Charles Mueller, from Richmond, Ind., summarizes his career this way: “I’ve got a 1.76 grade point average. 2.0 is passing , 4.0 is perfect.) I study maybe three hours a week. My problem is I can’t read. I have to read Donald Duck comics three times to find out what’s going on. That’s the truth, I’m that bad.”

Many undergraduates are grateful to Parsons for the refuge it provides. “I won’t knock this school like most people around here do,” George Knabb of Allentown, Pa., confesses. “I was 20 years old and the Army was after me. This is a weird place. There’s no stigma, if you screw up and have money, too. In most schools they knock you for that. I know of one dormitory group of 197 guys who had an aggregate average on finals of 0.80. Twenty-one guys got 0.00. Nobody sweats. Nobody gets axed.”

It may be asked why the students’ draft boards don’t take more interest in this state of affairs. “My father’s very big in ordinance,” one student brags. “He owns the draft board. They’ll never get me.” So far, most students haven’t needed that kind of clout to stay in school. “They don’t tend to take ‘em if the student is moving toward graduation,” Dr. Roberts explains, “The only criterion, really, is whether he’s making progress. If he nudges up his grade point 1/10 of a percent, that’s progress, isn’t it?”

In view of his success at Parsons, Roberts considers himself an authority on progress. A graduate of Syracuse who also attended Yale and the University of Chicago, he had served as assistant pastor of New York’s fashionable Brick Presbyterian Church, where he earned a formidable reputation as a fund raiser. Doubtless this is what led the church leaders to ask him in 1955 to take over as president of their floundering 80-year-old college in Iowa. They could hardly have expected the result: Roberts has since severed all connection between Parsons and the church, and the school is now operated by own business-oriented board of trustees.

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