Given a sabbatical from Chicago in 1943, he came back to Cambridge on a Guggenheim Fellowship to do historical research. He was working in Houghton early in the spring of 1943 when an excited friend brought him the news: Radcliffe's trustees wished to interview him for the job of president.

Jordan did not accept immediately. He had always loved teaching, and feared that an administrative post would leave him no time to teach. But almost simultaneously, he was made a professor of History at Harvard, with the agreement that he could teach and still have time to tend to Radcliffe. He accepted, wound up his Chicago affairs, and was inaugurated in October of 1943. He still teaches one course each year and gives a graduate seminar in the Tudor and Stuart periods of English history.

This interest extends to all aspects of teaching. Vitally interested in general education, he was one of the original members of the committee that drew up the monumental report to President Conant on "General Education in a Free Society." Jordan is always experimenting with his own courses, teaching with as much discussion as possible in a group so large.

Nor does his interest stop with the instruction of college girls. Jordan has always decried the fact that, for the average woman, education ceases with graduation, when frequently she marries and spends all her time caring for her family. But when she is in her forties, her children are usually grown and she suddenly finds herself with leisure time that is increasingly hard to fill.

Radcliffe Seminars

To give these women new intellectual stimulation, Jordan in 1950 established the Radcliffe Seminars. The Seminars draw their leaders largely from Harvard's faculty, and are offered to women who hold college degrees or their equivalent. Courses in the liberal arts are conducted on the first-year graduate level, with emphasis on reports and discussion of extensive outside reading. A typical example of the program's success is the course in Greek. Meeting only two hours a week for a term of sixteen weeks, the women cover more ground course in the University, which meets three hours a week for thirty weeks.

Radcliffe's president necessarily must talk shop when at home, for his wife, the former Frances Ruml, was dean of the college from 1934 to 1939. Now executive secretary of the world-famed Harvard Mission on Plasma Fractionation and Related Processes, she is, he claims, "a born administrator."

A Farm Boy

Born in 1902 on a Lynnville, Indians, farm, Jordan still finds his principle source of relaxation in the farm he bought in terms of farm utility a long-held amateur farmer who buys every new farming device he can conceive a use for. As yet he has found no means of rationalizing in terms of farm utility a long-held ambition: The purchase of an M.G. sports car.

In spite of his penchant for farming gadgets, he managed to stay clear of the vast machinery that runs Harvard until this year, when the I.B.M. machines went berserk and for weeks he had no list of the students in his course with which to draw up sections. But there is always the daily consolation that he can leave Harvard Hall and the hustle of the University, stroll slowly across the Common into the shaded Quad and once more become responsible for an ordered island of 1000 women