Education: Goodbye Now

All over the U.S., veteran college and university professors were saying goodbye and climbing down from their lecture platforms—this time for keeps. Six topflight teachers whose retirements (in July or September) were announced last week:

¶ Princeton’s Christian Gauss, 68, judicious, quizzical, pince-nezed professor of modern languages, longtime Dean of the College. Gauss and three others, all retiring now, are the last of President Woodrow Wilson’s 47 preceptors, appointed in 1905. Another: Edward Samuel Corwin, 68, professor of jurisprudence, historian of the Constitution and the Court, vigorous defender of Roosevelt’s 1937 court-packing plan.

¶ Harvard’s Ralph Barton Perry, 70, Pulitzer Prizewinning philosopher (Thought and Character of William James), earnest letter-writing and speechifying internationalist; and Sydney Bradshaw Fay, 70, share-the-guilt historian of World War I (Origins of the World War).

¶ Stanford’s Albert Léon Guérard, 65, professor of literature, transplanted Frenchman, prolific critic and author (Art for Art’s Sake, Preface to World Literature, France, a Short History, some 14 other volumes); and Thomas Addis, 64, Scotland-born authority on Bright’s disease and other kidney ailments, winner of the Scottish Cullen Prize “for the greatest benefit done to practical medicine in the past four years” (1938-42).