First Dean

"What would happen to Joe Di Maggio [of the American League's New York Yankees] if there were no National League?"

Propounder of this question was Harvard's spectacled young President James Bryant Conant. He believes that teachers, like baseball players, are kept on their toes by lively competition for their professional services. In no danger of slacking is Harvard's Economist John Henry Williams, world-famed authority on money and banking. But bald, caustic Professor Williams, despite the fact that his department conferred on him in 1933 its prized Nathaniel Ropes chair, left Cambridge a month later to become economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Since then a Harvard professor chiefly in name, he has been upped to the bank's deputy governorship, which the 1935 Banking Act converted into a vice-presidency. Last week, with a shrewd competitive stroke, Harvard's Conant tethered an elusive man and filled a difficult job. He appointed John Henry Williams as first dean of Harvard's slowly hatching Littauer School of Public Administration.

The Littauer School, endowed with $2,000,000 by Gloveman Lucius Nathan Littauer of Gloversville, N. Y. a year and a half ago (TIME, Dec. 23, 1935), will be the first formal attempt by a U. S. university to provide training for public servants. Such a school was the lifetime dream of President-Emeritus Abbott Lawrence Lowell whose standard work on The Government of England laments the absence of a U. S. counterpart to the university-trained British Civil Service. After accepting the gift of Gloveman Littauer, who once sat in Congress (1897-1907), Chemist Conant appointed a steering committee headed by Princeton's public-spirited President Harold Willis Dodds to engage in a preliminary survey. Since March the committee has been conferring privately with Government bigwigs, including Secretaries Wallace and Morgenthau. These and similar "exploratory sessions" will be all the gradually assembling faculty of the Littauer School will conduct until it is opened to students in the fall of 1938. By that time it will have moved its headquarters from old Hunt art museum to a new building, for which Founder Littauer earmarked $500,000 of his gift.

Taking up his duties immediately, Dean Williams announced: "As a result of these conferences it was determined to focus attention primarily upon those already in the Government employ. Thus the work in the school will be on a post-professional basis; the students will be men with governmental experience. . . .

"The school proceeds on these two general principles: first, it will serve as an agency for assisting the Government officials in utilizing the entire resources of the university. . . . Second, the school, through specially organized seminars, will be concerned with the study of questions of broad governmental policy."

To himself Dean Williams assigned a seminar on problems of fiscal policy, in which he proposes to discuss with young New Dealers "the political and social implications of Government spending." A stout political independent, John Williams has done Government service before and during the New Deal. President Hoover sent him to Geneva in 1932 to help draft the agenda for the World Economic Conference held in London the following year. In 1934 Secretary Hull dispatched him to South America to explore the governmental exchange control systems which were blocking the Secretary's free trade ambitions.

Apt to strike undergraduates as being unduly deliberate, Professor Williams thinks and speaks gravely, in keeping with his conservative suits, starched collars, and the heavy gold watch chain which he twirls. Harvardmen of every shade of opinion agreed that as dean of the Littauer School he will furnish a critical counterfoil to the Harvardman who has hitherto been the university's chief link with official Washington, enthusiastic Law Professor Felix Frankfurter.

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