Right on the Premises

For nearly two years, a talent-scouting committee has been searching the U.S. for a new president of the nation's most famous nondenominational seminary, Union Theological, in Manhattan. Last week the board of directors elected a man who had been on campus all along: Dr. John Coleman Bennett, 61, who was dean of the faculty from 1955 until he became acting president after the retirement of Henry Pitney Van Dusen last June.

Congregationalist Minister John Bennett is a self-effacing theologian with some eyebrow-raising views about the duty of churches not to join any holy war against Communism. Protestant churchmen respect Bennett as a methodical, thoughtful interpreter of social ethics, as a provocative religious journalist (he was a founder of the biweekly Christianity and Crisis), and as a tireless behind-the-scenes worker for the World Council of Churches. Like his predecessor, he is Union-made: he studied theology there, joined the faculty permanently in 1943.

Bennett is popular with his professors, but with only seven years to go before reaching Union's mandatory retirement age, he is clearly something of an interim appointment. A number of younger seminary executives are believed to have turned down the job, which virtually demands a 25-hour working day. Explains Stanford's Dr. Robert McAfee Brown, a past member of Union's faculty: "You have to be a theologian, administrator, educator, pastor and fund raiser." Bennett will probably find the job of bankroller the hardest. Unaffiliated with any church or university, Union needs over $1,000 a day from outside donations to stay solvent.

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