Education: Under New Management

To the casual passerby, everything looked normal around the University of Maryland’s treeless new Georgian campus at College Park last week. Fall classes had yet to begin, but in Byrd Stadium, Football Coach Jim Tatum ran his 54-man squad (Pennsylvania mining and mill-town boys outnumber the 19 home-state boys) through first practice with high hopes of repeating his undefeated 1953 season. But across campus, in an ornate, walnut-paneled office, the U. of M.’s new president, Wilson Homer Elkins, 46, held his first press conference. Said he casually: “I don’t think that a university can continue on top, year after year, in football and not impair its educational program.”

Trim, stocky Wilson Elkins could hardly have found a better way to emphasize that Maryland is under new management. His predecessor, Harry (“Curly”) Byrd, was a onetime Maryland coach (1913-34) who had set out after World War II, with alumni support, to get Maryland the best football team that money could buy. Over the years, he talked legislators into ever greater appropriations for the University of Maryland, and paid them in a current coin: football victories. When he resigned last January, after 18 years as U. of M. president, to run for governor on the Democratic ticket, Curly Byrd’s football team (in five years, 43 victories, six defeats) was the nation’s best. The university had been transformed from a small agricultural school into a sprawling, Midwestern-style campus with 25,000 students, a host of professional schools and thriving branches (for the armed forces) on four continents.

But in building Maryland’s great football teams and physical plant (e.g., a $375,000 hen house for poultry students, the $1,000,000 Byrd Stadium), Booster Byrd did little for the U. of M.’s reputation as an incubator of academic learning. Most scholars gave Maryland a wide berth, and of last year’s 2,045 graduates, only 373 received degrees in the arts and sciences.

President Elkins is determined to add academic luster to Maryland’s plant and prowess. A star quarterback at the University of Texas and a onetime Rhodes Scholar, he came to Maryland after five years as president of Texas Western College (2,900 students). Well aware of Curly Byrd’s “enviable contributions,” he has no intention of plowing under the football team, concedes realistically that to attain distinction, a university needs endowment, and good football teams stimulate endowment giving. But in putting the accent on “distinction,” he plans “a strong academic program,” library expansion, and increased discussion of controversial subjects in the classroom. A Phi Beta Kappa himself, he also has a special goal: to raise Maryland’s academic standing so that, like more than 150 other colleges and universities, it will be qualified to award Phi Beta Kappa keys.

Maryland was not alone in plotting new directions. Last week the University of Chicago, which has long given short shrift to teacher training, announced that teachers, and students preparing to teach, would henceforth only have to pay half tuition ($345-360).

University of Chicago administrators have been increasingly worried about 1) the shortage of teachers in U.S. elementary and secondary schools, 2) the legacy of heavy academic theory left behind by ex-President and Chancellor (1929-51) Robert Hutchins. Starting with the cut-rate tuition plan. Chancellor Lawrence Kimpton (TIME, April 23, 1941) hopes to build a reputation for practical civic-mindedness, attract a larger proportion of so-called “All-American” students, is even toying with the idea of restoring Chicago’s participation in intercollegiate football, banned in 1939.