The Presidency: Clip and Save Part II

(The following brief sketches fill out the last nine of the 23 candidates on the Corporation's latest list of men still being considered for the Harvard presidency.

None of the biographies are intended as a complete history of qualifications; rather they are an attempt to show what kind of man each person is, according to comments from students and faculty members at Harvard and the man's own university.)

Matthew Meselson, 40, Harvard professor of Biology:

A quiet man, Meselson is highly-respected within his field and has managed to avoid making enemies by steering clear of Faculty polities. One of his greatest assets-is his youth.

Colleagues describe Meselson as a hard person to get to know, but he is well-liked both by Faculty and students. He is an extremely diplomatic person, perhaps because of the nature of his work.

Meselson, who began his career as a research fellow at Cal Tech, has long been associated with the government's development of chemical and biological warfare. Throughout the association, Meselson has been a strong opponent of the employment of nerve gas.

Diplomacy comes into light because Meselson must work closely with the very people he is trying to undo in Washington; that he has accomplished as much as he has in limiting chemical and biological warfare is something of a miracle.

At present, Meselson is conducting a study of nerve gas for the American Association of University Professors.

Meselson is not a Harvard graduate; he received a Ph. D. from the University of Chicago in 1931 and later took a Ph. D. from Cal Tech. He joined the Harvard Faculty in 1960, and was appointed professor of Biology in 1964.

Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky, 51, director of Stanford Linear Accelerator Center:

Born in Berlin in 1919, Panofsky came to the United States in 1934 and became a naturalized citizen. He has no previous connection with Harvard, having taken his undergraduate degree from Princeton in 1938 and his Ph. D. from Cal Tech in 1942.

Panofsky is renowned as a brilliant experimental physicist; he has done most of his work on linear acceleration and he conceived the idea of the two-mile accelerator at Stanford.

The son of art historian Irwin Panofsky, Panofsky and his brother, Hans, graduated number one and two from Princeton.

During the height of the McCarthy era in 1952, Panofsky resigned his position on the Berkeley faculty when he was asked to sign a loyalty oath. He has been at Stanford ever since.

Panofsky staunchly opposed the ABM system while it was being debated in the Senate in 1969, and he was asked to testify before the Senate Sub-Committee investigating the system.

Assistant Secretary of Defense David Packard once appeared before the Committee while Panofsky was in Washington, and in response to a question from 'Senator Fulbright, said that he had consulted Panofsky about the ABM and Panofsky was all for it.

Panofsky was then called to clarify Packard's statement, and in no uncertain terms, he told the Committee that the only time Packard had mentioned the ABM to him was in the men's room of the San Francisco airport, and then Panofsky had expressed an entirely negative view.

As a fund-raised, Panofsky showed considerable acumen in obtaining appropriations for the linear accelerator, a task which one Stanford colleague described as requiring "an infinite amount of politics."

Panofsky served on the President's Science Advisory Committee from 1960-65, and was director of the Stanford High Energy Physics Laboratory from 1952-61.

Edward M. Purcell, 58, Gade University Professor of Physics:

The oldest of the 23 and, with a 1952 Nobel Prize in Physics, the most distinguished from within the Harvard community, Purcell must be considered the Corporation's "Pope John" on the list. Because of the 66-year-old mandatory requirement age, he would be an interregnum president if chosen; both academically and politically, he is highly respected by the entire spectrum of the Faculty and most students who have taken his course.

But Purcell has been through the president's sweepstakes before in 1953 when he was one of the most prominently mentioned successors to President Conant, Privately, friends say he is definitely not running for the presidency now, and would take it only if the Corporation decided there was no one else.

As a teacher, he is admired by the Faculty, accessible to students, and appealing to alumni. His career at Harvard began after he graduated from Purduc in 1933. In 1938, he became an instructor after doing graduate work here, and a full professor in 1948.

Roger Rosenblatt, 30, assistant professor of English:

Roger Rosenblatt's presence on the list has been the spark for much speculation. At 30, he is the youngest Harvard House Master and the youngest man on the list; as an assistant professor, he is the only non-tenured Faculty member being considered.

Rosenblatt has been called a conservative by liberals a liberal by conservatives, and a robust-if flashy-administrator by many of his colleagues.

Rosenblatt came under heavy criticism for his role as member of the Committee of Fifteen. His articulate defense of the Committee's actions as, essentially, reasonable human choices in an unreasonable, inhuman world won him a large moderate following.

Many have accused him of being one of the most conspicuously upwardly mobile members of the Faculty; others have pointed out that his most prominent personality traits-good humor, a striking ability to speak his mind well and quickly, and a large measure of dash-have simply made the graph of his career an especially easy curve to follow.

Henry Rosousky, 43, chairman of the Harvard Economics Department:

Rovosky, whose field of interest is Japanese Economic Growth, again shows the Corporation's basic inclination to find a man with undisputable scholarly credentials.

Both at Berkeley where he was a professor of Economics and History from 1958-65 and on the Harvard Faculty which he joined in '65, his greatest distinction has come as an academic. Although he did not graduate from the College, he received his M. A. degree and Ph. D. from Harvard and was a Junior Fellow here from 1954-57.

In many ways, Rosovsky's last years in academia seem like a constant flight to the academic higher ground. He left Berkeley for Harvard in '65 because, he said, the continual student unrest interfered with his academic work.

Once here, he became chairman of the Faculty Committee to set up an Afro-American Studies Program. In the midst of the April '69 student strike, the Rosovsky Committee's report was first altered then rejected by the Faculty in the face of black student protests. Rosovsky resigned from the committee and took a year's leave of absence.

He does not have a great deal of fund-raising experience, but has been chairman of the Berkeley Center for Japanese and Korean studies and is currently associate director of the East Asian Research Center. He remains active on Faculty committees and is considered one of the leaders of the old conservative caucus.

Theodore R. Sizer, 38, dean of the Harvard School of Education:

The Ed School is one of the most easily overlooked yet most innovative graduate schools in the University. It is also a financial disaster area, or in the Harvard idiom, a bottomless tub.

Its dean for the last six years has been in the uncomfortable position of watching it grow from a mediocre to a respected and progressive school; then, at the height of its expansion last year, seeing the federal support shrink away.

This year the Ed School is operating under a total Faculty hiring freeze; its six million dollar library (still under construction) has absorbed most of the money from large private donors; and federal support for next year, the basis of several new programs under Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, is again being reduced.

Sizer took over the Ed School dean-ship in 1964 from President Pusey who served as acting dean for one year.

At the time he was still a non-tenured assistant professor serving as an advisor to Pusey. His elevation from assistant professor to dean surprised most older Faculty members, but there is little doubt the president hand-picked Sizer on the basis of personal confidence.

Whatever skepticism there was over Sizer's youth has apparently disappeared. A poll of Ed School students during the April '69 strike showed the dean was the most accessible Faculty member around-both to students and other professors. Under his direction, the Ed School continues to have the highest black admissions (15 per cent) in the University.

One drawback on his presidency chances, however, has been his emphasis on the development of the school at the expense of the more perfunctory duties of juggling budgets and smoothing out the administrative wrinkles. "You wouldn't characterize him as an efficiency expert," one colleague said. "He fits the mold of the dean as a teacher rather than the dean as a manager, or a fund-raiser, or administrative wizard. He's basically an educational philosopher and a humanist."

Robert M. Solow, 46, M. I. T. professor of Economics:

Like Cooper, Solow was one of the late additions to the list of candidates, But even more than Cooper, Solow is an administrative enigma.

Although he is regarded as one of the leading economists in the country, Solow has almost no administrative background. As one colleague put it, "I think he is a rather remarkable choice."

Solow is one of the inventors and main proponents of the growth theory of economics, and has been described as being "extremely brilliant." All of his education was completed at Harvard: he received a B. A. in 1947, M. A. in 1949 and a Ph. D. in 1951.

His most recently published encounter with Harvard involved a now-famous written exchange with John Kenneth Galbraith soon after Galbraith's book "The Affluent Society" was first published several years ago.

Solow is a spokesman only for economics, and has seldom gone on record on volatile public issues. He was senior economist on the staff of the Council of Economics Advisors to President Kennedy, and was later appointed to the President's Commission on Income Maintenance Programs by President Johnson.

Solow is known as a quiet man, not at all pompous, and is held somewhat in awe at M. I. T., where he and Paul Samuelson are the mainstays of the Economics Department.

Clifton R. Wharton Jr., 46, president of Michigan State University:

The big question here is-if Larry DiCara ?1 likes this man, can he be all good? Students at Michigan State where he has been president for 11 months seem to have a divided view. His first year on the campus of '55,000 has been relatively uneventful and both students and faculty agree Wharton has not yet encountered any major tests of his mettle.

The first black president of a large American university. Wharton came to MSU from the Rockefeller Foundation where he was vice-president of the Agricultural Development Council (ADC) since 1964. His field is agricultural economy, though he graduated from Harvard College in 1947. From '58-'64, he headed an ADC task force in Southeast Asia, which worked on developing more food products in Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia.

While an undergraduate at Harvard, he was one of the founders of the National Student Association and its first national secretary.

At MSU, his first act as president was to set up a commission to revamp the schizophrenic admission policy of Michigan State. The admissions committee has previously sought a combination of National Merit Scholarship winners and rural high school graduates.

The new emphasis, according to a preliminary commission report, will fall on a more balanced range of freshmen with greater minority group recruiting.

Larry DiCara likes him because he was the Boston Latin School's "Man of the Year" this year, and DiCara is a perennial runner-up.

Robert R. Wilson, 56, director of the National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, Ill.:

Wilson is the second scientist-administrator being considered from the Batavia Accelerator and his presence on the list can be largely attributed to the newest Cooperation member. Charles Slichter, himself a physicist at the University of Illinois.

Although his Batavia colleague, Edwin Goldwasser, is closer to the optimal age. Wilson is a more widely recognized research physicist in large nuclear projects. He graduated from Univ. of California-Berkeley in 1936, did four years of graduate work there under Robert Oppenheimer and Ernest Lawrence, then moved to Princeton where he became an assistant professor.

In 1944, he became head of the experimental nuclear physics division in the Los Alamos Atomic Bomb Project until 1946.

He took a Harvard professorship in '46, but continued to work on a special project in Berkely. In 1947, he moved to Cornell to head a new particle accelerator laboratory there, and three years ago switched to the mammoth 200 Bell accelerator in Batavia.

His penchant for building the biggest particle accelerator in the world is combined with a formal training as a sculptor at the Academia Belli Arte in Rome. His most famous work-"a long kind of artsy triangle." According to one student critic-stands in Carl Kaysen's Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.