Special Section: 50 Faces for America's Future

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Rhodes scholar before getting his law degree from the University of Oklahoma. He has a knack for country-style campaigning: while running for Governor, he flourished a broom, vowing to sweep the "Old Guard" out of state government. He also spurned campaign contributions from organizations. An early Carter backer, Boren, who is also a born-again Christian, has since become disillusioned with the President's energy policies; the Senator from the oil state would like to deregulate gasoline prices and is strongly opposed to the Administration's windfall profits tax proposal. But the single most important problem that the country faces, cautions Boren, "is overregulation and the fact that the regulators have no accountability to the American public."

9. Leon Botstein, 32, is one of the nation's most forceful advocates of an often neglected cause: the small liberal arts college. Although he attended the University of Chicago and Harvard, Botstein believes that in an increasingly complex world the traditional college can provide a vital educational function quite different from that of large, research-oriented universities. He has buttressed his argument with an impressive performance. In 1970, at the age of 23, he became one of the youngest college presidents in American history when he took over and briefly revived New Hampshire's failing and nonaccredited Franconia College. At 28, Botstein, the son of two Polish refugee doctors, became president of Bard College in New York's Hudson Valley. In addition to expanding the curriculum, Botstein intends to turn Bard into a valley cultural center. An accomplished violinist, Botstein has occasionally been invited to conduct the Hudson Valley Philharmonic.

10. Arvln Brown, 39, was fresh out of the Yale University School of Drama and just 24 in 1965 when he helped start the Long Wharf Theater in a converted warehouse in New Haven, Conn. Becoming artistic director in 1967, he set about making the Long Wharf one of the best and boldest regional theaters in the nation. Broadway dares not take many chances, but Brown does, and the result is a series of plays staged first in New Haven and then moving on to New York: The Changing Room, Streamers, The Shadow Box, The Gin Game and a revival of Ah, Wilderness! Brown, who has already branched out into television and is planning to go into movies, is not talking idly when he says: "We've become equally proficient with Broadway in overall quality." A year ago the Long Wharf won a Tony Award for its "extraordinarily high level of performance and aspiration."

11. J. Hyatt Brown, 42. While he plotted the coup that would make him speaker of the Florida house of representatives, Brown kept a clipping of the Israeli lightning raid on Entebbe pinned to his office wall to remind him of the value of surprise. Surprise he did. While the incumbent speaker and supporters were feasting at a dinner, Brown's cohorts, known as "the dirty dozen," collected legislators' signatures on a petition that changed the house's voting rules and enabled Brown to call for an immediate vote that gave him the gavel. Since then the Republican, a former insurance salesman from Daytona Beach, has reformed the ramshackle procedures of the house, cut school taxes and held down property taxes. Brown, who stands for efficiency and economy in