Hugo, Gobsie & Beartrap

Last week Dean Lee Paul Sieg of University of Pittsburgh's College & Graduate School accepted a call to the presidency of University of Washington. Few first-rate educators envied him the job.

For more than a decade University of Washington, sloping back from Seattle's lakes, has been the nation's prime example of the political meddling, jealousy and intrigue which bedevil most state universities. It came to the fore during the eleven-year administration (1915-26) of the late Henry Suzzalo. Able in politics as in pedagogy, he wangled generous grants from the Legislature, built up a maze of specialized colleges, upped enrollment from 3,000 to 7,000. But he made one major mistake. As virtual Governor during the fatal six-month illness of Wartime Governor Ernest Lister, he started to clean up lumber camps and trod on the toes of a lumberman named Roland Hill Hartley. In 1926 Hartley was Governor and Suzzalo found himself out of a job.

In 1927 the Hartley Board of Regents which ousted Suzzalo draped the presidential mantle around Matthew Lyle Spencer, director of Washington's School of Journalism, but put the presidential sceptre in the hands of a Hartley henchman named William Neal Winter, a practicing spiritualist with a "control" named Hugo. Asked Washingtonians: "Who really runs the University--Hartley or Hugo?" In 1932 Hartley (or Hugo), ostensibly for economy, smashed the Suzzalo system of Colleges, bore down on extracurricular activities, optional courses. That autumn Washington Alumnus Clarence Daniel Martin (Class of 1906) rode the Democratic landslide into the Governorship. President Spencer soon "asked" to be relieved of his job and given an English professorship. A new Board of Regents granted his first request, denied his second.

Washington deans rallied their cliques, brought their jockeying for the presidency out into the open. Least involved in the intrigue was gentle, popular Hugo August Winkenwerder, longtime Forestry dean. He got the job, as acting president. But no one felt that he would last long and facultymen were unruly. Apparently no Washingtonian could bring peace. The Regents decided to pass the word around that the job was open, wait for applications. They came in floods. Typical was one from a small-town high school principal who "had a knack of making himself liked and thought he would make a good university president." The Regents swung around the country, interviewed some 50 educators, found none both suitable and willing to put his head in Washington's political beartrap. University of Chicago's Dean George Alan Works was interested last autumn until Governor Martin vetoed a bill to help take the University out of politics by forbidding the Governor to juggle the Board of Regents.

When Washington was looking for a president in 1915 Columbia's President Nicholas Murray Butler, whose brother William Curtise is a rich, hard-fisted banker at Everett, Wash., recommended Suzzalo. Four months ago the Regents turned again to President Butler. He gave them six names, including Lee Paul Sieg's. Last fortnight Dean Sieg went to Seattle for a weekend, then back to Pittsburgh to talk it over with Mrs. Sieg. She said yes. He will take office Aug. 1. Offered $12,000 a year, he took $10,000 to be closer to the rest of Washington's low-paid, hard-worked faculty.

To curious Washingtonians last fortnight Lee Paul Sieg looked as if he might be the man for their job. They saw a strapping six-footer of 54, with close-cropped, iron-grey hair above a tough, tanned face, who looked and talked more like an Army engineer than a college professor. They knew him at once for one of their own western kind--robust, big-boned, kindly, unhurried, a son of pioneer stock who has stayed close to earth.

Lee Paul Sieg's father worked up from printer's devil to the none too prosperous ownership of an Iowa weekly newspaper. Son Paul went through University of Iowa in three years, paid his way the last year with a stereopticon lantern. He taught physics at Iowa for 19 years, with 18 months off to serve as a captain in the Air Service during the War. He is an authority on optical phenomena. In Pittsburgh he lives in a modest house on a side street. He used to go hunting & fishing in Canada but now he would rather spend his summers motoring his family around to see the scenery. He likes crossword puzzles, Alice in Wonderland, A. A. Milne and Kelly pool.

"American universities." says Lee Paul Sieg in a deep, throaty voice, "are off on the wrong foot. They teach too much. "A good teacher is one who knows his subject pretty well and has the qualities of a good citizen. He should be the sort of man you would like to have for a neighbor. . . .

"It is a mistake to think that a young man gets educated in four years. It's four years apprenticeship in which he learns how to get educated. . . . What little education I have I learned after I got my Ph. D."

In 18 years President-elect Sieg has rarely missed a night of telling original bedtime stories to his own or his neighbors' children. His stories' hero is a wonder-working goblin named Gobsie. Last week Washingtonians were hoping fervently that he would bring some of Gobsie's magic to their troubled campus. Their brows went up skeptically when President Lewis B. Schwellenbach of the Board of Regents declared: "Dr. Suzzalo's educational prominence brought undue attention to Washington's only instance of interference with its educational affairs. This same prominence will serve to inoculate against and prevent its repetition. Such things are like smallpox--they can't happen twice."

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