The New Rector

In his early twenties, Ed Stettinius was a big man on the campus but nobody ever accused him of scholarship. He was student president, ran the University of Virginia's honor system, and its Y.M.C.A. He was also president of the IMPs, a club of roisterers, although he did not smoke, never drank, did teach Sunday School.

In almost four years at Virginia, interrupted by illness and a trip around Europe, Ed Stettinius earned only six of 60 credits needed for a degree; he flunked a course in Government. A latter-day president of the university said that with his "atrocious grades," Edward Reilly Stettinius Jr. would never last in school today. But Stet clearly earned his V in life.

By the time he was 31, Ed Stettinius, son of a Morgan partner, was a vice president of General Motors; at 37, board chairman of U.S. Steel; then, successively in Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, chairman of the War Resources Board, priorities director of 0PM, Lend-Lease Administrator, Under Secretary of State, then Secretary of State.

Last week 46-year-old Ed Stettinius returned to the University of Virginia--as its 26th rector, a post whose first occupant was Founder Thomas Jefferson (1819-26). Virginia had long since rewarded its No. 1 alumnus by giving him an honorary Phi Beta Kappa key. The University of California added an honorary LL.D.

As rector, handsome, white-haired Big Ed will be kind of chairman of the board of the university, while President John Lloyd Newcomb, 64, continues to shape educational policy.

Rector Stettinius hopes to keep a close eye on Virginia's new Woodrow Wilson School of Foreign Service and International Affairs.* He will invite his diplomatic buddies down to speak, will himself be a proper subject of study as onetime Secretary of State and first U.S. representative to the U.N. Security Council.

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Last fortnight one of the South's richest private universities (endowment: $30 million) picked a new head man. As fourth chancellor in 71 years, Tennessee's Vanderbilt University chose mild-looking, shy Harvie Branscomb, 51, dean of Duke University's divinity school. Alabama-born Dr. (of Philosophy) Branscomb, onetime Rhodes Scholar, was a World War I friend of Vanderbilt's outgoing chancellor Oliver Cromwell Carmichael, now president of the Carnegie Foundation. They served together in Belgium on the Hoover relief commission. At Duke University, he has been an outstanding leader in the intellectual and moral progress of Southern Protestantism.

*Endowed with $300,000 by ex-Commerce Secretary Jesse Jones, and 7,500 international lawbooks by goateed Alumnus (and onetime World Court Judge) John Bassett Moore. The new school's director: Colonel Hardy C. Dillard, boss of Virginia's wartime school for Military Government officers.

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