I.

When John U. Monro leaves University Hall in July, he will not simply be closing out a whole portion of his life.

Ever since he was a child, Monro has had contact with Harvard. His father graduated in the class of '06, and as soon as young John was old enough to understand, he began attending Harvard football games with his father. Even before Monro graduated from the College in 1935, he had started working part-time for the University News Office. That job became permanent, and Monro continued at it until 1941 when he joined the Navy. After the war, he was back in Cambridge and began a steady rise in the Administration. It culminated in 1958 when President Pusey asked him to become Dean of the College.

His decision to depart, then, digs deep into the nature of the man himself. Stepping down from the prestigious post of Dean of Harvard College to become Director of Freshman Studies at an unaccredited Negro College in Alabama contradicts the careful calculations of ordinary minds: the new job assures neither comfort, nor power. Monro will have traded Cambridge, where people often feel they are at the center of the world, for Birmingham, where many people feel out of the way and like it.

Monro is not an enigma, and does not defy analysis. He is a man of several sides; each must be seen to reconcile the apparent contradictions in his behavior.

He is, most obviously, an administrator, and, if his colleagues are to be believed, he is very good--perhaps excellent--at the job. Monro is a tireless worker, comes in early in the morning, and, more often than not, stays late at night. He has established an easy rapport with his fellow administrators; the respect for him is probably a mark of the quality of his work and his style of operation.

But branding a person an "administrator" at Harvard may be consigning him--implicitly--to the ranks of the unacceptable or the inferior: if he is at Harvard and he is any good, why is he in the bureaucracy? The fact is that he may not be any good. There are dull people in the Harvard Administration, just like there are dull people on the Faculty and in the student body; many of them are satisfied with the repetition of their daily jobs and, moreover, probably perform well at them. Like most administrators. Monro can take the routine in hand and enjoyit. There is a certain sense of pride and duty in this: "If I didn do it," he will say, "then Dean Ford would have to do it. "But what separate a good many Harvard administrators from being simply bureaucrats is that they do not stop with this. And Monro--according to his colleagues--is one of these.

His annual reports, by and large as plain as any annual reports, are laced with such words as "adventure." Monro has always grasped for fresh ideas and criticisms of old practices. When engaged in new enterprises, he transmits a sense of excitement and displays vast amounts of energy. A student who has worked with him at Miles College says: "They [the people at Miles] are a little bit cowed by Monro's ability to work hard and accomplish a lot in a short time.... The drive to get things done is paramount."

Monro's capacity to handle the routine and his competence to make difficult innovations were combined no more successfully than when he began to overhaul Harvard's system of scholarships and financial aid. In 1948, he became assistant to Provost Paul H. Buck and two years later moved up to the top post in the Financial Aid Office, a job he held until he became dean. "As the G.I. bill ran out and the World War II veterans got through," explains one former colleague, "it was clear that Harvard was going to have to give more thought to the ways it went about providing financial aid to its students." The problem fell to Monro.

When he finished with it eight years later, he had--along with some others--completely refashioned Harvard's scholarship program, and, in the process, projected his ideas to a national forum. He set up criteria for determining a student's "need" and pushed for the use of a variety of sources to meet the need--loans and jobs as well as scholarships. Many ideas in the Harvard program were borrowed by other colleges or used by a new national organization, the College Scholarship Service. Monro was one of the principal movers behind CSS, set up through the College Board, and he soon became chairman. What CSS did was standardize many scholarship procedures for more than 1000 participating schools. Monro's work amounted to a substantial achievement, a reshaping of a fundamental program that now affects 40 per cent of the College. But his effort was not flashy, and it is this dogged, quiet style that his admirers value so highly.

It is not this style, though, that lies at the heart of Monro's decision to leave Harvard. Something else is more crucial -- something else that his friends describe variously as a "sense of mission," or "absolute monesty," or "uncompromised dedication," or "strong commitment." These terms boil down to the fact that Monro is a profoundly dedicated--and determined--"do-gooder."

This word--"do-gooder"--has acquired a variety of negative overtones, but many of them don't apply to Monro. He is not a temporary meddler in causes, as the word might imply; he is really a permanent do-gooder, a professional. He very much admires people whom he believes have purpose. And his involvement in Harvard, one senses, stems from his belief that the University is an institution involved in long-term and important do-gooding.

When he talks about going to Miles, he speaks in the same terms. Miles is small, understaffed, and strained to capacity; its academic credentials are still shaky--at least when one compares it with more established small colleges, North and South. But Miles also has a strange monopoly: it is the only Negro college near Birmingham. This is very important to Monro. "Here is a college," he says, "that's in a unique position to serve its community."

Monro's vocabulary is filled with nice-sounding words like "community," and, despite his administrator's pragmatism, he shares something with the do-gooder and the reformer -- "vision." "The number of wild ideas he's got is enormous," says a student who has worked with Monro at Miles and clearly likes him. Both as Harvard administrator and a part-time Faculty member at Miles, Monro has been the source of many new schemes. Some of these spring from instinct, from a hasty appraisal of the facts of the situation. They seem plausible at first, but on examination appear full of problems. As a result, Monro must retract some and allow others to slide to a slow death. At times, they make him appear foolish. But some of them dowork, and the suggestion of others prompt reactions.

According to at least one close friend, there is a deliberate technique in this approach. "He's one of the best educators I have ever known.... He starts with a position, and then he's open to dialogue and he revises."