New Presidents

At M. I. T. At Wooster, Ohio, last week an old man who had recently had a leg amputated at the hip was made very happy. He was Dean Emeritus Elias Compton of the College of Wooster. He had just learned that his son. Professor Karl Taylor Compton, chairman of Princeton's physics department, had been made 11th President of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Surprised and delighted, said he: "I didn't even know he was being considered for the place until we got word from friends who read the morning papers. . . . Our greatest concern when Karl was a boy was that he would never be interested in anything but play. He had a football suit when he was in the grades and it seemed as though he wore it most of the time."

To make a place for its new President. M. I. T. reorganized its executive body in thoroughgoing fashion. Dr. Samuel Wesley Stratton, retiring President, now becomes chairman of the executive board and corporation, Big Businesslike, as befits the foremost U. S. technical college.

When Chairman Stratton selected President Compton as his successor he chose a man after his own heart. Both are midwesterners, both are physicists, both like to tinker, neither is an M. I. T. man. In its 65 years M. I. T. has had but one alumnus for its President.

Alert, 42-year-old President Compton. like his father, is a Wooster graduate (1908). He taught there one year, then at Reed College (Portland, Ore.), then at Princeton where he was made an assistant professor in 1913. During the War he was an aeronautical engineer in the Signal Corps. The year following he was associate scientific attache at the U. S. Embassy in Paris. As outside jobs, he is consulting physicist for the U. S. Department of Agriculture and for General Electric Co.

Next July, when he takes office, President Compton will have charge of 487 teachers, 2,868 undergraduates, and the nation's "Brightest" and "Second Brightest" boys--Wilber Brotherton Huston and Charles H. Brunissen, winners in last summer's Edison examinations (TIME, Aug. 12 et seq.).

At Washington & Lee, last week, people were getting used to a new president, Francis Pendleton Gaines, who has been chief executive of Wake Forest (N. C.) College for the last three years. President Gaines was likewise getting used to W. & L. and its 181-year traditions. Not far from his new house lie the bones of Henry ("Light Horse Harry") Lee, Princetonian, Revolutionist, and his heroic son Robert E. Lee (W. & L.'s eighth president), and his grandson George Washington Custis Lee (W. & L.'s ninth president).

Although the college is comparatively poor in worldly goods, there is still a $3.000 annuity from George Washington to administer, and on Decoration Day the president of W. & L. must bear in mind his alumni who enlisted in a body in '61 as the Liberty Hall Volunteers, taking the name of one of the institution's early titles. The board of trustees to whom he is accountable includes Democrats Newton Diehl Baker and John William Davis.

At the college which President Gaines is leaving there is also a ripe tradition of the Old South. Wake Forest's patriarch, President Emeritus William Louis Poteat, was graduated in the class of 1877, and shaped Wake Forest's destinies for 22 years. It was Grand Old Man Poteat, along with President Harry Woodburn Chase of the University of North Carolina, who kept the state from committing itself to an anti-Evolution law (1925).

Of Dr. Poteat and his works his son-in-law, Author Laurence Stallings (Plumes, What Price Glory?) wrote, while the controversial fires of Evolution crackled and blazed: "A great many of the faithful [Baptists] lumped all scientific intelligence under the opprobrious pseudonym of 'Poteatism'. . . This Luther set out for the Diet of Worms, which was the forum of the University of North Carolina, where he had been asked to answer the challenge of 'Can A Man Be A Christian Today?' . . . President Chase risked his neck by pronouncing it the 'most important document in the history of the South.' "

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