FAREWELL, GROVES OF ACADEME

OUT of academe and into retirement each year go a few rare men who shaped not only individual minds but entire institutions--dynamic deans, prolific professors, reformers of old fields and creators of new ones. This year is no exception. Among the influential who have become emeriti are men whose words and works will be hard to dispense with and hard to forget.

Harvard's "dean of deans" Delmar Leighton, 66, is probably remembered more warmly by more Harvardmen than anyone else in the Yard. Alumnus ('19) Leighton spent 40 years giving errants a second chance and trying to hold Harvard to human scale. The son of a truck farmer, he "backed into deaning" after flying for the Marines in World War I, trying the textile business and teaching economics. As Harvard's first dean of freshmen in 1931, Leighton warmed up cold Cambridge by housing freshmen together for mutual aid. As dean of the college in 1952, he revitalized the famed house system by installing bright young professors as "senior tutors" to live with upperclassmen and make the houses the center of Harvard intellectual life. In 1958, Leighton drew commuter students closer to Harvard as first master of Dudley House, a nonresident center with everything (tutorials, athletics) except beds. Leighton thinks Harvard still "needs a lot of fixing." But he has done more than his share, and now he says: "I'm going to retire, period." Antioch's W. Boyd Alexander, 65, was nominally vice president and dean of faculty at the offbeat Ohio school (founded by Horace Mann), where students alternate between regular classwork and jobs far off campus. In fact, he was Antioch's "hidden president" for nearly three decades--the man who kept the academic fireworks safe and sane. Alexander began as a carpenter, switched to teaching math and industrial arts. Twice acting president, he guided five Antioch presidents in more than doubling enrollment (to 1,670) and faculty, and in raising endowment 25-fold. Antioch now has some 800 students off working in 35 states at any one time. A year-round calendar allows them to earn B.A.s in the standard four years; the jobs help them learn more than students at sheltered schools. Alexander's parting hope: that "we continue to be a force for constructive change in American higher education." The University of Wyoming is losing lean, granitic Samuel Howell Knight, 70, creator of the so-so school's one real claim to academic fame--a crack geology department that lures graduate students from Yale, Stanford and other distant schools. Geologist Knight spent his youth studying the badlands the way a city kid takes in the movies. He might have made a fortune in mining, chose instead to teach on a salary that for 30 years did not top $5,000. Knight is famous for stunning blackboard sketches using multicolored chalk, and for his summer science camp, which has drawn 2,000 collegians from all over the U.S.

One of Wyoming's wonders is the rare, 75-ft. brontosaurus skeleton that he recently assembled in the campus museum. Not least, Knight was the faculty wise man at Laramie for 47 years, a policy shaper under seven presidents.

His well-earned title: "Mr. Wyoming University." Leaving Berkeley is Architect William Wilson Wurster, 67, shrewd adviser during the university's $50 million building spree and creator of its new College of Environmental Design. Dean Wurster came to education late; he first built more than 5,000 houses around San Francisco, drew cheers from some colleagues and sneers from others (Frank Lloyd Wright called him "the eminent shed architect"). In 1944, Wurster, who delights in "ordered chaos," became the innovating dean of the architecture school at M.I.T. When the University of California called him in 1949, Wurster took over a feeble, fragmented architecture school that lacked even separate accreditation. Now revamped, it stresses unified environmental studies, from art, landscaping and materials research to big-think city planning. Wurster's unmollified critics call the school "mediocre," scorn its new building (unfinished inside to spur creativity) as "shocking and offensive." For his part, University President Clark Kerr is "amazed and delighted."

The University of Virginia's once sleepy law school is now a national citadel. One famed alumnus is U.S. Income Tax Boss Mortimer Caplin, who after graduating taught two others, Bobby and Teddy Kennedy. The change is due to Dean Frederick D. G. Ribble, 65, great-great-grandson of Chief Justice John Marshall. Himself an expert on constitutional law, Alumnus ('21) Ribble stayed on to teach because the $1,500 pay looked good at the time. He proved to be a gentle Socrates who "always had a question to answer your question," a sound scholar and a galvanizing dean with a flair for Ribblesque phrasemaking ("We want the aces, not mere kings"). Ribble's students once had to hold a dance to raise $60 for a new copy of Williston on Contracts; now Virginia's law library is the South's best. Ribble imported top Washington lawyers as guest lecturers, got the Army's Judge Advocate General School to settle near by. Ribble scorns mere grade getters, believes in producing men with "a sense of the meaning and the purpose of the law." He will continue teaching, stressing his fervent philosophy that law exists "to guide human affairs, to avoid friction, to make life fuller."

Harvard is losing its 'Enry 'Iggins: Linguist Joshua Whatmough, 66, who speaks everything from Sanskrit and Hittite to Celtic and Lithuanian. Whatmough (rhymes with know) pioneered scientific linguistics, shaped Harvard's department into a world center for mathematical study of language. The son of a Lancashire iron molder, he won scholarships to Manchester and Cambridge, taught Latin in French to Egyptians at the University of Cairo. For 37 years, always sporting a polka-dot tie and a blue cornflower in his lapel, he wrestled with statistical analyses of where language is headed. He calculates, for example, that by the year 3020, English will have lost nearly all of its irregular verbs (like sing, sang, sung) via "selective variation," a Darwinian survival of language that best fits the occasion. Whatmough is equally at home in the past (Dialects of Ancient Gaul), and gloats: "I can prove that Homer wasn't written by one man.

It knocks the literary critics into their cocked hats." Whatmough still bounces out of bed every day before 4 a.m., plans to continue researching and writing his autobiography--not to be published, he says reassuringly, until he is dead.

The world of U.S. foundations is losing its wise, undisputed dean: Henry Allen Moe, 69, boss of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for the past 37 years. A Rhodes scholar and an Oxford-trained lawyer, Minnesotan Moe gave "Guggie" fellowships the status of a U.S. intellectual knighthood, personally knighted some 5,000 artists, scholars and writers to the tune of about $1,500,000 a year. Moe's genius was to spot promising people in their 30s, give them time and money to make good their talents. No man has done more to nurture creative Americans (Physicist Arthur Holly Compton, Painter Jack Levine, Composer Aaron Copland, Novelist James Baldwin). Moe will continue such manifold interests as the presidency of the American Philosophical Society, but his infinitely painstaking talent hunt is over. Moe is not a bit sad: "I'm just as content as hell to turn this over to younger men."

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