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When Washington was looking for a president in 1915 Columbia's President Nicholas Murray Butler, whose brother William Curtise is a rich, hard-fisted banker at Everett, Wash., recommended Suzzalo. Four months ago the Regents turned again to President Butler. He gave them six names, including Lee Paul Sieg's. Last fortnight Dean Sieg went to Seattle for a weekend, then back to Pittsburgh to talk it over with Mrs. Sieg. She said yes. He will take office Aug. 1. Offered $12,000 a year, he took $10,000 to be closer to the rest of Washington's low-paid, hard-worked faculty.
To curious Washingtonians last fortnight Lee Paul Sieg looked as if he might be the man for their job. They saw a strapping six-footer of 54, with close-cropped, iron-grey hair above a tough, tanned face, who looked and talked more like an Army engineer than a college professor. They knew him at once for one of their own western kind—robust, big-boned, kindly, unhurried, a son of pioneer stock who has stayed close to earth.
Lee Paul Sieg's father worked up from printer's devil to the none too prosperous ownership of an Iowa weekly newspaper. Son Paul went through University of Iowa in three years, paid his way the last year with a stereopticon lantern. He taught physics at Iowa for 19 years, with 18 months off to serve as a captain in the Air Service during the War. He is an authority on optical phenomena. In Pittsburgh he lives in a modest house on a side street. He used to go hunting & fishing in Canada but now he would rather spend his summers motoring his family around to see the scenery. He likes crossword puzzles, Alice in Wonderland, A. A. Milne and Kelly pool.
"American universities." says Lee Paul Sieg in a deep, throaty voice, "are off on the wrong foot. They teach too much. "A good teacher is one who knows his subject pretty well and has the qualities of a good citizen. He should be the sort of man you would like to have for a neighbor. . . .
"It is a mistake to think that a young man gets educated in four years. It's four years apprenticeship in which he learns how to get educated. . . . What little education I have I learned after I got my Ph. D."
In 18 years President-elect Sieg has rarely missed a night of telling original bedtime stories to his own or his neighbors' children. His stories' hero is a wonder-working goblin named Gobsie. Last week Washingtonians were hoping fervently that he would bring some of Gobsie's magic to their troubled campus. Their brows went up skeptically when President Lewis B. Schwellenbach of the Board of Regents declared: "Dr. Suzzalo's educational prominence brought undue attention to Washington's only instance of interference with its educational affairs. This same prominence will serve to inoculate against and prevent its repetition. Such things are like smallpox—they can't happen twice."