One of the Ablest

To any stranger seeing him for the first time striding along the campus of Princeton University or lunching with the boys at the Quadrangle Club, Robert Francis Goheen (rhymes with so keen) would hardly seem to be more than a typical Ivy-League graduate student. He has the uniform crew cut, usually wears the standard tweed jacket. But at 37, Assistant Professor Goheen is a first-rate classicist who has won the devotion of his students and the respect of his elders. Last week, after more than a year's search for a successor to retiring President Harold W. Dodds, the trustees of Princeton decided that Goheen was just their man.

The son of a Presbyterian doctor-missionary, Goheen grew up in India, got his first taste of U.S. education when he entered Lawrenceville as a junior in 1934. Two years later, dropping him off at Princeton, his parents told his freshman adviser: "We've got. to return to India. Please look after this boy." Little care was needed. Goheen made both the varsity soccer team and Phi Beta Kappa. After a year of graduate study, he carried the habit of success into the Army, rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Ist Cavalry Division in the Pacific.

At war's end, he was doubtful about returning to the academic life. But his fatherly former freshman adviser, Chairman Whitney Oates of the classics department, had no intention of letting Goheen out of Princeton's sight. He saw to it that his former student received one of the first four Woodrow Wilson Fellowships designed to attract young talent into teaching. In 1948, Goheen got his Ph.D., settled back into the pleasant routine of faculty life.

In class, waving an inevitable cigarette about, he packed his lectures with so much information that writers' cramp became universal among his students. In 1951 he published his Imagery of Sophocles' Antigone, which, in bringing the techniques of 20th century literary criticism to classical scholarship, is considered by his colleagues to be something of a scholarly "roadbreaker." But beyond his teaching and research, Goheen retained his one-of-the-boys quality--the amiable father of six children, the Sunday afternoon coach of a small boys' football team, the dufferish but genial companion on the golf links.

Last week, in view of the many big names (e.g., Adlai Stevenson) that rumor had bandied about as possible successors to Dodds, Goheen was as startled as anyone over "this elevation to sudden eminence." But like Harvard and Yale before it, Princeton had dipped into obscurity and pulled out a plum. "He is," says Classicist Oates of Goheen. "one of the ablest men in the whole damn teaching profession."

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