Education: Goodbye, Messrs. Chips

Each year U.S. colleges and universities must say goodbye to many a famed and favorite figure. Among 1954’s retirements: North Carolina’s Howard Washington Odum, 70, slouching, rumpled dean of Southern sociologists, whose 200-odd books, articles and monographs have set a whole generation of Southerners to analyzing their problems of poverty, race and regionalism, and even the state of their schools and soil. Twice a Ph.D. (Clark and Columbia Universities). Sociologist Odum went from Georgia’s Emory University to North Carolina in 1920. soon won fame as an insatiable collector of facts and folklore, a writer of passable novels (e.g., Rainbow Round My Shoulder), a breeder of prizewinning cattle (“So far, my bulls have been worth more than my books”), and a lifetime champion of a rich and powerful South that would “stop being afraid of democracy.” Princeton’s Philip Khuri Hitti, 68, widely considered the top authority in the U.S. on Moslem culture. Born in Lebanon of peasant stock. Hitti as a child suffered a fracture of the arm that healed so slowly that his farmer family finally decided: “Let’s give him an education, since he can’t do anything else.” After studying at an American missionary school and the American University of Beirut. Hitti emigrated to the U.S.. won a doctorate at Columbia, eventually wound up at Princeton to become chairman of the Department of Oriental Languages and Literatures and head of the pioneering Near Eastern Studies program. Since then, rising each morning at 6 and somehow managing to get through the day mostly on fruit and milk, mild-mannered Professor Hitti has introduced hundreds of students to lands “once remote as Mars,” turned out a history of the Arabs, indulged in such pastimes as tracking down the origin of the word “tennis.” (His theory: not the French tenez, as is often supposed, but the Arab Tinnis, from the town that manufactured the cloth that made up the balls that were part of the game the Crusaders discovered the Arabs playing with their rahahs—the palms of their hands—from which came the word racket.) Harvard’s Arthur Meier Schlesinger Sr., 66, indefatigable chronicler of U.S.

manners & morals, one of the first to stress what has come to be known as social history. A shy, shuffling figure, Historian Schlesinger, for all his brilliance, maintained the air of being a wise and learned hayseed to whom nothing about America—from the rise of the city to the fall of the antimacassar—seemed irrelevant or immaterial. His summary of U.S.

characteristics: “A belief in the universal obligation to work; the urge to move about; a high standard of comfort for the average man; faith in progress; the eternal pursuit of material gain; an absence of permanent class barriers; … a deference for women; the blight of spoiled children : . . . and certain miscellaneous traits such as overheated houses, the habit of spitting, and a passion for rocking chairs and ice water.” Johns Hopkins’ Leo Spitzer, 67, who as a child in Vienna knew French, Hebrew.

German and Hungarian by the time he was seven, later plunged into Latin, Greek.

English, Italian, Provencal, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Rumanian, Gothic.

Anglo-Saxon, Sanskrit, Lithuanian, Old Church Slavonic, Albanian, Neo-Greek, Turkish and Russian to become one of the most fabulous of philologists. From his office, so cluttered with books and papers that Smoker Spitzer has been dubbed Johns Hopkins’ most “inflammatory professor,” a gush of learning has come. To Spitzer, his wispy-white head wreathed in smoke as his pencil flashes across a page (“Working? Not at all. Enjoying myself as always”), his main interest has been “man [who] stands at the window of our national civilization before which opens the vista of other civilizations. And he is that window . . .” Stephens’ Anna Froman Hetzler, longtime teacher of voice. A stylish lady with a propensity for swishing skirts and rustling petticoats, “Tillie” Hetzler studied music in Berlin, Paris and Manhattan, found she had a knack for training singers. Though all of 78, she still lives alone, visited by a stream of favorite pupils and surrounded by her music and favorite possessions (e.g., a toy soldier owned by Brahms), occasionally visits Manhattan and appears on TV with her daughter, Songstress Jane Froman. Her plans for the future: “A gay, wild life.” Randolph-Macon’s spry, sprightly Ma bel Kate Whifeside, 75, who has single-handedly given her campus one of the liveliest of college Greek departments.

Small and proudly wrinkled (“They’ve taken out my wrinkles,” she once com plained of a retouched photograph, “and I spent all these years putting them into the right places”), Miss Mabel has set hundreds of girls to exclaiming and de claiming through Aeschylus and Aristophanes. Each year, dressed in the robes of the priest of Dionysius, she has marched into the college’s amphitheater to put on a major Greek production, has somehow managed to make old Athens so alive that one student once wrote her: “I have for gotten my Greek, I have forgotten the declensions and I have forgotten the lines I learned for the plays, but I find that Greek is the most useful course I took while I was in college.” Haverford’s Albert Harris Wilson, 82, who retired once in 1939 but just went on teaching mathematics anyway as profes sor emeritus. In 44 years, whether puttering about his roses, stretching his 5 ft.

6 in. to reach an equation on the top of the blackboard, or tutoring a troubled student long after hours, “Little Al” has become the most popular figure on cam pus — a gentle man who had a habit of quietly slipping his own money into scholarships for impoverished pupils and “who believes,” as the 1914 yearbook puts it, “that there is good in every man and seeks to make that good predominate.” Columbia’s Talbot Hamlin, 65, ranking U.S. architectural historian, authority on early 19th century American architecture, editor of the monumental (four volumes, $80) Forms and Functions of Twentieth Century Architecture. The son of a professor of architecture, Hamlin entered the field almost by instinct (“Well, let’s put it this way. I never wanted to do any thing else”), made a name for himself in practice, turned to teaching, became the bearded, debonair exponent of a brand of functionalism not divorced from humanity: “The pleasure one gets from perceiving character in a building is not merely a cold realization of the mechanical fitness of its forms to the purpose they serve; it is a definitely emotional reaction as well. The good building puts one in the right emotional state; it prepares one for the activities that go on in it.”