New Man for Athens

U.S. Schoolteacher Homer Davis helped found Athens College in 1925, saw the academy for Greek boys slowly increase its first enrollment of 15 students and endowment of $10,000, took over as president in 1930. Last week, from the U.S.-Greek-run school in Athens, which tenaciously survived the dictatorship of John Metaxas (1936-41), successive occupations by Italians, Germans and British, and a painful postwar rebuilding, President Davis, 63, announced his resignation. President-elect, picked by Davis during a trip to the U.S. last month: Charles Marion Rice, 52, director of admissions and head of the English department (1941-57) at Connecticut's Choate School.

Schoolmaster Rice, who does not know Greek but is resolutely planning a cram course for this summer, will spend next school year learning his job under Davis. The school that he will take over in September 1960 now has 1,050 students, a healthy endowment of $1.6 million (contributed mostly by Greek-Americans, partly by Athenian Greeks), and a spectacular, 35-acre mountain campus. Teaching, done mostly in Greek, follows roughly the curriculum prescribed by the nation's Ministry of Education, including instruction in the Greek Orthodox religion. But the school is not an austere learning factory, as most Greek academies are. President Davis has spread the six-year Greek secondary-school program through seven years, has planned courses to goad students to independent thought, promoted an unheard-of give and take in classrooms. Davis will leave the school and Successor Rice with an encouraging financial boost; fortnight ago the Ford Foundation announced that it would give Athens College $250,000 for scholarships and salaries of Americans who will teach at the academy.

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