COME DOWN, PROFESSOR

Big, bustling, redhaired, rawboned Joseph August Brandt has lived most of his 46 years near, but never quite in, academic ivory towers. His job has been to make the ivory towers pay rent. He helps make bestsellers out of books which professors write.

Joe Brandt, an ex-Rhodes Scholar and ex-newspaperman, has successively headed three college presses: University of Oklahoma (where he wheedled out of John Joseph Mathews his Indian study, Wah'kon-tah, the first university press book to become a Book-of-the-Month); Princeton (which he left to become, briefly, president of Oklahoma), and the University of Chicago, where he has continued to publish salable books by scholars (a recent one. The Road to Serfdom, by Friedrich Hayek).

These experiences have given Joe Brandt some strong opinions on the uses of scholarship. Last week, about to leave Chicago for a new job (president of the Manhattan publishing firm, Henry Holt & Co.), he expressed them at summer graduation exercises. Said he: the Ph.D. is one of education's major ills. "Consciously or unconsciously," Brandt declared, "the American scholar has . . . spent his time on minutiae while Rome burned. . . . [He] is hopelessly inadequate to give the people intellectual and spiritual leadership. And unless our people have such leadership, all the battleships, all the planes, armies and atomic bombs and all the words in the treaties of peace soon to be written will not avail us against a future war."

The atomic bomb, said Brandt, "has proved there is no such thing as the absent-minded professor. When the scholar decided to turn over to the Government his knowledge of the atom, he at once assumed responsibility for the kind of Government which would use the atomic bomb. And since the Government is the people, he destroyed once and for all his right to ignore the people."

Brandt's earnest recommendation: "The institution of the doctorate should either be abolished by our universities or reformed so that it will reunite the people and the scholars."

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