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Scholar-Writer Bliss Perry retired almost three years ago and Humanist Irving Babbitt died last July, but Harvard still has giants in its English department. One of them is tiny, big-voiced John Livingston Lowes, 66, keen student of the Romantic Movement. He is perhaps the most brilliant U. S. example of the great scholar-teacher whom President Conant wants on his faculty. Another giant is snowy-bearded George Lyman Kittredge, 73, bon vivant, Chaucer and Shakespeare authority, prime link between Harvard's past & present.
In philosophy Harvard has religious-minded William Ernest Hocking, 60, profound Alfred North Whitehead, 72, one of the three "geniuses" whom Gertrude Stein has known (others: herself, Painter Pablo Picasso). Ill health made William Zebina Ripley, 66, railroad expert, retire last March but economics in 1932 acquired brilliant Josef Alois Schumpeter, onetime (1919) Finance Minister of Austria. Since 1882 Frank William Taussig, 74, tariff authority, has been one of Harvard's proudest possessions.
Other arts & sciences aces: Harlow Shapley, 48 (astronomy), Charles Hall Grandgent, 71 (Romance languages), Percy Williams Bridgman, 51 (physics), Kirtley Fletcher Mather, 45 (geology), last week named director of the Summer School.
President Lowell left direction of his Law School (enrollment: 1,462), oldest (1817) and best in the U. S., to its famed, scholarly Dean Roscoe Pound, 63. President Conant has been dropping in occasionally on Law School meetings. Once while the Law faculty was sitting for its portrait, he eased Dean Pound out of his accustomed place in the centre of the picture. Others in the picture: Samuel Williston, 72, foremost U. S. authority on contracts, Thomas Reed Powell, 53, Zechariah Chafee Jr., 48, Manley Ottmer Hudson, 47, Sam Bass Warner. Absent: Francis Bowes Sayre, 48, criminal law expert and son-in-law of Woodrow Wilson who last November went to Washington as Assistant Secretary of State; Felix Frankfurter, 51, author of the Securities Act, and this year's exchange professor at Oxford, whose friends think his good friend Franklin Roosevelt intends him for the U. S. Supreme Court's next vacancy.
Harvard's Medical School, in the U. S. topflight with Columbia's, Cornell's, Johns Hopkins', may expect a friendly eye from President Conant, long a frequent visitor to its laboratories. Failures are rare among its hand-picked students, limited to 125 per class. It has all Boston's hospitals for laboratory, most topnotch Boston doctors on its staff. The Medical School plumes itself on Elliott Carr Cutler, 45 (brain surgery); Walter Bradford Cannon, 62 (physiology); Hans Zinsser, 55 (bacteriology); Varaztad Hovannes Kazanjian, 54 (plastic surgery).
Stocky, philosophical Dean Wallace Brett Donham, 56, has linked his Graduate School of Business Administration firmly with big business, made it the best of its kind in the U. S. But with big business no longer so popular as it was, scholarly Harvard is debating whether it should ever have entered the business school field. Enrollment this year is down to 811 from last year's 960, the previous year's 1,102. But over 90% of last year's class are employed.