Hardheaded Henry II
Henry Heald became Chancellor of NYU in 1952. To manage a large university in postwar days was to increase the staff and carefully distribute its work in order to accommodate swelling enrollments. To keep authority, the chief executive had to delegate responsibility or be overwhelmed by it. Chancellor Heald’s attention to the Hall of Fame was of necessity occasional and peripheral. He was kept informed by his lieutenants, and his participation was largely ceremonial. Very much the “education chancellor,” he worked incessantly at it, with aplomb, most of his professional life. At one time he called for drastic overhaul of first the Chicago and later the New York City school system. At another time he was instrumental in promoting the merger of Case institute with Western Reserve University, side by side in Cleveland. As head of the “Heald Commission” appointed by Governor Rockefeller he “prompted a radical renewal of the State University of New York.” During his four short years at NYU he took an active part in the National Commission on Accrediting — no simple overnight task.
More than once he was refereed to as a “workaholic.” We tend to agree when we learn that in his many years as a respected engineer and president of Illinois Institute of Technology he had accepted an astonishing number of assignments in the professional areas of business, construction, and land use.
We may well ask how he found time to stop and pick up the 25 honorary degrees and large bagful of medals that came to him over the years as just deserts for exemplary service to education and public well being. Or to associate himself with faith and good works as a church trustee and officer of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. And so on — and on.
More of a doer than a talker, he was in the Chaucerian tradition of the scholar:
Noght o word spak he more than was nede,
And that was seyd in forme and reverence,
And short and quik, and ful of hy sentence.
Souninge in moral vertu was his speche,
And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche.
–The Clerk of Oxenford, Canterbury Tales
At the 1952 Hall of Fame unveiling of Susan B. Anthony and Thomas Paine, Dr. Heald spike eight brief paragraphs of welcome, pleasure, acknowledgment, thanks and appreciation. In accordance with ceremonial litany, Dr. Sockman responded. At the installation ceremony for Woodrow Wilson in 1956 Heald had cut the number of paragraphs to four. The mind’s eye sees him sitting patiently, listening politely with the third ear, solving another problem far away for one of the approximate 50 major commissions he served on during has career:
One day in 1956 he called his administrative staff into his office and said, “I have just been offered the presidency of the Ford Foundation, and I don’t see how I can refuse.” And that was that.
The external record shows that as an “education chancellor” Dr Heald had a salutary effect on education at all levels. The internal record of this effect on the Hall of Fame, if a record exists, is in his papers in the University archives. When Heald was head of the Ford Foundation, the University itself was the proud recipient of generous Foundation support. Other private colleges and universities were also large beneficiaries. Time magazine called him a “worker of wonders” in education.
In his final report as president of the Foundation, Dr. Heald urged “private philanthropy to become bolder as federal government assumes more of the functions previously left to foundations.” On Henry! Thou shouldst be living at this hour.