Education: Lost Leaders

Each year U.S. universities invoke the iron rule of retirement to uproot deadwood professors. In this proper process, some rare and ageless men are always lost — activists who spurned ivory towers, scholars who truly enlarged human under standing, professors who really professed.

This year is no exception. Among the giants who have become emeriti are many who seem almost irreplaceable.

Common to all of them is long devotion to the goal set by that gentle needier, Raphael Demos, 70, holder of Harvard’s imposing Alford professorship of natural religion, moral philosophy and civil polity (one predecessor: Josiah Royce). The goal: to plumb “who we are, what we know, and how we know it.” A Greek immigrant who worked his way through Harvard as janitor of the Lampoon building, Christian Platonist (The Philosophy of Plato) Demos roiled Cambridge with Socratic questioning for 45 years. The aim of education, he argued, after Socrates, is to become more human by learning “the depths of one’s ignorance.” Demos abhorred specialization, the cult of knowing more about less.

Philosopher Demos was a great questioner, but good ones abound in all fields. One such is the University of Chicago’s Vienna-born Friedrich Hayek, 63, professor of social and moral science, a noted traditionalist whose “radical” theories first drew national attention in a 1944 best seller, The Road to Serfdom, and later in The Constitution of Liberty (1960). Now returning to Austria to teach, Hayek was a burr under many a U.S. intellectual sad dle. Almost alone, he argued that welfare-state planning, however well intentioned, inevitably leads to expediency, coercion and loss of liberty.

Also departing are some great synthesizers, for example, Harvard’s protean Henry A. Murray, 69, professor of clinical psychology, who spent four decades probing human personality from every conceivable angle. A Groton graduate and captain of the Harvard crew (’15), Murray went on to become a Manhattan surgeon, a Rockefeller Institute embryologist, a Cambridge University Ph.D. (biochemistry), a personal student of Psychiatrist Carl Jung. He ran the Harvard Psychological Clinic, designed the personality-assessing Thematic Apperception Test, won a Legion of Merit medal for his work in the wartime OSS, and conducted impeccable personal research into everything from fear, fantasy and humor to religion, myths and Melville’s novels.

Murray, who will go on researching despite retirement, once proposed a vast “new testament” synthesizing Eastern and Western wisdom. Yale’s famed Philosopher F.S.C. Northrop, 68, argued similar ideas in his monumental The Meeting of East and West (1946), the work of a man equally at home in law, science, sociology, diplomacy and anthropology. Yale has rarely seen the likes of Northrop, a brilliant Wisconsinite who studied at Harvard and Cambridge, became a protégé of Alfred North Whitehead. The first master of Yale’s Silliman College, Northrop quit that in 1947 for fulltime scholarship on both the law and philosophy faculties. He preferred immersion in such subjects as Mexican culture, quantum physics and relativity (he was an intimate of Einstein’s) as preludes to informed philosophical analysis. From all this, Northrop, who will soon head an anthropology symposium in Austria, concluded that synthesis is possible in all human affairs — if men will only try.

At many campuses, the most painful losses were blessed not only with brains but also with a warm human touch. Dart mouth’s outdoor-loving Paul Sample, 65, one of the first U.S. artists-in-residence, was fittingly no abstractionist, but a celebrator of human figures in the Brueghel tradition. Once the heavyweight boxing champion of Dartmouth (’21), where he “slept through” an art appreciation course, Sample went on to paint prizefighters, New England landscapes and memorable watercolors of the U.S. Navy in World War II. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, chair man of Columbia University’s English department, had an equal humanity. Refreshingly unfeminist, Miss Nicolson was longtime dean of Smith College, and a formidable Yale-and-Michigan-educated scholar who endlessly illustrated how science inspired 17th and 18th century poetry and philosophy. Her honors were staggering. She was the first woman president of Phi Beta Kappa (1940), and the only person ever elected to the office for a second term.

Yale’s English-born Roland H. Bainton, 68, a Congregationalist minister and professor of church history, was once described as “part Puck, part St. Francis, with a mixture of Erasmus.” A caricaturist who likes to whip off sketches of Reinhold Niebuhr or Paul Tillich, he is also an indefatigable bicyclist whose latest two-wheeler boasts 18 gears. Few other Yale divines have done so much to spread the word in human tones. In 42 years at Yale, Bainton published 19 books (total sales: 1,500,000), notably Church of Our Fathers and Here I Stand, probably the most readable biography of Martin Luther in English.

Dramatizing the best of the past—the American past—was the achievement of crisp, eloquent Howard Mumford Jones, 70, Harvard’s Abbott Lawrence Lowell professor of the humanities. A former president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Jones spoke out sharply against McCarthyism in the 1950s. It was a patriot’s protest; few scholars are so enamored of U.S. ideals. Author Jones (The Pursuit of Happiness), who will lecture at M.I.T. this fall, is convinced that “Americanists” have one of the toughest fields around—a thicket of North American lore, its European roots and all of South America as well. It is “not a discipline for the C mind.”

Humanist Jones bemoans the disproportionate cash lavished on science research these days, but concern for the human was equally strong and perhaps more so among his retiring scientific colleagues. Example: Caltech’s eminent Biologist Alfred H. Sturtevant, 70, whose 1913 technique for “mapping” chromosomes made him a granddaddy of genetics. When the AEC argued in 1955 that fallout from H-bomb tests was harmless, Sturtevant bristled. “It is inexcusable to state that no hazard exists,” he retorted.

The most esoteric scientist, in fact, can be a humanist at the terminus of his work. Zoologist Alfred E. Emerson, 65, leaves the University of Chicago as a world authority on the social behavior of insects and the proud owner of the world’s biggest collection of termites—230,000, which he keeps in jars in his office. What has Emerson learned? That cooperation, not competition, is the main way that termites survive. And humans? That un-Darwinian possibility alone is enough to make anyone wonder how the University of Chicago can possibly retire Emerson until he finds out a lot more.