BLATANT

By TIME

Most university presidents, secure in the cloistral detachment of their office, let their dignity fatten in silence, and save their wind for civic holidays, feasts of the church and times of national disaster. Magazine editors, moved by a similar but perhaps sincerer humility, often preserve the newspaper tradition of anonymity. But when a man achieves great eminence he shatters these conventions even as a growing lad might burst by stout activity the short breeches that fitted him so well a year before. So it is with Glenn Frank, onetime editor of the Century, newly chosen president of the University of Wisconsin (TIME, May 25). Last week in the Editor and Publisher, the name GLENN FRANK was spread across two pages of a newspaper syndicate's advertisement --an advertisement which perhaps exceeded in blatancy any publicity ever offered to the president of a great university or the editor of a conservative magazine.

BEGINNING SEPTEMBER 21-- A DAILY EDITORIAL

By One of America's Most Popular Writers, Lecturers, and Widely Discussed Figures in Public Life

The splurge continued: "Early in the spring of this year Glenn Frank signed a contract with us agreeing to write a daily editorial for news- papers, beginning in the fall. We instructed a news-clipping bureau to send us all press notices. . . . and were inundated with clippings, from full-page feature pages to two-inch news-items--ELEVEN HUNDRED AND NINETY-FOUR up to date and more still coming." Appended was a list of the newspapers which had already subscribed for the daily editorial together with statement--made in strict accordance with the U. S. mode of measuring a man by his earning capacity--of the fees received by Editor Frank--once $50 a lecture--now $500. "His fees for one average month totaled $6,500."

Blatancy, always objectionable, is less so when its noise calls attention to a man of worth, and Editor-President Frank, as everyone knows, is a gentleman of the highest abilities. Of him wrote Albert Edward Wiggam in his famed book, The New Decalogue of Science: "Glenn Frank's career, in my judgment, will be one of the world events of the coming generation. His genius, scholarship, poise and insight represent the new type of statesman, of whom I have endeavored to write."