The Peacemaker

One of the surest ways a board of trustees can anger the faculty of a college or university is to pick as president a man who has never 1) been a scholar, 2) earned a Ph.D.. or 3) taught a class. Last week the trustees of the Consolidated University of North Carolina picked just such a man--but not a single professor voiced even a hint of an objection.

The man the trustees picked to run their three campuses (the University at Chapel Hill, the State College of Agriculture and Engineering at Raleigh and the Woman's College at Greensboro) is William Clyde Friday. 36. Born in Dallas, N.C., he took a degree in textile engineering at State College in 1942. After serving in the Navy, he went back to the university for a law degree. In 1951 President Gordon Gray, onetime Secretary of the Army (Truman Administration), made him his special assistant. Last March, four months after Gray resigned to devote full time to Government service as Assistant Secretary of Defense under Eisenhower, his man Friday became acting president. The appointment was to be only temporary : for its permanent president, the university wanted a name with a good deal more academic prestige.

As the months passed, the university began to change its mind. Partly because of Gordon Gray's long absences, the three campuses had lost some of their former stature, and each was torn by faculty bickering. The medical school and affiliated North Carolina Memorial Hospital blamed each other for the hospital's mounting deficit. At Raleigh, the engineering, physics and mathematics departments were at each other's throats over who would be in charge of the new nuclear reactor. Meanwhile, at Greensboro, the campus was split down the middle because of an overeager chancellor's efforts to reform the curriculum.

With unruffable good nature, Friday swept all these problems away. He placed the medical school and hospital under one man. shifted a few professors around at Raleigh, managed to get the Greensboro chancellor to resign. He restored the peace, and gradually it became obvious that Friday was the man for the presidency. "He is the kind of person," said one professor, "who can humanize the scientists and Simoniz the humanists."

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