On the Move in the South

The plague of higher education in the South has been its complacent "intellectual provincialism" and its dearth of leaders with the ambition to "rise above regional standards." So argued Allan M. Cartter, vice president of the American Council on Education, after a study of Southern universities. Yet Cartter also found signs of "a real educational renaissance" at four private schools that have in recent years acquired new presidents and got on the move.

These four--Vanderbilt's Alexander Heard, Emory's Sanford S. Atwood, Tulane's Herbert Longenecker and Duke's Douglas Knight--are all nationally oriented administrators who refuse to keep old Southern traditions at the cost of academic quality. Of the quartet, only Heard is from the South, showing how trustees of their schools reached out to seek the best available men anywhere. Yet Savannah-born Alex Heard, 48, is even more outspokenly critical of Southern educational provincialism than the three Northerners. "We in the South cannot duck behind the thought that if we show up in the rear ranks in national ratings, the ratings measure the wrong things," he says.

Self-Study. Political Scientist Heard came to Vanderbilt from the deanship of the University of North Carolina's graduate school. Taking over two years ago, he ordered a self-study in which 285 faculty and staff members produced a massive critical report. Heard read all 36 Ibs. of it, now uses it as a basis for measuring Vanderbilt's progress. He created a separate department of molecular biology and a division of bio-medical sciences, established a "distinguished professor" rank with high salaries to attract top talent, and overhauled the sociology department.

Heard argues that "the most pervasive aspiration of our time is for greater human freedom," insists that a university must "maintain an open forum" and defend the academic freedom of both faculty and students. He also stresses service to nearby Negro colleges: Vanderbilt now has faculty-exchange programs with Nashville's Fisk University and the cross-town Meharry Medical School, one of the South's main sources of Negro doctors.

Coke College. Wisconsin-born Sandy Atwood, 53, has similarly put new life into Emory, once known as the "Coca-Cola college" because of its endowment by soft-drink tycoons. Since his arrival in Atlanta from Cornell (TIME, July 19, 1963), he has recruited a more dynamic faculty, launched a $25 million fund drive, raised admission standards and tuition. "If you're giving good education, there's no reason you shouldn't charge for it," he says.

Atwood recently won high praise from his faculty when he came to the defense of Emory's controversial Theologian Thomas Altizer, whose death-of-God doctrine outraged Emory's Methodist-dominated trustees. Insisted Presbyterian Atwood about Altizer: "He feels he had an idea worth discussing. He has the right to do so." At the same time, Atwood finds certain qualities in his students that he feels non-Southern schools should envy. "These kids are not bearded ruffians and sloppy kids," he says. "They write thank-you notes after a visit to our house. Now that would never happen at Cornell."

Under Herb Longenecker, 53, a former vice president at the University of Illinois, Tulane became one of the South's first private schools to accept Negroes as undergrads. Once a commuter university, Tulane now draws its students roughly one-third each from the New Orleans area, the South and

Southwest, and the rest of the U.S. Since his arrival in 1960, Longenecker promoted a doubling of faculty salaries, drew up a ten-year plan to strengthen its senior faculty, created such crossbred schools as bioengineering.

Cosmopolitan. Doug Knight, 44, a Yale Ph.D. who headed Wisconsin's Lawrence College at the age of 32, came to Duke insisting that "we dare not be satisfied until we are a national force in every field which legitimately concerns us," (TIME, Sept. 13, 1963). He claims that Duke competes with any U.S. university "in salary scale and in the origin and quality of the faculty." He has raised $47 million so far in a new $187 million expansion drive, intends to double the size of the Duke library, already 1,716,000 volumes.

Duke's nationwide Board of Trustees is chaired by Ford Motor Co. Vice President Wright Tisdale and Knight himself is a member of M.I.T.'s governing corporation. With some 200 foreign faculty members and about the same number of foreign students, Duke is probably the South's most cosmopolitan campus. "You can't have a limited attitude toward race when you have all the races in the student body and on the faculty," says Knight.

Plenty of Southern private universities still seem to stake their reputations on the way their magnolias suffuse, or the proximity of beaches, or the absence of Negroes. In Alex Heard's opinion, they will suffer increasingly by comparison with those that feel the urgency of improvement. "Mediocrity breeds mediocrity," he says. "Excellence attracts excellence."

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