Education: Where East Is West

In Turkey, a wealthy American tourist, recoiling from the native bread, which was flat as a bathmat, was overjoyed at the sight of crisp, crusted, American-style loaves. He sought out the baker, found he was a Protestant missionary named Cyrus Hamlin. Missionary Hamlin convinced wealthy, grateful Tourist Christopher Robert that the Turks needed education even more than better bread, talked him into endowing the first U.S. college in the Near East.

That was in 1863. Today Istanbul’s Robert College, and the seven others in the Near East College Association,† have 40,000 alumni, including 29 U.N. delegates and advisers, have become the biggest single reservoir of U.S. goodwill in the strategic Near East. Last week 59 U.S. teachers sailed from New York to restaff the Near East colleges.

The most prestigious of colleges is the American University of Beirut, largest U.S. educational center abroad. A.U.B.’s grads include a recent Syrian Prime Minister (now U.N. delegate), the Lebanese Minister to the U.S. Among former Beirut teachers: Vassar’s President Emeritus Henry Noble MacCracken.

No Veils, No Skirts. In 1925, when A.U.B. introduced coeducation to the Lebanon, it did much to liberate Near Eastern women. Today unveiled Moslem girls mingle with men on the Mediterranean-edged campus, play tennis in shorts. Beirut’s 1,000 graduate doctors now battle trachoma, typhus, malaria throughout the Near East. With 42 nationalities and 30 religious sects among its 2,463 students, A.U.B. is a “perpetual peace conference.”

New & Old. Robert College stands at the Bosporus narrows, where Europe and Asia are only 800 yards apart. Its 19th Century buildings overshadow a 15th Century Turkish fort (see cut). Engineers trained at Roberthave built modern Turkey’s factories, railroads and sewage systems. Basketball, softball, other U.S. sports have spread through Turkey from the college. Robert’s noted students: Bulgaria’s first education minister; a confidential secretary of the late President of Turkey, Ismet Inönü; Editor Gilbert Grosvenor of the National Geographic (his father taught there).

Of the 59 teachers sailing last week, 45 were recruits (several just out of uniform), the rest old hands returning with their families for another three-year hitch. Eleven of the party belonged to one family, the Blisses, which have given the American University of Beirut two presidents, a president’s wife, three professors.

†Istanbul Woman’s College, the American College of Sofia, the American School for Boys at Baghdad, the American University of Beirut, International College (also at Beirut), Athens College, Damascus College in Syria (founded in September 1945).