Education: From the Reservoir

Of all the projects ever started by U.S. foundations, few have had more pleasant results than the John Hay Whitney Foundation’s program for visiting professors in the humanities. In the last two years the foundation has picked out twelve retired scholars, paid them an average of $7,500 a year, sent them off to continue their careers for a year on small liberal-arts campuses that might not otherwise have been able to afford such special talent. The scheme proved so appealing, in fact, that last year the New York Foundation joined the Whitney in a similar program. This week, as the two foundations jointly announced their selection of twelve new names for 1954, they had ample evidence from 1953 of just how successful their experiment has been.

¶Star of the 1953 group was Architect Joseph Hudnut, 68, retired dean of the Harvard Faculty of Design. At Maine’s Colby College he taught three classes, helped design two new general education courses for this fall, delivered six Sunday lectures for the general public. A kindly, cane-toting man who likes rambling talks and walks, Hudnut ended his year teaching 144 regular students—about a seventh of the college’s total enrollment.

¶For Frank Hurburt O’Hara, 66, onetime director of drama at the University of Chicago, the story was much the same. At the tiny (600 students) College of Idaho in Caldwell, Idaho, O’Hara laced his lectures with anecdotes about the great and near great of U.S. letters, was credited with tripling the enrollment in the American literature course. To O’Hara, the feeling was apparently mutual. Said one friend after his return from Idaho: “I’ve never seen him so full of steam.”

¶At Maryland’s Goucher College (for women), Classicist Harry Hubbell, 73, former professor of Greek at Yale, started out his year with six students, ended up with a record 40.

¶At North Carolina’s Davidson College, James Southall Wilson, 73, retired dean of the University of Virginia’s Department of Graduate Studies, had such a good time teaching Shakespeare (“The happiest academic experience I’ve had”) that he immediately accepted another job at Hollins College, Virginia.

¶At the University of the South (Sewanee, Tenn.), Clarence Ward, 70, former professor of the history and appreciation of art at Oberlin, chalked up an impressive record. As a result of his stay, the university has decided to set up a full-fledged department of fine arts, has asked Ward to return as a charter member.

With such samples of success, the New York and Whitney Foundations hope to inspire the hiring of other retired professors. The Whitney Foundation has a list of 350 scholars willing and able to return to work. All in all, says former Columbia College Dean Harry J. Carman, chairman of the foundation’s Division of Humanities, it is quite a reservoir—”which too often goes unused.”