Invited Back

Yaleman Archibald MacLeish ('15) has always had a partiality for Harvard, too. He graduated from Harvard Law School (1919), then taught at the college for two years. In 1938, as curator of Harvard's Nieman Fellowships, he shepherded the first group of newspapermen through their year at Cambridge. Last week Harvard invited MacLeish back for life. The Harvard Corporation picked him for the 178-year-old Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory, first held by John Quincy Adams and later by such great teachers as LeBaron Russell Briggs (1904-25) and Charles Townsend ("Copey") Copeland (1925-28).

To the Harvard English department, which approved the selection, MacLeish seemed an ideal choice. As a Pulitzer Prizewinning poet (Conquistador, 1932), MacLeish lives up to the latter-day Boylston tradition of creative rather than scholastic talent as exemplified by the last two holders of the chair: Poet Robert S. Hillyer and Poet Theodore Spencer, who died in January. He will receive upward of $10,000 a year, plus the legendary right to pasture a cow in Harvard Yard. To MacLeish, the job will mean one more turn to a career that has already covered a catalogue of callings, ranging from gentleman-farmer and journalist (FORTUNE, 1930-38) to Librarian of Congress (1939-44), Assistant Secretary of State (1944-45) and deputy chairman of the U.S. delegation to UNESCO's first general conference (1946). Though he was not telling what he intends to teach, it seemed a sure bet that he would take on English A5, the traditional Boylston course in creative writing.

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