Divine Discontent

PRINCETON

Robert F. Goheen's appointment as President of Princeton pleasantly surprised most of the university community. He seems to have accumulated the fine things that a Princeton education gives to most people, and looks forward to intelligent changes of the bad things that it has given to some.

Associates say he is a man of both caution and action, and that while Princeton can expect no dramatic changes right away, Goheen certainly "looks forward" and will use an impressive imagination to better the status quo. He will listen, seek to find, weigh, and then decide.

Goheen's first major chance to decide will be on the controversial Eating Club issue. Despite alumni pressure, there have been growing rumblings of discontent at the Club's apparent discriminatory and undemocratic practices.

Goheen's, according to one faculty member, is a "Princeton man, do or die," but he's not "the Old Grad type." The new president, Princeton's youngest since 1761, will consider the club issue in the light of how they serve the university, not how they stimulate alumni fund raising. "He's a non-aristocratic person, and he's simply a darn nice guy," a friend said last night.

For a nice guy, Goheen has had an incredibly intense academic career. Born in Vengurla, India of two distinguished Presbyterian medical missionaries, he lived in the Orient for 15 years before entering Lawrenceville. At Princeton, Goheen studied Classics, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, won the coveted M. Taylor-Pyne Honor prize, played varsity soccer, was president of the Intra-mural Athletic Association, and graduated with highest honors.

A year after graduation, Goheen enlisted in the Infantry as a Second Lieutenant, soon saw duty in the intelligence corps in Australia, New Guinea, and Leyte, and emerged in 1945 as assistant chief of Staff for Intelligence.

Goheen then slipped back into Princeton ways, was a Woodrow Wilson fellow before receiving his Ph.D., and was immediately hired as a teacher in the Princeton Classics Department. As a teacher, his students found him intense and scintillating in his presentation of "meaty" material. His lectures, they said, were a torrent of vital information that left students with aching writing hands when they left the lecture room. "He's one of the ablest men in the whole damm profession," Whitney J. "Mike" Oates, chairman of the department said once of Goheen, who was his freshman advisor when the new president first came over from Lawrenceville in 1936.

Goheen has had little time to develop as a scholar, since much of his post-Ph.D time has been spent in administrating the national Woodrow Wilson Fellowships. A book he published about four years ago was described by one colleague as "small but significant" in the field of Greek literary criticism. He has, according to one friend, a broad interest in classicial culture as it fits into the traditions of the West.

In his travels for the Woodrow Wilson Fellowships program, Goheen has met with university leaders across the country, so his academic orientation has not been limited solely to Princeton. Faculty members particularly note his physical fitness as an important qualification for the job.

A family man in the real sense of the word--four girls, two boys--Goheen will be reluctant to give up the obscurity of his faculty home for the President's House. He will also miss the challenge of personal scholarship, which friends say he will most certainly be fored to give up. But it was his driving ambition and potential in both scholarship and administration that nailed him the post, and after all, as retiring President Dodds pointed out in his announcement, "divine discontent yields results."