¶ With some expert guidance from Jonathan Routh, a British practical joker, a bunch of Cambridge students popped up in The Netherlands to help in their own fashion the State University of Leiden celebrate a hands-across-the-Channel Cambridge Week. They 1) opened an exhibition of rare Rembrandts and Hobbemas that turned out to be all fakes, 2) unveiled a statue that was really two live, scantily clad models painted white, 3) planted a memorial tree in the Pieterskerkplein that managed to grow a yard overnight, 4 ) showed a film on Cambridge life filled with native mud huts and elephants wallowing in water. As a result of all the confusion ("I can't believe," cried Burgomaster Francois van Kinschot, "that the British ambassador would make such fun of me!"), British authorities had the very devil of a time convincing the citizens of Leiden that the Earl of Bessborough, chairman of the organizing committee, was really an earl and that visiting Lecturer Sir Charles Darwin was indeed the genuine grandson of a famed, genuine biologist.
¶ After a three-year study, Past President Daniel Chadwick of the Arizona Rural School Association was able to shed some light on what sort of youngster wins national spelling bees. Of the champs questioned, 128 came from public schools, 38 from parochial and three from private. Far from being freaks, 128 winners were rated all-round excellent by their schools, and 94 listed some form of sport as their favorite hobby. ¶ Appointment of the week: Franze Edward Lund, 47, president of little (700 students) Alabama College, to succeed the late Gordon Keith Chalmers as 17th president of 133-year-old Kenyon College (enrollment 500) at Gambier, Ohio. The son of Episcopal missionaries in China and a Ph.D. (in history) from the University of Wisconsin, Lund took over Alabama in 1952. turned it coeducational, raised salaries and standards, won the reputation as perhaps the most adept college president in the state at persuading the legislature to give him—and the state higher education system as a whole—more money.