The Student as President

As one antidote to campus disorder, dozens of U.S. colleges have lately invited students to share the chores of administration. Key faculty committees boast voting student members; boards of trustees bloom with recent graduates. Now the trustees of New Hampshire's Franconia College have gone a step farther. They have just named a graduate student as the school's new president. He is Leon Botstein--age 23.

The move was entirely appropriate for Franconia, a tiny (enrollment: 250) experimental college that has given its students a major voice in charting their studies ever since it opened in 1963. "We're not taking Leon because he's 23," says Dartmouth College Chaplain Paul W. Rahmeier, chairman of Franconia's trustees, "nor would we avoid him because he's 23." Botstein was chosen, the trustees maintain, because he was the best man. And he was not chosen by the board alone; a search committee of students, faculty and trustees interviewed him and recommended his appointment.

Mixed Results. For Botstein, who is completing his Ph.D. in history at Harvard and this year served as a special assistant to the president of the New York City Board of Education, Franconia will be a challenge, to say the least. Botstein will be the school's fourth president since 1963. Franconia's current president, Larry Lemmel, is quitting because the job kept him away from his family and scholarly pursuits.

Located on the site of a former resort hotel in northern New Hampshire, Franconia is spiritually somewhere between Alice's Restaurant and Alice in Wonderland. The place abounds with tutorials and individual projects. Freed from formal departments and competition for tenure (there is none), teachers shape their courses to their own interests and those of their students. Results have been mixed. Courses range from imaginative interdisciplinary projects to haphazard bull sessions. Some students, who seemed unable to learn anything at conventional colleges, have blossomed at Franconia. Others have found license as unsatisfying as control.

Franconia is not fully accredited and is financially in the red. Students freely transfer in and out of the college; though the school was changed from a junior college to a four-year institution in 1965, it has still granted only 25 bachelor's degrees. Since scholarship funds are very limited, the annual cost ($3,800) discourages all but the well-to-do. In addition to these problems, Botstein must overcome the difficulties of his age. He will be younger than most of his faculty and some of his students as well.

Still, he is optimistic. "A lot of us get too concerned about the permanence of institutions and pay too little attention to what they do," he says. He counts on the school's experimental aura to engage students in a day when collegians increasingly regard traditional education as "irrelevant." If Franconia can awaken more and more students to their own capacities, Botstein believes, the problems of funding and accreditation can be solved. However he fares, Botstein is firmly convinced that a president should never become inseparably tied to one institution. He expects to retire before he is 30, "to start from the bottom somewhere else."

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