Solow is one of the inventors and main proponents of the growth theory of economics, and has been described as being "extremely brilliant." All of his education was completed at Harvard: he received a B. A. in 1947, M. A. in 1949 and a Ph. D. in 1951.
His most recently published encounter with Harvard involved a now-famous written exchange with John Kenneth Galbraith soon after Galbraith's book "The Affluent Society" was first published several years ago.
Solow is a spokesman only for economics, and has seldom gone on record on volatile public issues. He was senior economist on the staff of the Council of Economics Advisors to President Kennedy, and was later appointed to the President's Commission on Income Maintenance Programs by President Johnson.
Solow is known as a quiet man, not at all pompous, and is held somewhat in awe at M. I. T., where he and Paul Samuelson are the mainstays of the Economics Department.
Clifton R. Wharton Jr., 46, president of Michigan State University:
The big question here is-if Larry DiCara ?1 likes this man, can he be all good? Students at Michigan State where he has been president for 11 months seem to have a divided view. His first year on the campus of '55,000 has been relatively uneventful and both students and faculty agree Wharton has not yet encountered any major tests of his mettle.
The first black president of a large American university. Wharton came to MSU from the Rockefeller Foundation where he was vice-president of the Agricultural Development Council (ADC) since 1964. His field is agricultural economy, though he graduated from Harvard College in 1947. From '58-'64, he headed an ADC task force in Southeast Asia, which worked on developing more food products in Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia.
While an undergraduate at Harvard, he was one of the founders of the National Student Association and its first national secretary.
At MSU, his first act as president was to set up a commission to revamp the schizophrenic admission policy of Michigan State. The admissions committee has previously sought a combination of National Merit Scholarship winners and rural high school graduates.
The new emphasis, according to a preliminary commission report, will fall on a more balanced range of freshmen with greater minority group recruiting.
Larry DiCara likes him because he was the Boston Latin School's "Man of the Year" this year, and DiCara is a perennial runner-up.
Robert R. Wilson, 56, director of the National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, Ill.:
Wilson is the second scientist-administrator being considered from the Batavia Accelerator and his presence on the list can be largely attributed to the newest Cooperation member. Charles Slichter, himself a physicist at the University of Illinois.
Although his Batavia colleague, Edwin Goldwasser, is closer to the optimal age. Wilson is a more widely recognized research physicist in large nuclear projects. He graduated from Univ. of California-Berkeley in 1936, did four years of graduate work there under Robert Oppenheimer and Ernest Lawrence, then moved to Princeton where he became an assistant professor.
In 1944, he became head of the experimental nuclear physics division in the Los Alamos Atomic Bomb Project until 1946.
He took a Harvard professorship in '46, but continued to work on a special project in Berkely. In 1947, he moved to Cornell to head a new particle accelerator laboratory there, and three years ago switched to the mammoth 200 Bell accelerator in Batavia.
His penchant for building the biggest particle accelerator in the world is combined with a formal training as a sculptor at the Academia Belli Arte in Rome. His most famous work-"a long kind of artsy triangle." According to one student critic-stands in Carl Kaysen's Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.