The Polished Prof

To Dean William Taeusch of Ohio's little (1,000 students) College of Wooster, the new history instructor seemed just about perfect. He was a suave, scholarly Briton named Robert Peters. He had an impressive Oxford accent and an even more impressive array of credentials. A letter from Oxford's Magdalen College stated that he had an M.A. He apparently had another master's degree from the University of Adelaide in Australia. His specialty was medieval church history.

As far as Dean Taeusch could see, Peters lived up fully to his credentials. His Western civilization lectures were so polished that students flocked to hear them. He spoke at the Wooster Kiwanis Club and dazzled the local chapter of the American Association of University Women. He entertained graciously, and his personal library was rated excellent. An accomplished organist (he happened to mention, in passing, that he had a music degree from the University of Durham, England), he played during several services in the college chapel. Since he also let it be known that he had studied at St. Aidan's (Theological) College, he was asked to deliver a couple of sermons.

Word to the Wise. One day during spring vacation, Dean Taeusch began boasting about his find to a friend in Pittsburgh. To his surprise, the friend had already heard about Robert Peters. Back in 1948, Peters had been employed as a publicity secretary in the office of Bishop Austin Pardue, but his behavior became so erratic that he had to be fired. That, however, was not all that was a bit irregular about the man. It might be wise, said the friend, for Dean Taeusch to look into the matter further.

On his return to Wooster, the troubled dean wrote to the Immigration Service, to Oxford and Adelaide, then sat back and waited. Finally, last fortnight, he summoned his student body to a special meeting to break the news. The polished Mr. Peters, said he, would not be around any more. As a matter of fact, he was at that very moment in the clink.

Saga of a Scholar. It had taken the dean himself quite a while to digest the news, but last week the whole saga came out. "Peters," it seemed, was really Robert Parkins, an Anglican priest who had been arrested in Britain for bigamy. He had never been to Oxford or taken an M.A. at Adelaide; nor had he earned a music degree from Durham.

In 1947, he had changed his name and fled to Switzerland. There, he got a job as chaplain of an Anglican church in Lausanne. When police caught up with him, he fled again, was finally caught in the mountain resort of Riffelberg masquerading as a Mr. Humphreys. Expelled from Switzerland as an undesirable alien, he was eventually found in Ceylon, boarding with a bishop and teaching at the Colombo Divinity School. Next stops: Singapore, Australia, Canada and finally the U.S. In 1950, he went back to Canada, but recrossed the border and took up illegal residence. Meanwhile, armed with faked credentials, he had done a stint of teaching at Trinity College, University of Toronto.

Last week, charged with illegal entry and lodged in the Erie County Penitentiary near Buffalo, Peters went so far as to admit that his credentials were a bit "outdated," and that perhaps he had painted a rather "rosy picture" of his qualifications. Otherwise, he thought that all this fuss was really quite a bore. "It is," observed Mr. Peters, "making it incredibly difficult for me to live a useful life in the future."

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