Education: Ike for Columbia

Columbia University’s choice of General Dwight D. Eisenhower as its new president, to take office next year, had brought mostly cheers— but there were a few who had reservations. Said the New York Herald Tribune last week: “There will inevitably be regrets that the trustees were unable to find a scholar of the first rank qualified for the post. Plainly, in turning to General Eisenhower, they elected to subordinate the question of learning, of the skills in education, to the more practical issues of administration. . . . It can be argued that the present era of confusion calls for just [such] stalwart virtues. . . . [But] the regrets will remain.”

Whether a first-rank scholar is really needed to run a modern U.S. university, or whether an able administrator sensitive to the rights and duties of scholars might do as well or better, was at least a debatable question. But Columbia was breaking no precedents in appointing General Eisenhower.* Robert E. Lee, after a lifetime in uniform, became the able president of Washington College (now Washington & Lee) in Lexington, Va. And even in the Herald Tribune’s home town, the president who had ruled City College for the longest stretch was Alexander Webb, a Union general at Gettysburg. Columbia’s 85-year-old President Emeritus Nicholas Murray Butler had no doubts about the matter. Said he: “General Eisenhower’s great ability . . . in dealing with world problems [is] precisely what the world needs today in the administration of a great university.”

* Whose brother Milton, now president of Kansas State, is no professional scholar either, but a former OWI executive & longtime Department of Agriculture official.