Southern Inventory

Last week one of the South's leading universities and its leading college for training teachers, which face each other across Hillsboro Ave. in Nashville, Tenn., each installed a new chief. Vanderbilt University took as its third chancellor, big, venturesome Oliver Cromwell Carmichael, 46. George Peabody College for Teachers took its fifth president, scholarly Psychologist Sidney Clarence Garrison, 50. All week the two campuses shone with such a collection of academic finery as the South had not seen in decades. From rostra thundered Princeton's President Harold W. Dodds, Johns Hopkins' President Isaiah Bowman, U. S. Public Health Service Surgeon General Thomas Parran, American Bar Association's President Arthur T. Vanderbilt, scores of other bigwigs. No mere installation of officers had instigated all this big talk. Pedagogues and laymen had gathered to take stock of Education in the South. Excerpts from the inventory:

P: National Education Association's Dr. Howard Dawson: With one-third of the nation's children, the 14 Southern States account for only one-sixth of the nation's expenditure for public education.

P: Louisiana State's Graduate School Dean Charles W. Pipkin: The 37 libraries of Southern universities boast only 5,121,115 books, less than Harvard and Yale, with a joint 6,526,113.

P: Duke University's Medical School Dean Wilburt C. Davison: The South's twelve four-year medical schools in 1936 turned out only 764 doctors, not enough; if all stayed in the South, to replace doctors who died.

P: Chancellor Carmichael: The South has so few universities offering first-grade graduate work that many of its best brains go north to study, never to return.

Vanderbilt University, which today has 1,607 students, a $6,775,000 plant and $22,500,000 endowment, was urged to lead the South out of. its educational wilderness. The University owes its eminence to Oliver Carmichael's predecessor, old James Hampton Kirkland (TIME, June 21, et ante), who in his 44 years as chancellor wrested control of the institution from the Methodist Church, raised its scholastic standards, boosted its endowment from slightly more than $1,000,000 to $22,500,000. Nearly all the endowment and plant came from three igth-Century industrial Titans--$4,000,000 was Vanderbilt money, $18,500,000 Rockefeller money, $2,790,000 Carnegie money.

Broad-shouldered Oliver Carmichael was self-educated in the schoolroom and library built by his father, an Alabama farmer, for the family's seven boys and three girls.* At 15 he was ready to go to the University of Alabama. He went on to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, interrupted his studies to work for Herbert Hoover's relief commission in Belgium, to go to India, take a fling in General Smuts's East African Army. He was twice mistakenly arrested as a spy. When he arrived in Alabama to enlist in the U. S. Army in 1917, barely 25 miles from his birthplace he was arrested for the third time because a deputy sheriff was suspicious of the foreign stickers on his luggage. After the war, Oliver Carmichael taught French in a Birmingham high school, was nosed out as a candidate for Congress in 1920, became president of Alabama (Women's) College (1926-35), then went to Vanderbilt as dean of the graduate school and senior college.

By last week Oliver Carmichael thought he knew very definitely what Vanderbilt and Southern education need: money. He proposed that Vanderbilt and Peabody, which have a close working partnership, enlarge their graduate department to give doctors' degrees in at least 15 fields. And he bluntly informed the South that it should stop depending on the gifts of Northern capitalists, should pay its own educational way.

*The Carmichael children spent an aggregate of some 60 years in college; all seven sons have doctors' degrees.

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