Education: Streamliner

Apparently no big U.S. university can now afford to pick a scholar for its president. The U.S. college president, 1947 model, has to be a salesman, skilled at wheedling bequests from his alumni; a special pleader when it comes to dealing with his trustees; an executive when it comes to bossing his community of scholars. Last week, the University of Southern California picked a new president, and ran true to form.

U.S.C. chose big, affable, 51-year-old Fred Dow Fagg Jr., dean of the faculties at Northwestern University. Fred Fagg is an air-minded administrator whom Franklin Roosevelt once picked to reorganize the Bureau of Air Commerce. Fagg founded Northwestern’s Air Law Institute, the nation’s first authority on air law. When he became dean in 1939, he started to streamline Northwestern’s liberal arts program. Once the university listed 600 liberal arts courses (“Before Fagg, if you wanted to learn about English literature,” said a Northwestern professor last week, “you had to take a course in the early life of Burns, one on his middle life, and another on his later life”).

Fred Fagg believed that the faculty knew better than the student what makes a well-balanced education, and chopped away at the student elective system. He liked to drop in on lectures unexpectedly, and if he thought one was bad he told the professor so afterwards.

At U.S.C., popular Fred Fagg succeeds domineering old Rufus von KleinSmid, who in his later years has antagonized most of his faculty. But in his day Rufus von KleinSmid had been something of an administrator too: he had expanded U.S.C.’s cramped campus into a 55-acre plant with 12,000 students and one of the fattest ($12,000,000) annual budgets among U.S. universities.