Each year U.S. colleges and universities must say goodbye to many a famed and favorite figure. Among those retiring in 1956:
¶ Ohio State's Howard L Bevis, 70, since 1940 the University's affable but hard-driving president. A graduate of the University of Cincinnati ('08) with a doctorate from Harvard Law School, Bevis served as state finance director under two Ohio governors, after a stint on the state Supreme Court and five years at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration arrived at Ohio State to usher in its era of greatest prosperity and controversy. He aroused student and faculty resentment by insisting that he screen all campus speakers, earned the censure of the American Association of University Professors by firing Physicist Byron Darling for invoking the Fifth Amendment before a House investigating committee. He made bitter enemies ("He only talks about money and buildings. He's not an educator") and loyal friends ("He has the good will of all. I don't know anybody who isn't his friend"), all in all managed to chalk up quite a record: in 16 years, the University's research increased tenfold, its campus grew by $79 million worth of new buildings, its enrollment rose from 13,000 to 22,000.
¶ Harvard Law School's debonair Zechariah ("Zack") Chafee Jr., 70, an expert on equity law who won both popular and academic acclaim as one of the nation's most lucid authorities on freedom of the press and civil liberties. A classmate of the late Senator Robert Taft at Harvard Law School, Chafee later joined the faculty to find himself teaching such promising young men as Dean Acheson, Archibald MacLeish, Joseph N. Welch and Kenneth Royall, was so handy with the apt anecdote that he became known as "the Scheherazade of the law school." He gradually emerged as the calm and persuasive crusader against all temptations to curb the free interplay of ideas. "I am," he said, "one of the large number of old-fashioned Americans who care a good deal about our Bill of Rights and about maintaining American traditions of freedom and tolerance. We like the country in which we grew up, and we want it to stay that kind of country for our children and grandchildren."
¶ University of Michigan's round, bouncy Harley Harris Bartlett, 70, director of the university's botanical gardens and one of the top botanists in the U.S. Bartlett scoured Formosa, Sumatra, Mexico, Guatemala, British Honduras and the Philippines for his botanical specimens, but to a large part of the university his chief claim to fame rested closer to home. He kept open house for his students, helped so many with their problems (and their bills) that hundreds of Michigan men and women came to know him as "Uncle Harley"—a typically absent-minded bachelor professor with a penchant for forgetting speaking engagements, a taste for collecting Liberian stamps, and a passion for hosting woodland picnics for the children of the neighborhood.