New York, July 7—The resignation of Mr. Kenneth Pitzer as President of Stanford University accentuates the universal search for college presidents, Mr. Pitzer’s being only the most recent of the displaced persons from the academic chancelleries.
He went to Stanford only a year or so ago, having served as President of Rice, and achieved great prominence before that in science. Stanford is of course a good, vital university. During the Cambodian season he had to call the police, but only about thirteen times, and only 65 persons were injured, forty arrested. Ideologically, Pitzer was perfectly respectable: He deplored the Vietnam war and Nixon’s activities over there. He declared a war of his very own, on Brigham Young University, against whose athletes he declined to play, on the grounds that the Mormon religion denies the priesthood to Negroes: and thus Mr. Pitzer acquired his own, personal South Africa. He broadened the curriculum in order to include students on all governing boards and committees, he deplored the draft, he got the trustees to agree to the students’ demands that he close down the Research Insitute. He was very tolerant, bringing no charges at all against anyone, when one of his nicest buildings was burned down.
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