A New Generation of College Presidents

would anyone become a college president? The job requires a peerless fund raiser, diplomat, orator and cop -- a man who can tame romantic radicals, soothe rival professors, work ungodly hours and somehow prove his own scholarly prowess.

In recent years, student revolts have broken many a college president and kept numerous campuses headless across the country. Even so, a whole new generation of willing masochists has lately taken over many of the nation's top campuses, including Bryn Mawr, Cornell, Hunter, Mount Holyoke, Penn State and Swarthmore. Among the brightest presidential faces:

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA. Martin Meyerson, 47, was the Harvard-trained head of Berkeley's College of Environmental Design in 1965 when he became acting chancellor after Edward Strong was eased out during the Free Speech Movement. Meyerson quickly proved that he could deal with both angry students and upset professors. A year later, he became president of the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he drew on his planning experience to spur action on the school's proposed move from an obsolete city campus to a new 1,200-acre suburban site, a plan now blocked by a dispute over the hiring of minority construction workers. Meyerson also streamlined Buffalo into eight faculties, each with its own provost and budget. With rare aplomb, he charmed campus radicals while pioneering the now widely used tactic of getting courts to enjoin seizers of campus buildings. Meyerson's diplomatic tal ents fit Pennsylvania's needs precisely. Despite its Ivy League aura, the 230-year-old university is crammed into a downtown Philadelphia campus, where the new president will have to reconcile both student rebels and resentful blacks in the surrounding ghetto.

MICHIGAN STATE. Clifton R. Wharton Jr., 43, is the first Ne gro to head a major American university that is predominantly white. He is less interested in his significance as a black "first" than in enlarging Michigan State University's commitment to his consuming interest -- combatting poverty and pro moting agricultural growth at home and in underdeveloped countries. An economist long associated with the Rockefeller-backed Agricultural Development Council, Wharton was endorsed for the presidency by a student-faculty screening committee and elected by the trustees over two other nominees, including Michigan's ex-Governor G. Mennen Williams. Ironically, Wharton's main problem at the giant East Lansing campus (40,000 students) may be with black militants, who suspect his Establishment background. A graduate of Harvard, Wharton is a director of the Equitable Life Assurance Society and the son of a former U.S. Ambassador to Norway. His pedigree spells authentic black power -- but not to the militants.

DARTMOUTH COLLEGE. John G. Kemeny, 43, is a short, mustached Jewish refugee from Budapest and a brilliant mathematician. He replaces the tall, Waspish dean of Ivy League college presidents, John Sloan Dickey, who is retiring after 25 years of transforming Dartmouth. A former State Department official, Dickey added 20 buildings to Dartmouth's campus, more than quintupled its endowment, and personified the very model of an idealistic Yankee headmaster. Kemeny, who arrived in the U.S. in 1940, is a new departure for Dartmouth. At 18, while at Princeton, he was drafted by the Army to work on the Manhattan Project, and later served as Albert Einstein's research assistant. He plays with computers as a hobby and is expected to accelerate change at the 3,800-student college. His first big problem may well be whether the Ivy League's only remaining holdout should grant undergraduate degrees to women. At a press conference after his appointment, Kemeny pledged that Dartmouth, which was founded in 1769 to "Christianize children of pagans," will increase its American Indian enrollment next year. As for women, he reserved judgment.

CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY. Harold Brown, 42, used to be Lyndon Johnson's Secretary of the Air Force -- a background that many collegians these days might equate with typhoid. Nevertheless Brown has become Caltech's new president (succeeding Lee DuBridge, who resigned to become White House science adviser) with the approval of the student advisory committee. A physicist. Brown impressed the student screeners with his modesty and candor about student reaction to his Pentagon associations. "Not only was I concerned," he said, "but everybody else was concerned." Says Stephen Horner, one of the students who interviewed Brown: "His answers were not always to our satisfac tion because he did not always have the answer, but he impressed us as being thoughtful and reasonable and quite brilliant."

DUKE UNIVERSITY. Terry Sanford, 52, is a former Governor of North Carolina who has used political office as a steppingstone to a college presidency rather than the other way around. A liberal Southern Democrat whose governorship (1961-65) was noted for racial tolerance and educational reform, Sanford now dismisses the possibility that he may run again in 1972. One of the first Southern governors to insist on equal opportunity in state and private hiring, he in creased the state's public school budgets by 50% and college budgets by 70%, reorganized the state university structure by creating a statewide system of community colleges, and established three new liberal arts campuses. "The university," says Sanford, "is going to be the place where things happen -- more so, perhaps, than any other place in American life, including the political offices that were available to me."

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