Education: Farm Boy No. 2

It began in a musty Victorian house in Manhattan’s Chelsea ‘district. But there was nothing else musty about the New School for Social Research. Among its founders in 1919 were four intellectual mavericks: Historians Charles A. Beard and James Harvey Robinson, Philosopher John Dewey and Economist Thorstein Veblen. The New School was for adults who had learned the wrong things in college, or not enough, or had never been there.

Within three years it got a director who has been there ever since: foot-shuffling, pipe-puffing Alvin Saunders Johnson, a Nebraska farm boy and an educational iconoclast. He made it a unique adult school, short of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, but far above the dreary, text-bound trade schools which pass for adult education in most U.S. cities. Its faculty is heavily loaded with crack refugee professors from Europe. It keeps school in a modernistic, seven-story, Joseph Urban-designed building in Greenwich Village, now has 5,700 pupils.

Last week Iconoclast Johnson, now 70, retired. His successor—”a man after my own heart”—is another farm boy: lean, 49-year-old Brynjolf Jacob (Bryn J. for short) Hovde (rhymes with loved a). Bryn J. has, among other things, toured ,the Chautauqua lecture circuit, taught at the University of Pittsburgh—where he got into more than one ruckus because his politics were to the left of the trustees’ —and run the State Department’s Division of Cultural Cooperation. Says he: “I like to think of a university as a storm center. I like people to take up an issue and scrap and fight about it.” He looked just right for the New School.