Wanted: Brains

Publisher Samuel Irving Newhouse, 64, has good reason for believing that journalism is far from a dying profession. After four decades of shrewd trading (TIME, April 6), his flourishing empire is worth about $175 million, includes 14 newspapers, five TV and three radio stations, Street & Smith Publications Inc. and Conde Nast Publications Inc. (Vogue, House & Garden, Glamour). To keep it flourishing, the empire at his death will go into a nonprofit educational trust, the Newhouse Foundation; the business will be run by his two sons, S.I. Jr., 32, and Don, 30. This week the first fruit of the plan dropped on Syracuse University: $2,000,000 for an imaginative expansion of the university's journalism school, to be known as the Newhouse Communications Center.

No college man himself, Newhouse chose Syracuse partly because his two sons went there (neither graduated), partly because he owns the city's two daily newspapers, Syracuse's morning Post-Standard (circ. 98,699) and evening Herald-Journal (circ. 130,000). Newhouse also believes that journalism schools are just as profitable as journalism, and his will be no small-change operation. The new center will be an eight-acre complex of facilities for training and research in the whole spectrum of communications: newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, audiovisual education, speech, literacy, public relations, scholarly publishing. Under Dean Wesley Clark, it will draw heavily on other disciplines: history, political science, economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology. What Publisher Newhouse hopes for is a center to attract "the best brains at all levels"--students, editors, publishers, statesmen. Since this will cost far more than $2,000,000, Newhouse has pledged "whatever is necessary for its completion."

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