The Head of Subway U

A slum kid's Harvard, New York City's tuition-free City College has produced such men as Financier Bernard Baruch and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Started 114 years ago, it sparked the founding of six more colleges to form a huge municipal system that now has 91,450 students. By winning the right to grant doctorates, the system this month became "the world's largest university." This week City University installed its first chancellor: John Rutherford Everett, 42, former president of Virginia's little (675 women) Hollins College, who calls his new job "probably the roughest in U.S. higher education."

The Oregon-born son of a Texas college president, Everett is the great-great-great-nephew of one of history's unlucky men: Edward Everett, the Massachusetts Senator (and onetime Harvard president) who delivered the two-hour "main" Gettysburg address, only to be upstaged in two minutes by Abraham Lincoln. Swift descent also once felled John Everett, when at 15 he took a sleepwalking dive from a third-floor window, breaking 36 bones and earning 4-F status in World War II.

Big, poised Scholar Everett has since risen steadily. A graduate of Missouri's Park College ('42), Everett in three years earned a bachelor of divinity degree at Union Theological Seminary, an M.A. in economics and a Ph.D. in philosophy at Columbia University. By 1948, he had been a philosophy professor at Connecticut's Wesleyan University, chairman of the philosophy department at Columbia's School of General Studies, and campaign manager for Connecticut's Democratic

Governor Chester Bowles. At 31, he became president of Hollins College, in ten years turned it from a sleepy school to a vigorous campus with a national reputation for research in teaching machines.

The measure of Chancellor Everett's job is that it took three years to fill: hundreds of candidates refused it. At $25,000 a year, the pay for heading Subway U is puny compared to the headaches. While carrying out the orders of New York's unwieldy 21-member Board of Higher Education. Everett must mollify the presidents of seven nominally independent colleges. While finding ways to accept more students, especially from New York's submerged Negro and Puerto Rican population, he must maintain City's traditional standards. Withal, he must develop stiff doctoral programs and research that match the best in the U.S. He took the thankless job, says Everett, "because I would have always wondered why if I hadn't. It's the most interesting higher education job in the country."

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