Meritorious Macalester

St. Paul's Macalester College is a Presbyterian-linked liberal arts school with 1,700 students, mostly from Minnesota. It has some pleasant distinctions: a 22-member bagpipe band in Macalester clan kilts, a 40-acre campus along swank Summit Avenue, where Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald grew up. But none of this explains the school's greatest claim to fame. In number of National Merit Scholars, a status symbol among U.S. colleges, little Macalester is year after year among the top ten campuses in the nation.

Last week, as the National Merit Scholarship Corp. announced a record 1,050 winners, Macalester did it again. No fewer than 20 chose Macalester, which was outstripped only by nine other predictable choices such as Harvard, with 89 winners, Yale's 38, Princeton's 33 and Radcliffe's 38 (the female front runner). Trailing Macalester were Cornell (17), Michigan and Berkeley (16 each).

Minnesota Mining. Macalester's Merits are explained by the mechanics of selecting 1,050 winners from the 10,000 finalists who satisfactorily pass N.M.S.'s series of tests. In the pool of available scholarships are 425 financed by the Ford Foundation. Winners of these scholarships are chosen by N.M.S. panels solely on a basis of grades and character. But in a second category are about 625 scholarships financed by 150 sponsoring organizations and individuals, many of which use their option of selecting winners not only by academic criteria, but also according to certain qualifications--typically, children of company employees.

Macalester's scholarships are in the second category. They are sponsored by the Reader's Digest Foundation, which picks its winners only from finalists who want to go to Macalester. In N.M.S.'s seven-year history, all of the Digest Foundation's 86 scholarships have been for Macalester. In some years, half of all winners in Minnesota have thus chosen Macalester. This year only one of Macalester's 20 winners is un-Digested--a Minnesota lad who crept in on an IBM scholarship.

Unforgettable Character. All this is due to the beneficence of Macalester's Most Unforgettable Character, Reader's Digest Founder-Editor DeWitt Wallace. Wallace, 72, was born at tiny Macalester four years after it opened in 1885. His father, Dr. James Wallace, a Presbyterian preacher and a Greek scholar, was president for a dozen years, and saved the place from bankruptcy. Wallace graduated from neither Macalester nor the University of California, where he later put in a couple of years. But he has poured money into Macalester ever since he got rich selling homily grits.

Wallace's scholarships, which cost as much as $1,500 a year per student, are only a fraction of his generosity to Macalester. Since 1958, he has given $1,000,000 a year for faculty salaries; he recently pledged $2,750,000 for a fine-arts and humanities center. No one is quite sure how many thousands more he has given.

But according to President Harvey Rice, Wallace has made it possible for Macalester "to become one of the leading liberal arts colleges in the nation."

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