen and McGeorge Bundy. Goheen got the nod in 1957, becoming, at 37, the youngest Princeton president since 1759.

Last week, at 51, the dean of Ivy League executives, Goheen capped his whirlwind career by announcing that he will leave his post no later than June 1972. His motive for quitting was characteristically well considered and direct: "The term of a university president should normally not run beyond ten to 15 years at the outside."

Goheen wanted to end his term three years ago, but assorted campus revolts influenced him and he held on. "It did not seem right," he said last week, "to give up the helm while the university was being shaken by widespread unrest and was still developing more responsive and effective procedures for governance." Though Princeton students are still protesting against the war and the school's involvement in Government research projects, Goheen is convinced that the big crunch is over and that his major reforms are well under way.

Blacks and Girls. In response to Princeton's "constitutional crisis," Goheen became one of the first presidents to back student power on his university's board of trustees. In recent months, Princeton students have joined the faculty in working out some of the nation's most rational guidelines for deciding where to cut university expenses. Well before that, Goheen helped Princeton discard its white-shoe image. He reduced the social power of fraternity-like "eating clubs," cut the number of prep-school graduates to 70% of the freshman class, steadily recruited black students. In 1968 Princeton went coed. Of its current 5,100 students, 700 are women.

One of the last of the oldtime scholar-presidents, though hardly a slouch at modern fund raising, Goheen is nearly a polar opposite of Yale's outspoken, well-publicized Kingman Brewster Jr. Nonetheless, Goheen's 14 years' experience as head of a great university seems unlikely to end with quiet retirement to a classics library. At his age, say Goheen watchers, his public life may have just begun.

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