Education: First Love

When the officials of Haverford College, on Pennsylvania’s Main Line, tried to talk Geographer Gilbert Fowler White into taking over the presidency in 1946, he was about as reluctant as a candidate can be. At 34, he felt that he was much too young for the job; he was also much fascinated by geography, in which he took his doctorate (1942) at the University of Chicago. Nevertheless, White finally accepted—and proved to be as wrong about himself as he had been reluctant.

A devout Quaker, he seemed just the man for the nation’s oldest Quaker college. He knew all his 450 students by name, and on Campus Day, when students and facultymen don old clothes to work at some campus building project, President White was out there hammering with the rest of them. Though he looked like an undergraduate himself, he managed to give Haverford some of the happiest years of its life. He raised faculty salaries quadrupled scholarships, more than doubled the endowment to $10 million. He served as vice chairman of the American Friends Service Committee, was adviser to such public groups as the Hoover Commission and UNESCO.

About the only thing he did not have enough time for, in fact, was his old love geography. Last week, convinced that “in a time when the pressure of world population upon natural resources is increasing and when the world’s regions are more closely linked to each other,” a geographer has a special role to play, Gilbert White decided to resign. His new post: professor of geography at the University of Chicago.