Each year U.S. colleges and universities say goodbye to many a famed and favorite faculty man. Among those retiring in 1959:
The University of North Carolina's enduring Louis Round Wilson, 82, a prime mover in raising Chapel Hill to scholastic eminence, whose prudent management of the school's domed, 1,000,000-volume library (now named after him) made it one of the nation's best. Quaker-born Librarian Wilson graduated from Chapel Hill in 1899, there launched the South's first library science course in 1901, the school's topflight Extension Division in 1912, the University of North Carolina Press in 1922. Robert Hutchins lured him to the University of Chicago in 1932, where he spent ten years training future heads of university libraries from Columbia to California, was elected president of the prestigious American Library Association. Back at Chapel Hill as an active teacher since 1942 (Chicago regretfully retired him at 65), Librarian Wilson becomes professor emeritus, a peppery gadfly who deluges the chancellor with notes of advice, will soon launch his 31st book.
Harvard's .benign, bemused Werner Wilhelm Jaeger, 70, world-renowned interpreter of ancient Greek humanism, one of the first scholars to bear Harvard's exalted University Professor title. At nine, German-born Classicist Jaeger fascinatedly read his first Latin grammar straight through, at 25 took over the University of Basel's Greek chair, once occupied by Nietzsche. His biography of Aristotle (1923) revolutionized classical scholarship when he was still a young professor at the University of Berlin; his monumental Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture is a three-volume university, a gold mine of the ideas that nurtured Western man. He left Hitler's Germany in the '30s, taught at the Universities of California and Chicago before going in 1939 to Harvard, where the Institute of Classical Studies was set up especially for him. Fondly called "Zeus" by colleagues, Jaeger was one of Harvard's least pretentious teachers, delivered gentle-voiced lectures while gazing out the window with his hands on his round paunch, loved to answer his own questions to doctoral candidates as a kind of final blessing. Scholar Jaeger will stay in Cambridge, continue his great critical edition (ten volumes) of the works of Gregory of Nyssa,* the first such attempt since the French Revolution. Said Harvard Greek Professor John Finley in a farewell oration to Jaeger not long ago (following the remarks of Pupil Theophrastus to Master Aristotle): "Happy they with whom he lives, like Hesiod's people for whom the oak at its summit bears acorns, and in its middle branches honey."