New Mr. Smith

Smith College is one of the top U.S. schools for women, but its presidency is traditionally a job for a man.* Its retiring head man, Jonathan Swift scholar Herbert John Davis, who will leave in June after nine years in the president's office, had been plucked from the Cornell faculty. This week, Smith announced it had found his successor at Harvard.

Smith's new president is Benjamin Fletcher Wright, a bush-browed, pipe-smoking social scientist who looks younger than his 49 years. He was born in Texas, went to Texas public schools (in Austin) and the University of Texas, spent World War I as a private in Texas, and married a Dallas girl. In the early '20s, he took a Harvard Ph.D., later moved north and joined Harvard's faculty as an instructor in government.

Unlike retiring President Davis, who was happier editing Swift than running a college, Benjamin Wright is no stranger to administration. He was one of the authors of the 1945 Harvard report, General Education in a. Free Society (TIME, Aug. 13, 1945). As chairman of Harvard's Committee on General Education, he has spent the last three years in charge of an experimental program to divide the freshman curriculum into three balanced spheres: the humanities and the natural and social sciences.

Grappling with such matters, Wright has had to push aside some of his own work (including a book on the Federalist Papers, which he never got around to finishing), but he still takes time to read novels ("anything but detective stories"), listen to Mozart records and play with his two children and two cats. At Smith, one of his jobs will be to raise the $2,000,000 left to go in the college's $7,000,000 drive. Beyond that, he claims to have no revolutionary plans for Smith ("This whole thing has happened rather suddenly"). But Smith, he adds, will not become a female Harvard.

"For girls who want to go into the professional fields," he says, "the curriculum can be exactly the same as a curriculum for men. But most girls work for a while, then get married and have children. There is need for improvement in education for the days before marriage, and also for preparing for the life of the postgraduate mother--when the children have grown up and left."

* Among other big Eastern women's colleges, Wellesley has always had women presidents, Bryn Mawr switched to them in 1893, Radcliffe has alternated. Mount Holyoke, after ten madam presidents, chose Roswell Gray Ham in 1937; Vassar got its first woman president in Sarah Gibson Blanding in 1946.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.