Trouble at Trinity

Odell Shepard is an idealist, a writer, a lover of Connecticut, a wanderer and a teacher. So was Bronson Alcott, hero of Shepard's Pulitzer Prize biography (Pedlar's Progress). Alcott was a failure at almost everything he tried; Shepard has been a success.

While footslogging his way over most of the highways & byways of the Nutmeg State, Odell Shepard has peddled such friendly wares as good talk, homely poetry, corny songs and New Deal politics. He had sold them well enough by 1940 to get elected Lieutenant Governor. Defeated for re-election in 1942, he resumed the English professorship that he had held for an even 25 years.

Last week he "reluctantly" resigned from Hartford's (Episcopalian) Trinity College faculty. Then Trinity's best-known, most-respected professor, now 61, put the finger of blame on handsome young (35) Businessman-President George Keith Funston, one of his ex-students. Shepard charged Funston with refusing to grant him a year's leave for what he described as "acute mental fatigue." Said he: "I am left with these alternatives: to submit to a ruling [reflecting] lack of confidence in my veracity . . . OT to resign."

Last October Funston, an ex-radiator manufacturing and WPB executive, took over the 123-year-old college's presidency. His first businesslike step: to try to take academic control from Trinity's faculty committees. Shepard, implicitly questioning Funston's educational know-how, fought the move as "autocratic." When Funston got the chance to force his outspoken star to resign, he took it.

Shepard's many friends among Trinity alumni promptly bombarded Funston with protest telegrams and letters. But Trinity's executive committee, all conservative Hartford businessmen, backed up the president. They have long distrusted Shepard's "radical" notions about banks, utilities and big business.

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