Grand Tour

When Harry Woodburn Chase in 1933 took over big, bustling New York University (12,072 students in those days), he had no trouble at all adjusting to the job. A onetime professor of psychology, Massachusetts-born Harry Chase had already served for eleven years as president of the University of North Carolina, for another three as head of the University of Illinois. N.Y.U.'s new Chancellor Chase was no man to be easily awed by size.

In 17 years, N.Y.U. grew accustomed to the chancellor's behind-the-scenes efficiency. He was a stately man of genial humor who played a "terrible" game of golf (average score: "above 100") and fished with a notable lack of success ("I sometimes think that fishes are easier to buy"). But he was a whiz when it came to streamlining his $18 million budget system, placing N.Y.U:'s seven libraries under unified control, or bringing order into the once chaotic graduate schools. Under him the $32 million N.Y.U.-Bellevue Hospital Medical Center and the new $3,000,000 Law Center got under way; enrollments boomed (fulltime students: 19,773).

Last week, a bit weary of running the nation's eighth biggest university, Chancellor Chase, 67, decided to resign "while I can still hope to look forward to some years of freedom." He felt that he had good cause to "seek a rest." By the time he actually retires at the end of the academic year, he will have been head of one major university or another for a stretch of 32 years, a longer tour of duty than that of any other university* president in the U.S.

-One college president -with longer service: Bowdoin's Kenneth Sills, 32 1/2 years.

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