Goodbye, Messrs. Chips

Each year U.S. colleges and universities say goodbye to many a famed and favorite faculty man. Among those retiring in 1959:

The University of North Carolina's enduring Louis Round Wilson, 82, a prime mover in raising Chapel Hill to scholastic eminence, whose prudent management of the school's domed, 1,000,000-volume library (now named after him) made it one of the nation's best. Quaker-born Librarian Wilson graduated from Chapel Hill in 1899, there launched the South's first library science course in 1901, the school's topflight Extension Division in 1912, the University of North Carolina Press in 1922. Robert Hutchins lured him to the University of Chicago in 1932, where he spent ten years training future heads of university libraries from Columbia to California, was elected president of the prestigious American Library Association. Back at Chapel Hill as an active teacher since 1942 (Chicago regretfully retired him at 65), Librarian Wilson becomes professor emeritus, a peppery gadfly who deluges the chancellor with notes of advice, will soon launch his 31st book.

Harvard's .benign, bemused Werner Wilhelm Jaeger, 70, world-renowned interpreter of ancient Greek humanism, one of the first scholars to bear Harvard's exalted University Professor title. At nine, German-born Classicist Jaeger fascinatedly read his first Latin grammar straight through, at 25 took over the University of Basel's Greek chair, once occupied by Nietzsche. His biography of Aristotle (1923) revolutionized classical scholarship when he was still a young professor at the University of Berlin; his monumental Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture is a three-volume university, a gold mine of the ideas that nurtured Western man. He left Hitler's Germany in the '30s, taught at the Universities of California and Chicago before going in 1939 to Harvard, where the Institute of Classical Studies was set up especially for him. Fondly called "Zeus" by colleagues, Jaeger was one of Harvard's least pretentious teachers, delivered gentle-voiced lectures while gazing out the window with his hands on his round paunch, loved to answer his own questions to doctoral candidates as a kind of final blessing. Scholar Jaeger will stay in Cambridge, continue his great critical edition (ten volumes) of the works of Gregory of Nyssa,* the first such attempt since the French Revolution. Said Harvard Greek Professor John Finley in a farewell oration to Jaeger not long ago (following the remarks of Pupil Theophrastus to Master Aristotle): "Happy they with whom he lives, like Hesiod's people for whom the oak at its summit bears acorns, and in its middle branches honey."

Southern Methodist University's brisk, balding Robert Gerald Storey, 65, dean of the law school and founder in 1951 of the Southwestern Legal Center at S.M.U., one of the foremost legal laboratories in the U.S. Dean Storey, president of the American Bar Association in 1952-53, is a veteran lawyer who neither conceals nor advertises that he never got a law degree (he did not complete his undergraduate education until 1947). A small-town Texan, he got into practice by reading the law in books that he bought on credit, became a top Dallas attorney and served as U.S. executive counsel at the Nuernberg war crimes trials. Asked to become dean of S.M.U.'s low-grade law school in 1947, he built it into a thriving, well-financed institution, one of the country's best. Four years later he launched the Legal Center (TIME, April 30, 1951; Sept. 10, 1956), a brilliant idea to give U.S. and foreign lawyers a headquarters for topflight research. Fiery Attorney Storey ("I'm a great believer in the rule of law, not men") will continue as Legal Center president. "I don't know why anybody thinks I'm retiring," he says. "I've got enough work to keep me busy for a long time."

George Washington University's Dr. Winfred Overholser, 67, one of the nation's top professors of psychiatry, best known as superintendent of Washington's famed St. Elizabeths Hospital. Overholser's first interest was economics. A witty New Englander (Worcester, Mass.), he went to Harvard Business School, switched careers after a short stint as an attendant in a mental sanitarium. After medical school at Boston University, he wound up as commissioner of Massachusetts' department of mental diseases. When terrible-tempered Governor James Michael Curley fired him in 1936, U.S. Interior Secretary Harold Ickes hired him as head of St. Elizabeths, a federal hospital. Teaching at George Washington University, he concentrated on spreading psychiatry among general practitioners because "there will never be enough psychiatrists to go around." His sane humanism --he is a book collector, music lover, once served as moderator of the American Unitarian Association--stood him in good stead at St. Elizabeths, where he lives with his family. For 13 years he endured endless legal wrangling over his most celebrated patient, Poet Ezra Pound; but more important, he helped make St. Elizabeths one of the most enlightened mental hospitals in the U.S.

Columbia's slim, publicity-shy Robert Frederick Loeb (pronounced Lerb), 64, Bard professor of medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, one of the nation's top medical teachers. Son of famed Physiologist Jacques Loeb, discoverer of artificial parthenogenesis, Robert Loeb left the University of Chicago after his sophomore year in 1915 to enter Harvard Medical School, graduated magna cum laude. After residency at Johns Hopkins, Loeb switched to Manhattan's Presbyterian Hospital in 1921, helped administer the first insulin treatment for diabetes, pioneered in electrolyte physiology, discovered the first effective treatment for Addison's Disease. In 1947 he became Presbyterian's medical service director, in the same year Columbia's chief medical professor. No narrow specialist (he belongs to the American Philosophical Society), Loeb is a literate physician whose adroit editing for the last twelve years has kept Cecil's Textbook of Medicine the bible of U.S. medical students.

Georgetown University's courtly Tibor Kerekes (pronounced Care-a-kesh), 66, professor of European history, whose 32 hugely popular years in Washington have been a mere second act to an already crowded career in the maelstrom of World War I Europe. Budapest-born, Kerekes was a Hungarian cavalryman on the Russian front (he later lost an arm), became tutor to the Habsburg family in 1917 and claims he is the only living person who knows the ''true story" of the tragedy at Mayerling. Emigrating to the U.S., he tried orange growing in Florida, wound up in 1927 as assistant professor in Georgetown's then tiny history department (now one of the nation's largest) and chairman in 1947. Though Kerekes is first a teacher ("Because I can that way make contact with youth"), he has stayed close to the Washington pulse, advised congressional committees on Hungary. In 1956 he founded Georgetown's Ethnic Institute, will continue as director in retirement, trying to preserve, on paper at least, the rich native cultures of all peoples in the world "who are in danger of being obliterated."

Yale's Charles William Hendel, 68, topflight philosopher, who took over the Yale department 19 years ago and made it one of the nation's most renowned. Pennsylvanian Hendel hurried to Princeton in 1909 on the strength of what he had read about Woodrow Wilson's preceptorial system, graduated No. 1 in his class. After getting his Ph.D. there, he taught philosophy at Williams, Princeton, McGill University, won a reputation in Britain for a book on Hume and in France for one on Rousseau. Yale hired him in 1940 as Clark professor of moral philosophy and metaphysics. His main job: revamping the department, which then taught 469 undergraduates. Applying Wilsonian methods, Hendel set up Yale's seminar system, brought in top-ranking scholars (e.g., Paul Weiss), created a heady new atmosphere. This year one-third (1,249 students) of all Yale undergraduates studied philosophy, along with 82 graduate students culled from applicants throughout the world. Hendel will now prepare 20 lectures on theology for delivery in 1962 and 1963 at the University of Glasgow, under appointment to the famed Gifford Lectures (among previous American appointees: William James, Josiah Royce, John Dewey). Said Harvard's Paul Tillich recently of what Hendel wrought at Yale: "I know of no better philosophy department in the country."

Columbia's gentle, legendary Mark Van Doren, 65, whose thousands of never-the-same students in 39 years included Men of Letters Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling, Philosopher Mortimer Adler, Literary Gadfly Clifton Fadiman, Trappist Priest Thomas Merton, his own quiz-whiz son Charles. Van Doren is a Renaissance man out of Hope, Ill.--a Pulitzer prizewinning poet (Collected Poems, 1939), literary critic (The Nation), editor (Anthology of World Poetry), author of some 35 books. Not least was he a teacher, whose eclectic English 38 (Homer, the Bible, Kafka, Dante, Cervantes) was the most deceptively affecting experience on Morningside Heights. No literary geologist, Teacher Van Doren was an unanalytic celebrator of feeling, who could re-create a brief Homeric allusion to an ancient sight, sound or smell with a quiet anecdote of his own that suddenly exploded the passage into life. He lived what he read aloud and he was not above a genuine tear; Columbia may not see his like again for many a year. Retiring to his Connecticut farm, he will try his hand again at the lucid poetry that some compare to Frost and others to Dryden (his own standards: "Clarity, movement, vigor, plainness"). But first will come his first play, The Last Days of Lincoln, now being polished for Broadway next season. As Humorist James Thurber put it, describing him not long ago, Mark Van Doren is "so many men that I have to open my door and my windows when he visits me in order to let all of him in."

* Christian Bishop of Nyssa (372) in the Roman province of Cappadocia. St. Gregory was a poor administrator but a revered theologian and ecumenical influence, is known as one of the four great fathers of the Eastern Church.

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