Angell to NBC

James Rowland Angell last fortnight ceremoniously completed a distinguished lifetime of service to U. S. education when he bestowed an honorary LL.D. on his friend Cordell Hull at his 16th and last commencement as president of Yale University. Three years younger than Secretary Hull, President Angell was bowing gracefully to Yale's rule that all faculty-men must retire at 68. All year Dr. Angell, who is lively as a cricket despite what he calls his "obvious and offensive senility," has made no bones of the fact that he was looking for another job. Last week he announced that he had accepted one, full-time and full-sized, as the first Educational Counsellor of National Broadcasting Co.

What NBC's President Lenox Lohr wanted was "imaginative and efficient guidance" in a field which stands as much in need of an organizing genius as did the cinema industry when it hired Will Hays 15 years ago. Educators have long been unsatisfied with the radio as an educational medium. Two years ago they gave the industry a scare by plumping in great numbers for the unsuccessful Fess and Wagner-Hatfield bills calling for a Federal allocation of wave bands for educational purposes. This year NBC is devoting a record total of 4,360 hours, 44% of the network's total broadcasting time, to a miscellany of speeches, lectures, concerts, meetings, all labelled "educational programs." Most of these are "sustaining" (non-sponsored) and of widely varying quality. When schoolmen and radiomen met last year at the call of the U. S. Office of Education and the Federal Communications Commission for a conference on educational broadcasting in Washington, upshot was that educators wanted more radio time, networks wanted better programs. This week Counsellor Angell will sit down with Lenox Lohr to learn about his new job which starts in September, and to which he will bring the administrative experience not only of a University president but of a onetime (1920-21) president of the Carnegie Corporation. For his services Counsellor Angell will receive exactly what he was reputed to receive from Yale, $25,000 a year.

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