An Academic for Exxon

For most of its long history, Exxon Corp. has insisted that only company officers could serve on its board; not until 1966 did it begin choosing "outside" directors. Now it is going far outside indeed. Its latest nominee for director is Martha Peterson, 57, president of New York's Barnard College, a mathematician with a Ph.D. in educational psychology and an amateur ornithologist, who admits: "I am not a person who is terribly knowledgeable about business and Exxon." The world's largest oil company has never had a female director be fore, and Peterson suspects that she was chosen largely because "they felt it is important to have a women on the board." She is already the only woman on the boards of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. and the Dry Dock Savings Bank.

Peterson believes that her academic background (she was formerly the only woman dean at the universities of Kansas and Wisconsin) will be useful to Exxon, which like other oil companies has come under bitter public criticism during the gasoline shortage. "People in the academic world have been very critical of big business," she observes. "I can represent a sympathy with that viewpoint to the board, present certain questions, and as I learn, I can interpret the answers to the skeptics." Stockholders will vote on her nomination in May, and meanwhile she will be studying the energy crisis, which, she says, "seems unexplainable." She looks forward to getting an explanation that she can take back to the campus.

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