Columbia in the Heat

For years the biggest U. S. summer school has been Columbia's, where thousands of schoolteachers become students again for a six-week term. Last week, as usual, a swarm of teachers, mostly women from small-town schools, made a bee-loud glade of the precincts of Teachers College. But this war season is not as most sum mers on Morningside Heights:

>Columbia is now the world's largest producer of Naval officers : enrolled are 2,500 midshipmen, 200 Coast Guards men, about 400 officers getting advanced training, 728 uniformed V12 (Navy College Training Program) students, most of whom will get a stripe and a taste of war before they get a degree.

>For the first time in 189 years, Columbia College begins its academic year in July, and undergraduates are sweating through a Manhattan summer. With the Navy occupying all men's dormitories, the 616 civilian undergraduates (Columbia usually has about 1,800) have been driven to off-campus rooms. High point of their week is no Saturday night dance, but a Saturday morning Naval parade under arms.

>Summer session enrollment is down to about 7,000--half its 1931 peak.

But Columbia is proud of the fact that, apart from this decline in numbers, Teachers College and cultural opportunities are unimpaired. The campus north of ferryboat-like University Hall echoes with Kansas and Texas accents. Like a quarter million or so predecessors, the studying teachers flock to the Grove before and after classes. On rustic benches around trees named for the States, they foregather to 1) exchange impressions of the advanced intellectual life, 2) make dates to be snapshot in front of Alma Mater's gilt statue, 3) talk about exotic eating possibilities downtown, 4) plan tours of the city's features, from Chinatown, Rockefeller Center, the Empire State Building, to the nightclubs (where many will probably enrage waiters by asking for nonalcoholic drinks).

Summer Session Director Harry Morgan Ayres oozes satisfaction from every wide-open July pore. War or no war, gas or no gas, more than 1,500 courses taught by nearly 500 teachers, plus New York City's assorted lures, still have great drawing power. Greying Anglo-Saxon Scholar Ayres, who began teaching at Columbia in 1908, must combine the talents of a hotelkeeper, a national planner, a circus ringmaster and a conventual supervisor of morals. He does.

Columbia College's big war plant is under youthful, owlish Acting Dean Nicholas McDowell McKnight (21). An old China hand (cigaret advertising), he later served as aide to the college's late beloved Dean Herbert Edwin Hawkes. When Dean Hawkes died, McKnight was in the uniform of a lieutenant, enrolled as a Columbia Naval student. To fill Hawkes's civilian shoes, the Navy inactivized McKnight. The lieutenant has since been as inactive as seven beavers.

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