How to Be President

With a begging bowl for his orb of office and a football pennant for his sceptre, the college president can be a figure of fun--although few who have held the position have suggested that it is fun to be a college president. A veteran occupier of learning's most uneasy chair, Harold Stoke, now president of Queens College, tells in The American College President (Harper; $3.50) what it is like to sit there. Stoke's credentials are various: he headed the University of New Hampshire from 1944 to 1947, then took on the presidency of Louisiana State University and, until his resignation (TIME, Jan. 8, 1951), tried without much success to deflate big-time athletics, bring in out-of-state professors. Until his appointment last fall as president of New York City's Queens College, he did assorted deaning at the University of Washington and New York University. Some of his observations:

Alumni. "Most colleges are at their wits' end to find something, aside from financial support, which can worthily occupy the time and energy of intelligent alumni. To put it harshly, the support and good will of the alumni may not in itself mean much to an institution, but its absence can hurt. If there is not an apparent, active, or even noisy alumni support for a school, that fact will have to be explained to legislators, donors, parents and even prospective students."

Use of Buildings. "I know many campuses where a gunshot in the middle of the afternoon would not only hit no one; there would scarcely be anyone about to hear it. One president discovered that some 80% of all the classes in the university were held in the forenoon. He said it was hardly fair to ask the legislature for more buildings, unless the university made better use of the ones it had. After a year of urging, he succeeded in getting the proportion of morning classes reduced from 80% to 78%."

Big Football. "Reconciling the recruitment of competent athletes with conventional scholarship programs is an impossibility; yet it is equally embarrassing for a president to admit frankly that his college is in the business of entertaining, and that in order to be successful it is necessary to secure the entertainers."

Public Relations. "As a man of courage, [the president's] impulse may be to say 'Damn the torpedoes' and sail straight ahead. He may be sure that he will encounter torpedoes, and more likely than not, he will get sunk."

Professors. "An occupational hazard is arrogance. This grows out of the easy victories of the classroom, where he works with young people who know less than he does. He may thus unconsciously come to believe that business, politics, and educational administration would be much better managed if those in charge would only apply the same intelligence to their work that he uses in his own."

Presidents. "More skillfully than most men, they can make words do their bidding--idly filling the time, concealing their thoughts, or serving a purpose. Another surprising discovery for the college president is to find how little of his time, thought and energy goes into education. Eventually his preoccupation with 'housekeeping,' however irritating and deplorable it may be to a new president of scholarly interests, weans the mind and creates a mood of resignation. Soon he finds his colleagues making references to books he has not read." The average term for a college president, says Stoke, is four years.

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