No Job for Mollycoddles

"It's a hot seat," George F. Zook used to say of his $18,000-a-year job as president of the powerful American Council on Education. "Every once in a while somebody gets pretty cross. But if a man hasn't the courage to say what he thinks he shouldn't take this job. He'd be just a mollycoddle."

Last week, after 16 years in the hot seat, outspoken 65-year-old Dr. Zook made his farewell speech to the council's annual convention in Chicago and prepared to move over. To take the place he had resigned, effective next January, the council named Dr. Arthur Stanton Adams, 53, president of the University of New Hampshire, a 1918 graduate of the Naval Academy, and onetime submarine skipper.

Strong Bridge. At the beginning, Arthur Adams had never planned to be an educator at all. But in 1921, when the Navy invalided him out (because of poisoning by corrosive gases on board ship), he turned to teaching. Except for three years during World War II, when he served as a top administrator in the Navy's training program, Adams has been working in schools and colleges ever since. Before going to the University of New Hampshire in 1948, he was assistant dean of engineering and later provost of Cornell University.

Despite his thorough background in teaching and school administration, Adams knew he would find that following George Zook was no easy job. Since 1934, Zook had seen that omnibus organization grow from 269 to 1,093 member groups, representing most of the important U.S. public-school systems, private and state-supported colleges and universities, and education societies. Under Zook, the council also became a strong bridge between U.S. educational institutions and the U.S. Government, had one of the most respected independent voices in all U.S. education policymaking. Two measures that had strong A.C.E. support: the Mead bill for G.I. student housing and the Fulbright bill for overseas scholarships.

Preoccupying Issue. In 1946 Zook was appointed head of the President's Commission on Higher Education, supervised the compiling of its long-range, five-volume report which, among other things, strongly urges federal aid to education (TIME, Dec. 9, 1947 et seq.). When Zook leaves his job to write "a couple of books" and do some work for UNESCO's International Organization of Universities, Arthur Adams is sure to find that federal aid to education is still one of the A.C.E.'s most preoccupying issues. Said President-Designate Adams last week: "I'm not worried about federal aid, but I am worried about the arrangements under which it is to be given--about the preservation of the autonomy and integrity of American education. Hitler took over the police force first, the educational system second."

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