Universities: Happy Marriage in Chicago

In 1961, when Geneticist George Beadle was teaching at Caltech, University of Chicago Law Dean Edward H. Levi persuaded him to give up a life of scholarship and research to take the Chicago presidency. A few years later, when the University of California sought out Levi as chancellor at Berkeley, Beadle told Levi, then Chicago’s provost: “If you want to run a university, why don’t you take my place and run this one?” Levi stayed on at Chicago—and last week he was named by its trustees to succeed Beadle, who will retire next year. Levi will become Chicago’s eighth chief executive and one of the few Jewish scholars ever to head a major U.S. university.

A committee of seven trustees and seven professors had run through a list of 70 possible presidential candidates. But every time they met, explained Board Chairman Fairfax Cone, “all had the same candidate—Mr. Levi. He was our standard. No others matched that standard.” A shy, unpretentious man who likes bow ties and fine cigars, Levi, 56, has employed a dry wit and a lawyer’s tough logic in his pivotal task under Beadle: raiding other faculties of their top talent. An aristocratic intellectual who reads widely at jet-pace speed, Levi developed a rapport with academicians that neatly complemented Beadle’s administrative and fund-raising skills.

One Chicago professor calls the appointment “the happiest marriage that’s ever been arranged,” since Levi’s entire scholastic life, except for a single graduate year at Yale, has been linked with the university. He grew up in the school’s Hyde Park neighborhood, attended its laboratory schools from kindergarten through high school, went on to earn his law degree there. His entire academic career has been spent at the university as professor, law dean and provost.

Levi has thus been intimately involved in Chicago’s traumatic leadership shifts: the academic brilliance and financial decline under Robert Hutchins, whom Levi admired; the civic-minded fight to rebuild crime-ridden slums surrounding the university under Lawrence Kimpton; the drive to regain academic stature and financial stability under Beadle. Levi last week left no doubt about what he will emphasize. Said he: “To be a great and exciting university requires, above all, a great faculty.”