Transmutation

A few months ago Chemist Glenn Seaborg talked warmly of the compensations of his calling: "Stable employment, reasonably good pay, and considerably less pressure and worry than many other groups--such as educators." Sometime in August, Seaborg, who won a Nobel Prize with Physicist Edwin McMillan for discovering plutonium (the pair also discovered berkelium, californium, four other elements), will leave his post as associate director of the University of California's Radiation Lab at Berkeley to become a fulltime educator. New job: chancellor of the university's Berkeley campus (18,981 students), replacing Clark Kerr, now president of the university (TIME, July 28).

A tall, blunt-featured man whose interests have long ranged farther than the laboratory, Seaborg follows Cal teams on out-of-town trips, turns up at locker-room wakes--and also fights football professionalism. In 1957 he became a leading teacher-by-television in the science series programmed by San Francisco's hot-shot educational TV station, KQED. He recently helped overhaul math and science teaching in California public schools.

At first reluctant to spend as much time away from the Radiation Lab as his new job will require, Chancellor-elect Seaborg has pledged himself to "keep uppermost in.mind the crucial and classical function of a university in society: to foster free inquiry and teaching under the highest possible standards of objective scholarship." But many scientists will still wonder whether one of the world's best chemists should pour himself into the world of university management--which, even at one of the best campuses in the nation, consists largely of parking problems, building plans and ruffled regents.

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