New Blood for Brown

College administrators who stay too long tend to be "complacently pleased" with themselves, Brown University's President Barnaby C. Keeney told a commencement audience in Providence last June. Keeney, 51, obviously believes in practicing what he preaches. Last week, after ten years and five months as head of the nation's seventh oldest (201 years) institution of higher education, he stepped down to make way for a new president: Ray L. (for Lorenzo) Heffner, 40, currently vice president and dean of faculties at Indiana University.

A tough-minded scholar (specialty: 13th century history) who won a combat Silver Star in World War II, Keeney never suffered from complacency himself. During his administration, Brown's operating budget tripled to $25 million a year; its endowment doubled to $55 million, and the value of its physical plant doubled to $40 million. Two years ago, Keeney initiated a new admissions policy under which 10% of the places in Brown's freshman class (about 650 students) are reserved for youngsters whose grades ordinarily would not qualify them for an Ivy League college--but who exhibit some "outstanding characteristic." In 1964 he started a "big brother" exchange program with tiny (500 students) Tougaloo College of Jackson, Miss., the state's only integrated college. Keeney has never ducked away from controversy: last October he stoutly defended his director of health services, Dr. Roswell Johnson, who had prescribed birth-control pills for a handful of marriage-bound students at nearby Pembroke, Brown's female counterpart.

Keeney will stay in Providence until next June, showing Successor Heffner the ropes. Then he will move to Washington, D.C., to take over as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities--a job to which he was appointed by President Johnson last November. Brown's future appears to be in good hands. Despite his thick spectacles and scholarly mien (he is an expert on Elizabethan drama), new President Heffner is no educator of the ivory-tower school: at one time or another, he has worked as a "powder monkey" handling dynamite, as a production-line laborer in an inner-tube factory, and as a popsicle salesman.

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