Education: Man of Goodwill

During the darkest days of World War II, the husky, silver-haired president of M.I.T., laden down with the responsibility for some of the nation’s most crucial wartime research, dashed into an associate’s office and demanded: “Have you got the morning paper?” For the next few seconds, the president rustled through the pages, finally came to a stop somewhere in the middle. Then, after some intensive reading, he handed the paper back. “Thanks a lot,” said he, as he vanished out the door. “I just wanted to see how things were going with Smilin’ Jack.”

To those who knew Karl Taylor Compton best, it was typical that he should want to know how Smilin’ Jack was doing. Famed as a scientist and educator, he carried a heavy load, but no man could have carried it with greater grace or a lighter heart. Last week, in paying tribute to him on a special broadcast from Boston, his successor, James R. Killian Jr., mentioned his achievements only in passing. Far more important to Killian was Compton himself, “emanating goodness and wisdom . . . and engendering a spirit of good will among all coming within his influence.”

The Never-Sweats. The son of a professor of philosophy at Ohio’s College of Wooster, Karl Compton hardly seemed the type destined for so distinguished a career. Unlike his bookish brother Arthur, who had written a serious treatise on elephants’ toes at the age of ten, Karl was the friendly campus hero who captained the Wooster football squad and pitched on a local baseball team known as the “Never-Sweats” (the Never-Sweats’ catcher: a young fellow named Ben Fairless, now boss of U.S. Steel). Eventually, however, he got his M.A. at Wooster, later taught at Portland’s Reed College. By the time M.I.T. hired him as its president in 1930, he had risen to be chairman of the physics department at Princeton.

Karl Compton’s 18 years as president were golden years for M.I.T. He completed the great George Eastman Research Laboratory of Physics and Chemistry, set up the Graduate School, reorganized the undergraduate course to give M.I.T.’s science and engineering students a better grounding in the liberal arts. During the war, he helped mastermind the atomic bomb project, saw M.I.T. and Harvard turn Cambridge, Mass, into the radar center of the world.

Booked Until September. From his great paneled office in the Administration Building, Compton ran his campus with a firm but informal hand. He turned out some 300 articles on everything from thermionics to spectroscopy, helped found the American Institute of Physics, kept in constant touch with brother Arthur Holly Compton (who won the Nobel Prize and became chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis), brother Wilson Martindale Compton (who served as president of the State College of Washington), and sister Mary (who married the president of Allahabad University in India). Profoundly patriotic, he was a constant commuter to Washington, served the Government as an adviser on everything from guided missiles to U.M.T. Meanwhile, as if all these duties were not enough, he managed to find time for anyone who wanted to drop in for a chat. Actually, it was time he knew he could ill afford. Once, when he tried to squeeze in an appointment with his tailor one summer day, his secretary thumbed through her book and solemnly shook her head. “Sorry.”‘ said she. “but you’re booked solid until September.”

In 1948, when President Truman called on him to be head of the National Research Development Board of the Military Establishment, Karl Compton retired as head of M.I.T. On the day the news broke, scores of students stopped him on campus to shake his hand (“It’s nice.” said he, “but they don’t know how it hurts”). In 1949, on doctor’s orders, he was forced to resign from the nation’s top scientific post. He went back to M.I.T. as chairman of the corporation. “It is as true today,” he once told a graduating class, “as it was 2,000 years ago that the basic requirements for the good life are to ‘love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind,’ and ‘to love thy neighbor as thyself.’ ” Last week, having lived that sort of life, Karl Compton, 66, died of a heart attack.