Job Done

The man with the bald, freckled pate twinkled as he said: "I hope you won't applaud me when I finish this announcement. It might be misunderstood." Then Claude Moore Fuess (rhymes with peas) told his faculty at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass, that he was retiring--after 40 years, 15 of them as headmaster.

In the afternoon, "Jack" Fuess sliced his way with more than his customary abandon around the country-club golf course, allowed only an occasional dreihunderttausend Donner-wetter to escape his lips. At 62, Fuess thought that he and Andover both needed a change. His old friend Lewis Perry had resigned as principal of nearby Phillips Exeter Academy,* and that had helped decide him. "My generation has done its job. If I stayed here long enough, I'd become the

Grand Old Man, but I don't want to stay that long."

"The Bald Doctor," as Andover's 757 boys call him, had never wanted to be headmaster. He was the school's liveliest and most popular teacher, who enjoyed classroom work, also enjoyed his after-hours leisure, in which he wrote biographies (Choate, Webster, Coolidge). As the headmaster he still tried to call the boys by name, but often got them wrong. Said he last week: "My main regret is that I haven't been able to see as much of the individual boys as I wanted to. . . . I don't think I'm very popular now. A headmaster is never popular. He can't be."

Headmaster Fuess had, at least, been forthright. His first step was to abolish the compulsory classics; he found it "absurd to drive a boy with no aptitude for the subject two or three times through Caesar's Commentaries." He prefers to have only half his boys take Latin, "because they want to."

Over My Dead Body. Historian Fuess made four years of history an Andover requirement, despite a trustee who said that U.S. history would be made compulsory only over his dead body. ("In three years," Fuess calmly recalls, "he "was in his grave, and American history was required of every senior.") Fuess argues that too many private-school graduates "feel that they have performed their civic duty when they have grudgingly paid their taxes and damned the Government."

He believes that private schools are threatened by their own "Seven Deadly Sins": snobbishness, bigotry, provincialism, reaction, smugness, stupidity and inertia. "If we do not open our doors to well-qualified applicants, regardless of financial status,* the Government may step in. . . . Exclusiveness, at least in a social sense, cannot persist much longer in our independent schools."

Another famous private school had a new head last week. Roxbury Latin, which, unlike Andover, still makes Latin compulsory for all hands, chose Frederick R. Weed, 41, as the youngest headmaster in its 300-year history. Weed went to public school, graduated from Harvard, was in banking before he took up teaching. A committee headed by Harvard's President James Bryant Conant, an old Roxbury boy himself, picked Weed for his new job.

* Andover and Exeter were both founded by the 18th Century Phillips family. * One-fifth of Andover's students get scholarships.

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