Beirut's Fourth

The 82-year-old American University of Beirut, in the Lebanon, is one of the main outposts of western influence in the Near East. Last year, when A.U.B.'s kindly, white-haired President Bayard Dodge decided to retire (TIME, Sept. 29, 1947), Near Easterners wondered where the U.S. would ,ever find his like. For 35 years, Bayard Dodge had impartially dispensed advice, criticism and friendship to all creeds and factions, but kept his tropical suits unsullied by political controversy. Last week a troubled Near East (see INTERNATIONAL) got its first look at Dodge's successor.

Stephen Beasley Linnard Penrose Jr.,/- 40, is an ex-Sunday-school teacher and an active Congregationalist. Last May he was made a lay preacher by the Mt. Pleasant Congregational Church (Washington, D.C.), but he is the first of A.U.B.'s four presidents not trained for the ministry.. Between Dodge and Penrose, there is another and more striking difference: Penrose is outspokenly pro-Arab. Resigning as a special adviser to Defense Secretary Forrestal last May, Penrose denounced U.S. recognition of the State of Israel in a letter to the New York Times.

Penrose's background was in education, not politics. His father rescued Whitman College in Walla Walla (Wash.) from abandonment, served 40 years as Whitman's president. Young "Binks" Penrose went to Whitman, sang bass, played varsity tennis, majored in chemistry and Greek. Then, on his father's advice, the 20-year-old youngster sailed for A.U.B. and a three-year hitch as an instructor. Back in the U.S., Penrose took a Ph.D. at Columbia, taught at Whitman and Rockford Colleges, made a wartime jump to the OSS and Cairo as a Near East expert.

In Beirut, sober-sided Stephen Penrose expects to soft-pedal his Arab views. (His first act last week: a cable for money in behalf of 70 Palestinian students whose funds had been cut off.) He hopes to make A.U.B., already famed for the statesmen and doctors among its 15,000 alumni, also a center for technical education.

/-First cousin once removed to Pennsylvania's onetime political boss, Boies Penrose.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.