CONANT APPOINTS U. S. CIVILIZATION GROUP CHAIRMAN

Ending the brief period during which the American Civilization Plan has been without a head, President Conant yesterday announced the appointment of Dumas Malone, director of the Harvard University Press, to the Plan chairmanship.

Also named was Henry Nash Smith, Freshman American Civilization Counselor, who has been chosen executive secretary of the Plan. This office is a new one, while Malone succeeds to the post vacated by Paul Buck, associate professor of History, who resigned one month ago upon his appointment as an assistant dean of the faculty.

American History Scholar

The new chairman has long been associated with the study of American history and culture. Before becoming director of the Harvard Press in 1936. Malone was editor-in-chief of the Dictionary of American Biography, and prior to that, professor of History at the University of Virginia. He has also been a member of the faculty and Sterling Fellow at Yale, from which he holds three degrees.

In his first public statement as head of the American Civilization Plan, Malone paid credit to his predecessors, Howard M. Jones, professor of English, and Dean Buck, and to Smith, the ranking Counselor, for their parts in the establishment of the program.

Experimentation Over

"The difficult period of experimentation is over," Malone stated, "and we are now in a position to capitalize upon the experience of the past. The present program of the Committee is based upon a frank recognition of the difficulty of inducing busy undergraduates to do outside reading, and upon the consequent necessity of making it attractive to them. Despite the intrinsic difficulties, we feel that the opportunity to explore the various aspects of American civilization has rarely been so challenging as now."

The portion of the American Civilization Plan which is open to the general public consists this fall of a series of lectures on the general topic of "Backgrounds of American Architecture" by Lewis Mumford