January 7, 1944

Dr. Harold P. Klug

Department of Chemistry

University of Minnesota

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Dear Dr. Klug:

I am pleased to learn that you are a member of the faculty committee on the selection of a new president for the University of Minnesota, and I am glad to give you any help that I can.

A university seems to make good progress when it has a good president for fifteen or twenty to twenty-five years. This suggests that the age of the president at appointment should be between forty and fifty. Sometimes a younger man can be selected, but from my observations I would say that a younger man may turn out not to have been sufficiently stabilized by experience to withstand the upsetting influence of his promotion. I think that a candidate for president of the university should be, in most cases, a leader in a professional field. Sproul of the University of California is an exception; his early experience at the University as a member of the administrative staff was equivalent to service as a member of the faculty. I think that the president of a university should have had at least the administrative experience as serving for some time as the head of a department.

Your problem of selecting a man who can meet the public and also work effectively with the faculty and the legislature is a difficult one. The only way of knowing whether a possible candidate answers these requirements is to have heard him speak and to have had personal contact with him. The opinions of several people on these points should be obtained, since the judgment of any one man may not be reliable.

The qualities of good judgment, balance, clear-headedness, cooperativeness, and vision are hard to find in one man, and I wish you success in your search. I suggest that you consider Warren Weaver of the Division of Natural Sciences of The Rockefeller Foundation. I have felt for some time that he would make an excellent university president. Another possible candidate is William Houston of the Physics Department at this Institute. Houston is a good experimental and theoretical physicist, and an excellent teacher. He is recognized as a first rate physicist, but I judge that his interests in research are not so intense as to cause interference with his work as an administrator. He has, I believe, excellent judgment and balance. He is a good speaker, but not a very inspiring one—in general he is not a colorful character. He gets along very well with everybody.

Another man who might be considered is W. A. Noyes, Jr.

Sincerely yours,

Linus Pauling

LP:jr