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Unlike some of the physicists who helped produce the atomic bomb, Fieser has no moral qualms about his role in producing one of modern warfare's most fearful weapons: "I have no right to judge the morality of napalm just because I invented it." Nor does he blame the Dow Chemical Co. for manufacturing napalm: "If the Government asked them to take a contract, and they're the best ones in a position to do so, then they're obliged to do it."
As a scientist, Fieser refuses to engage in debate on the Viet Nam war, on the ground that "I don't know enough about the situation." A researcher, he insists, cannot be responsible for how other people use his inventions. "You don't know what's coming," he says. "I was working on a technical problem that was considered pressing. I'd do it again, if called upon, in defense of the country."
PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Scholae Latinae Bostoniensis Vita Aeterna Sit!
For more than three centuries, the Boston Latin School ranked with the very best American secondary schools —standing almost without peer among public schools. With an equal reverence for strict discipline and classical learning, Boston Latin could claim at least some part in the later success of a line of "old boys" that stretched all the way from Benjamin Franklin to Joseph Kennedy and Leonard Bernstein. But after World War II, as the city school system deteriorated, Boston Latin went into a sharp decline, and for a while seemed destined to become just another inept high school. Now, in a striking recovery, it once again ranks among the nation's best—largely because of a return to the fine old academic values it began with in 1635.
Worried by overcrowding, low admission standards and lax discipline, a group of alumni in 1961 persuaded the Boston school committee to institute competitive entrance exams and to transfer elsewhere students who flunk a subject two years in a row. The real rejuvenation started only with the appointment three years ago of Headmaster Wilfred O'Leary, an unashamed autocrat with a classics degree from Boston College who cracks heads as easily as he conjugates Latin verbs.
Instruct & Reprimand. Apprised of his tough ways as principal of Roslindale High, six teachers asked out even before he arrived. Since then, the new headmaster has got rid of 23 more. "You instruct, inspect, reprimand and relieve from duty," explains O'Leary, whose World War II stint as an Air Force colonel has given him a fondness for military metaphor. "A good school needs administration, perspicacity and guts."
There is no shortage of administrative fortitude now, and O'Leary plunges through the Byzantine web of bureaucracy as if it were not there at all. He encourages promising teachers to take the city's qualifying exam—then snatches them before any other principal even knows of their existence. "A good scholar is not necessarily a good teacher," he says. "A teacher must love boys first. Then he must have a good background in methodology and in his discipline." A good teacher, he might add, does not have to be a man; O'Leary has broken 332 years of Boston Latin's all-male tradition with the appointment of four women teachers.