A Birthday among Friends

Sarah Lawrence is entering its 18th year. To celebrate its coming of age, the small, progressive college in New York's suburban Bronxville, where girls in blue jeans carry the world on their shoulders, decided to drop its two-year diploma, emerged as a full four-year college, and hired a new president.

Sarah Lawrence College for girls was founded to extend progressive education to college age. It had few rules, no final exams, no required courses and little supervision. Residents of respectable nearby Lawrence Park used to charge Sarah Lawrence girls with having "too many Saturday night parties, too many bare legs and too many ukuleles." Smith and Radcliffe sniffed it off as an expensive (tuition: $1,700) and frivolous finishing school whose principal attraction was its nearness to Manhattan.

Weekends Only. Yet under the 16-year administration of able, Vassar-bred President Constance Warren, Sarah Lawrence attracted a gifted young faculty. Under its intimately personalized tutorial system, Sarah Lawrence girls directed their. own educations, with the advice of faculty "dons." Manhattan became useful not only for dates but for studying slums.

Last week Sarah Lawrence's 295 bobby-soxed, sloppy-joed undergrads listened intently to the inaugural speech of their new president, Harold Taylor. They were as relentlessly serious as any U.S. coeds, perhaps more so. "I resent having [the college] called a country club," said one of them. "I'm going tearing in town for the weekend, but I'll be back Monday wearing blue jeans."

Thursdays Off. Canadian-born President Harold Taylor studied philosophy at the University of Toronto, intending to write novels when he got through. At his graduation in 1935 he was astonished to find himself awarded a scholarship "as the best all-round man" in the class. He stayed on for an M.A., took his Ph.D. at London University. Then he got a teaching job at the University of Wisconsin, took out U.S. citizenship papers, and with a young English wife settled down in a remodeled barn for what he thought was a lifetime of philosophy and writing.

He had been teaching for five and a half years when Sarah Lawrence's Sociologist Helen Merrell (Middletoivn) Lynd, out shopping for a college president, spotted him. He accepted--with one reservation: that he could have Thursdays off ("I simply disappear and write").

As informal and curious as the liveliest of his students and only a scant dozen years older than most of them, handsome, curly-headed President Taylor (31) fits easily into Sarah Lawrence's small seminars and faculty evenings where students and tutors relax and argue in easy chairs or sprawled on floors. He is impatient of colleges that "rely more upon acquiring respectable opinions . . . than upon creating an attitude of mind which insists on examining opinion critically." Says he of his students: "They are just friends of mine. . . . We talk to each other and are quite unaware that one is a boy and one a girl." Say his students: "You can tell him anything."

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