Education: Student Prince

Surrounded by 3,000 cheering African subjects, Prince Karim, the Aga Khan IV, 21-year-old spiritual leader of 10 million Moslems, dedicated a new Nairobi hospital one day last week, then quietly announced his intention to return to Harvard. Before the end of his junior year, he had taken a leave of absence to attend the stricken Aga Khan III, then assumed the throne when his grandfather died in July 1957. Now, said he, “I decided I should lose no opportunity to equip myself for the future.”

Harvard will welcome his return. Karim had been a good student. Like his younger brother Amyn, a junior this year, the prince had made the dean’s list. One of his roommates was Adlai Stevenson’s youngest son, John Fell, who said: “His friendship is loyal and thoughtful, and he gives more than he takes.”

But at Harvard, where snobbery is by brains and not by blood, the Aga Khan IV will be just another student, or, as young Stevenson wrote, just ” ‘K’ as we soon came to call Karim.” Indeed, the Harvard Yard has seen many princes come and go, without fuss, sometimes even without remembering them. In 1912 Prince Jaisinh Rao, son of the Gaekwar of Baroda, got a Harvard bachelor’s degree, and in 1928 Prince Somdet Chao Fa Mahidol won his M.D. from the Harvard medical school. It was while the prince was a student at Harvard that his son, Phumiphon Aduldet, the present King of Thailand, was born in Cambridge—perhaps the only king born in the U.S. But these are recorded facts, nothing more. The legends are few, the tall tales rare.