Portland to Manhattan?

New York City's Board of Higher Education, which runs four municipal colleges (C. C. N. Y., Hunter, Brooklyn and Queens), is unafraid. It braved the wrath of Bishop William T. Manning and other moralists last spring by appointing Bertrand Russell a C. C. N. Y. professor.*Last week it again was rash. It prepared to appoint as president of C. C. N. Y., one of the nation's biggest colleges (25,810 students, day and evening), Dexter Merriam Keezer, president of small (550 students), progressive Reed College, Portland, Ore.

Dexter Keezer quit college (Amherst) to be a machine-gunner in World War I. Later he got his Amherst A. B. and a Ph.D. in economics from the Brookings Institution, taught three years at Cornell, Colorado, North Carolina, quit teaching to be Washington correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspapers and later an editor of the Baltimore Sun. He went to Washington as executive director of NRA's Consumers' Advisory Board, landed in Portland as Reed's president in 1934.

Reed's students first met their new president when he picked himself up from the mud at the losing end of the freshman-sophomore tug of war (TIME, Oct. 29, 1934). Promptly christened "Prex Dex," long-faced Dr. Keezer lived up to his unorthodox introduction. When a visiting Japanese professor left his boots outside his door in Keezer's house, "Prex Dex" blacked them himself. An ardent fisherman, he gathered Reed students in his basement for classes in fly-tying. He also brought intellectuals of all political shades to talk to the students, advertised the college so skillfully that it soon had to turn applicants away.

Last week a special C. C. N. Y. committee, having considered 60 candidates in its search for a president was ready to report. Its unanimous choice: Dexter Keezer. The Board of Higher Education was prepared for conservative opposition to Dr. Keezer. To its surprise, the storm came from another quarter.

Brandished before the board was a letter from William Bishop, vice president of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen. Dr. Keezer was the neutral member of the Railway Labor Board in Chicago, and as such decided some 60% of his 101 cases in favor of employers, 40% for the unions. Wrote Mr. Bishop: "He is the most biased . . . man I have ever come in contact with. . . ."

Unimpressed, the college committee adjourned for two weeks.

*Overruled by two lower courts, the Board was still trying last week to carry to New York's Court of Appeals its fight to make the Russell appointment stick.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.