When the University of Chicago’s Chancellor Lawrence A. Kimpton submitted his resignation last March, a mighty talent hunt gripped the Midway. Out went letters to 60,000 old grads, asking for suggestions. Such academic statesmen as James B. Conant were consulted. Two committees pondered 375 possible Kimpton successors, including Adlai Stevenson, Richard Nixon, and Harvard’s Dean McGeorge Bundy. The debate led to a decision that Chicago needed neither a big name nor an experienced academic administrator, but rather, as Trustee Chairman Glen A. Lloyd put it, “a top scholar in his own right”—a bright light to lure other top scholars to Chicago.
Last week Chicago happily found its top scholar in Caltech’s acting dean of the faculty: dynamic Geneticist George Wells Beadle, 57, who shared the 1958 Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology for discovering how genes affect heredity by controlling cell chemistry (TIME, Cover, July 14, 1958).
It fell to Chancellor Kimpton, now a Standard Oil (Indiana) executive, to spend his nine-year reign tidying up Chicago after the 21-year typhoon of Idealist Robert Maynard Hutchins. He threw out some of Hutchins’ more wildly experimental courses, raised sagging undergraduate enrollment to 2,100, nearly doubled endowment to $139.3 million. But though Kimpton put Chicago in what he felt was working order, some old grads feel that it still needs the kind of lively teachers who filled it in the heady Hutchins era.
At Caltech, Geneticist Beadle has stuck close to his research as head of the school’s famous biology division since 1946. But he has shown a sixth-sense ability to spot, recruit and excite able researchers, and has developed unexpected talents in fund raising and speechmaking. Beadle is even that rare scientist who takes an interest in money matters; he avidly reads the Wall Street Journal, and took delight in driving a $250 model A Ford for 22 years, then selling it for $300.
Chancellor Beadle will have plenty of money to handle at Chicago, whose annual income is $55.3 million. He himself will get at least $40,000-$50,000, but the real inducement to leave the Los Angeles area is the big academic challenge at Chicago. The eighth boss of the University of Chicago sees the assignment as nothing less than a chance to devote all the rest of his life to bridging the “two-culture” gap between science and the humanities, which many a scientist, statesman and teacher thinks is the biggest problem rising out of the scientific advances that Beadle, among others, has brought about.
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