Wriston to Brown

In Providence, R. I., last week 500 alumni gathered in Brown University's gymnasium for their annual dinner, heard addresses on "The State of the University," by Associated Alumni President Royal W. Leith, Rhode Island's Governor Theodore Francis Green, Vice President Thomas Baird Appleget of the Rockefeller

Foundation. Then up rose Brown's Vice President James Pickwell Adams to make an announcement of prime importance to all present. That afternoon, said Mr. Adams, the university corporation had accepted the petition for retirement of 69-year-old President Clarence Augustus Barbour, chosen his successor. He was Henry Merritt Wriston, who simultaneously announced his resignation as President of Lawrence College in Appleton, Wis.

The ten presidents Brown has had since 1764 were all Baptist ministers. A pious Methodist layman, big, bespectacled Educator Wriston was born in Laramie, Wyo., 47 years ago, went to Wesleyan University (Middletown, Conn.), got a Ph.D. in History at Harvard, returned to teach at Wesleyan. During the War he had a desk job with the Connecticut State Council of Defense, became a full professor at Wesleyan before being called to Lawrence in 1925.

Humming (enrollment: 979) and progressive, Lawrence is chiefly notable for the Institute of Paper Chemistry, a crack graduate school which President Wriston started in 1929. Under President Wriston's eleven-year administration, Lawrence has pioneered in holding free classes for the unemployed, renting paintings for student rooms, fighting subsidies to football players. An enthusiastic tennist, Dr.

Wriston likes to point out by way of contrast that Lawrence has a larger investment in athletic equipment per student than any other Midwestern college.

President-elect Wriston married a gracious Vassarette named Ruth Colton Bigelow of Springfield, Mass., has a daughter at Oberlin, a son at Appleton High School. He also has a black cocker spaniel named Robin, a desk exactly like George Washington's, a sizable collection of phonograph records ranging from Gilbert& Sullivan to Bach. He invariably reads while shaving. He will turn up in Providence for the second semester Feb.

I having broken in as his own successor Lawrence's Dean Thomas Barrows.

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