New Chancellor at Chicago

The University of Chicago knew just the kind of man it wanted to succeed Chancellor Robert M. Hutchins. He had to be someone who would not try to undo 20 years of Robert Hutchins, yet he must not be so dedicated to the Hutchins theories that he would contribute nothing new. Sighed one trustee: "We'll just start with the A's in Who's Who."

Last week, after four months of combing through the alphabet, the trustees announced that they had stopped at the letter K. The man they picked, out of 641 candidates proposed: Lawrence Alpheus Kimpton, 40, a University of Chicago vice president and a big, shaggy, good-humored man whom Hutchins once referred to as "240 pounds and all sweetheart."

Up from Deep Springs. The son of a Kansas City lawyer, Kimpton started out as a Stanford undergraduate with the idea of becoming a psychologist. But when he found out more about the subject ("Intelligence?" famed Psychologist Lewis Terman once said to him. "Why, that's what the Stanford-Binet test tests"), Kimpton turned to philosophy and took his PhD. at Cornell.

Since then, his career has been a happy blend of philosophy and administration. He first came to Chicago in 1943 after serving as head of a small college at Deep Springs, Calif., and dean of the college of liberal arts at the University of Kansas City. Kimpton's first Chicago job: to run the sprawling wartime Metallurgy Project which the university operated for the Manhattan District. He did it so well, and made so many friends in the process, that he quickly rose through a succession of posts--dean of students and professor of philosophy, dean of the faculties, and vice president.

How to Say No. In 1947 Kimpton left Chicago to become dean of students at Stanford. There he stayed for three years, a gregarious, wisecracking lion of campus parties, a lucid, articulate teacher of a course in Kant. In & out of class he plugged the Hutchins line so successfully that Stanford next fall is revamping its rigid curriculum to permit bright students to push ahead into advanced study. When Hutchins persuaded him to return to Chicago as vice president in charge of university development, Stanford students howled in protest. The Stanford Daily put out a special issue dedicated to him. The graduating class made him an honorary member.

As to what sort of line he would follow as chancellor of Chicago, Kimpton would give only a philosopher's hint last week. "I am not a Thomist," said he. "You might call me a neo-Kantian." Thomist or not, Kimpton seemed as good a successor to Hutchins as any the trustees would ever have found in the 3,200 pages of Who's Who. Explained one trustee: "He knows how to say no, and that's about three-fourths of the job of being chancellor."

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