Jonas E. Salk, the inventor of the first successful polio vaccine, will return to his high-school alma mater--Townsend Harris High School at Queens College in New York--this month to deliver the main address at ceremonies inaugurating the school’s reopening in a new guise.
Townsend Harris, a selective public school that focuses on the humanities, “was special to my development as a person,” Dr. Salk said in a prepared statement. “The faculty was exceptional, the students were exceptional. ... The challenge now is to recreate that whole, that something special that Townsend Harris represented.”
Dr. Salk, a 1931 graduate, will receive an honorary Doctor of Science degree from the school for his work on the polio vaccine and for his current medical research at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego.
The high school was founded in 1848 by Townsend Harris, the first U.S. Ambassador to Japan and the founder of the City College of New York. The original school, which stood on the campus, admitted only boys. In 1942, Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia closed the school to provide more space for college programs during World War II.
The reopened school is coeducational; its enrollment is expected to reach 1,200 over the next four years.
Judith Berman Brandenburg, associate dean and dean of academic life at Yale University, has been 3named the new dean of Teachers College, Columbia University. She succeeds P. Michael Timpane, who became president of Teachers College Sept. 1. Ms. Brandenburg, who will assume her new duties in January, is the first woman to hold the position.
Ms. Brandenburg, a former high-school teacher, has been affiliated with Yale for seven years, where she also taught psychology.
According to a Teachers College spokesman, she was involved in the creation of Yale’s women’s-studies program and has conducted research on undergraduate coeducation and on gender differences in students’ attitudes, aptitudes, and achievements.
James S. Coleman, Lawrence Cremin, and Eleanor Gibson, all noted for their work in education, have received honorary degrees from the School of Education of the State University of New York at Albany.
The school also gave “distinguished service” awards to Fred M. Hechinger, education columnist for The New York Times, and to Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers.
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, gave the keynote address at the ceremony, which was part of a three-day celebration of the 140th anniversary of the education school. The celebration also featured an exhibition of materials from the school’s archives and the awarding of “professional-excellence” commendations to seven Albany-area public-school teachers.
The University of Texas at Austin has announced that Charles Wash-ington, a 17-year-old football player convicted of armed robbery, will be allowed to enroll at the institution next spring and will be eligible to play next season.
Fred Akers, coach of the university’s football team, said last month that he and the university’s president, Peter Flawn, made the decision to allow Charles, an all-American player from Spruce High School in Dallas, to enroll. Charles, who served 43 days in a detention center and was sentenced to five years probation, will also receive an athletic scholarship.
He will be allowed to participate in spring training and will still have four years of college eligibility, beginning next fall, Mr. Akers said.
“Everybody else thinks he deserves a second chance--the judge and the legal people,” Mr. Akers told the Associated Press. “And I’m in agreement.”
