Somebody Unacademic

Ernie Pyle was only kidding when he called William Edwards Stevenson "a dean of women." Bill Stevenson was a handsome Wall Street lawyer, who during the war ran the Red Cross in Britain, then in Africa and Italy. Last week, at 45, Bill Stevenson formally became an educator. He took on the presidency of Ohio's 113-year-old Oberlin College.

Oberlin, the first U.S. college to admit coeds, is a smalltown, nondenominational but pious school. (Distinguished alumni: Robert A. Millikan, H. H. "Daddy" Kung, Lucy Stone.) Stevenson has visited Oberlin just once, "to look it over and get looked over." Oberlin didn't want somebody with hardened academic arteries. They wanted a businessman with some fear of God in him, and a talent for raising money.

Bill Stevenson has had long experience in raising and spending money for philanthropies; for the other point, he is a preacher's son,* and the brother of twin missionaries. Academically, he is best remembered for athletics and popularity. He beat Oxford for Princeton in the quarter-mile in 1921, and beat Princeton for Oxford in 1925. He helped set an Olympic relay record. ("As an athlete now, though, I'm pretty emeritus.") His wife "Bumpy" likes to say that she chased him to England in the '20s to propose, followed him again from England to Italy as a Red Cross worker. They have two daughters just about ready for college. Stevenson dislikes the low state of radio and the comic strips, and thinks that maybe education is at fault ("too much stress on vocation, not enough on thinking"). Says he: "I think we have to get some adults into the world."

*His father, the late Rev. J. Ross Stevenson, was president of Princeton Theological Seminary, U.S. Presbyterianism's largest.

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