"Vigorous Sort"

When Historian Charles Seymour turned in his resignation as president of Yale University last spring (TIME, April 18), he gave the university corporation a year's advance notice so that its 19 members would have plenty of time to find "fresh leadership of the most vigorous sort" to replace him.

Last week the corporation made its choice: vigorous, bumper-jawed 43-year-old Yale history Professor Alfred Whitney Griswold. A Yaleman himself (class of '29), Griswold had started out with literary ambitions.* But after a summer stint in a Wall Street brokerage office, he went back to Yale to teach. Since then he has been a witty, popular instructor in the departments of English and history. In 1947 he became one of Yale's youngest full professors, meanwhile turned out a brace of scholarly, readable books (The Far Eastern Policy of the United States, Farming and Democracy),

The selection of friendly, unassuming "Whit" Griswold, who favors quiet tweeds and drives his own maroon jeep station wagon, came as a surprise. New Haven scuttlebutt had been tossing around the name of Secretary of State Dean Acheson ('15) and others. President-Elect Griswold seemed as surprised as anybody. Said he: "It was so sudden I've had no time to make plans. My wife is bearing up bravely ... I feel fine."

* Sample quatrain by undergraduate Griswold published in the Yale Record in 1928:

Why is it when the costly blare

Of jazz is on the perfumed air

The girl whose mouth is closed is rare

Why is it?

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