L.S.E.'s Bold New Head

It scarcely looks like a pillar of academe. Crammed into six dowdy buildings on a narrow lane hard by the Strand, it has no spacious lawns or gracious halls. But the intellectual life of the London School of Economics has never been cramped.

Founded in 1895 by Social Reformers Beatrice and Sidney Webb, the L.S.E. has been noted for a unique blend of scholarship and social activism that has attracted an international array of agile minds, both to teach and be taught.

Its distinguished scholars have included Bertrand Russell, Arnold Toynbee and Harold Laski. Among its students have been several foreigners who went on to become heads of state, including John F. Kennedy, Jomo Kenyatta and Pierre Trudeau. Now a foreigner has been chosen, for the first time, to become head of the L.S.E.

A brash, bold German, Ralf Dahrendorf, 44, will become the L.S.E.'s eighth director when he takes office next fall. A specialist in sociology, Dahrendorf is currently the member in charge of science and education for the European Commission. His selection by the LS.E. (to replace Retiring Head Sir Walter Adams) is regarded by many as a symbolic move designed to bring Britain closer to the European community.

"It is significant," commented a member of the selection committee, "that he is committed as a European rather than a nationalist."

Just as important, of course, is Dahrendorf s spectacular career both in and out of education. After studying philosophy and classics at Hamburg, Dahrendorf obtained his doctorate in 1956 from the L.S.E. (where he also met his English wife Vera). He has since taught in Germany at the universities of Hamburg, Tubingen and Constance (a progressive institution he helped found in 1967), as well as at Harvard and Columbia in the U.S.

He also served an impatient few months as No. 2 man to West German Foreign Minister Walter Scheel before joining the European Commission in 1970. A year later, Dahrendorf shook the European Establishment by calling the European Parliament a "farce" and its Brussels administration a "bureaucratic leviathan."

Dahrendorf denies any malice in his attacks. "For me," he says, "criticism is an expression of love rather than detachment." Nevertheless, some colleagues note that he is headstrong and cannot get along with plodders. An intellectual gadfly with acerbic wit, Dahrendorf clearly likes to speak his mind.

Altogether, Dahrendorf should fit his new post well. From the days when the Webbs' friend George Bernard Shaw complained about their "incorrigible spooning over social statistics," the school has proved a lively intellect base for reform. Says Dahrendorf friend, Columbia Historian Fritz Stern "He is by temperament a radical reforner who has at last found a liberal home

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