TEN TYPICAL AND ATYPICAL COLLEGE PRESIDENTS

Main job of a State university president is to handle his State Legislature. Big, blond, booming Robert Gordon Sproul, 48, an ambitious executive and politician-president of the University of California, who recently turned down a $50,000 bank presidency, gets on well with his. Moreover he runs though not the world's best, the world's biggest university, with 24,000 fulltime students, seven campuses. Minnesota's Guy Stanton Ford, 66, is Sproul's opposite--small, frail, quietly witty, a famed history scholar who favors the theoretical rather than the practical side of politics. His institution comes close to being the most enterprising State university. Five years ago its General College was a bold experiment to provide misfit students with a broad, unclassical education. Today it is widely copied.

Big Two in educational prestige among U. S. private universities are Harvard and Chicago. Both have added to their reputation since they got their present presidents, Chicago its Boy Wonder Robert Maynard Hutchins in 1929, Harvard its Chemist James Bryant Conant in 1933. Rawboned President Conant, now 46, has proved a cautious, canny administrator. Arriving when Harvard was becoming stodgy and losing renowned old professors, Conant hired brilliant young teachers, jabbed a hypodermic into stodgy places, but made no basic change in the Harvard system. President Hutchins, now 40, is impatient with all existing systems. Smart, handsome, charming, a crack money raiser, Hutchins appeared headed for undisputed place as alltime All-American college president until he soured his faculty by trying to remake Chicago on a medieval pattern. Sour or sweet, his faculty is stronger than when he arrived.

Wisconsin's students are fun-loving, friendly, athletic, many of them farm bred. Wisconsin's Clarence Addison Dykstra, 56, is serious, hardworking, cold, a political fencesitter. Arriving at Wisconsin two years ago to clean up after Glenn Frank, who had a feud with Governor Phil La Follette, Dykstra pacified the faculty in the same efficient way as he had handled Cincinnati's flood as its City Manager, but he has so far kindled no fire among faculty or students. Frank Porter Graham, 52, is called "Mr. Frank" by his students at the University of North Carolina. Generally rated the ablest U. S. State university president, he has helped make North Carolina tops in the South. He fought in the trenches during the World War, still fights with the Legislature and utility interests that attempt to silence his liberal professors.

Father Robert Ignatius Gannon, 46, is halfway through his six-year term as head of Fordham, biggest of the nation's Catholic universities. Like its football teams, Fordham is rough, tough, commercial. President Gannon, a onetime English and philosophy teacher, believes there is nothing wrong with Fordham football or fascism in Italy, plenty wrong with Progressive Education.

Said a salesman to a goateed fellow-traveler in a smoking car one day: "My line's skirts, what's yours?" Replied goateed, twinkling William Allan Neilson, president of Smith College: "That's my line, too." Smith's Neilson, 70, retires this month, after 21 years as president, indisputably the first wit among U. S. college presidents, as well as one of the most successful heads of U. S. women's colleges. Smith's girls adore him and hope that his successor also will be a man. Wellesley's girls are proud of woman's intellectual stature, of their comely campus on a lake, and of their young woman president, Mildred Helen McAfee, 39. Missouri-born and Vassar-educated, Miss McAfee taught in progressive schools, was dean of women at Oberlin before she became Wellesley's president in 1936. Tall, athletic, curly-haired, President McAfee likes to write detective stories in her spare time.

Progressive educators rate Quaker, co-educational Swarthmore as the No. 1 U. S. college, Frank Aydelotte as the ablest U. S. college president. Little Swarthmore aspires to cultivate its students' emotions and morals as well as their minds, is a good all around institution. Aydelotte, 58, a onetime Rhodes scholar, golfs in the low 80s, is a whiz at money raising, loved by his students, a good all around man.

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