The Witty Reformer

The quality of Alfred Whitney Griswold was that he gave vividness and authority to ideals that other men often make trite or fanatic. The cliche-cursed goal of "excellence" in education seemed credible and attainable when Yale's President Griswold spoke of it in brief and reasonable words. Academic freedom, made suspect by some of education's oddballs, was restored to its place as a university's inalienable right and duty after Griswold defined it. Last week at Yale, the bells of Harkness Tower tolled the news that the university had dreaded for months. At 56, Whitney Griswold was dead of intestinal cancer.

The "wittiest" member of Yale's class of '29, Griswold aspired to be a writer. A taste of Wall Street drove him back to Yale to teach, and at 40 he became one of the university's youngest and most respected full professors. One day in 1950, he lunched in Manhattan with a college-president friend, heard out a tale of woe, and after the meal told his wife: "Thank God we're not in that racket!" The same morning, unknown to him, the Yale Corporation had named Whitney Griswold president, Yale's youngest in modern times.

The school was deep in the red, and Griswold smoothly made himself a crack fund raiser. He more than tripled endowment to $375 million, launched a $69.5 million capital-funds campaign, put $75 million into 26 new buildings, gave Gothic Yale a bold new look with daring designs by Eero Saarinen and other top modern architects. To emphasize liberal education, Griswold gave Yale College control of all 4,000-odd undergraduates, including the once separatist engineering students. To spur Yale scholars, he set up research fellowships for young teachers, more than doubled faculty salaries; top professors now get $22,000 a year.

But the world beyond New Haven knew Whitney Griswold best for his cool-headed defenses of scholarly values. "Books won't stay banned," he warned in McCarthy-era 1952. "Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost." Yet he supported the theory that duty required teachers to cooperate with congressional investigators even if the "powers of legislative inquiry are abused." He blasted athletic scholarships, "the greatest swindle ever perpetrated on American youth," bulled through the simon-pure code that now governs Ivy League football. He fought to repeal the federal student loan "disclaimer affidavit" ("we cannot legislate loyalty"), scorned the "methodological pedagogy" of teachers' colleges.

Such reforms brought new vitality to a university not noted for change in the past. To Whitney Griswold, education was "Madison and Jefferson talking to each other about everything under the sun." He acknowledged lofty achievements in other great universities, but he candidly said of Yale: "We can conscientiously believe that there is none better."

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