Home & Gown
Looming over the 9,000-acre campus of Leland Stanford Junior University, on the side of San Juan Hill, is a grey pile of masonry suggestive of an administration building and at the same time, with its terraced roofs for outdoor living, reminiscent of the communal dwellings that the Zuni Indians used to build. No lawn and scant shrubbery relieve the austere approach. Within, all is spacious and gracious, the solidly furnished home of the family of a man of large affairs. Here lives Nominee Hoover. Hither he was returning last week to await formal notification of his high honor.
Stanford University, of which Alumnus Hoover has been a guiding force since his graduation in 1895, was very much astir for the impending event. Committees of the faculty an of Palo Alto's citizens met at the home of Professor Theodore Jesse Hoover, the hero's elder brother and valued adviser, to plan their part in the proceedings They decided to hold the ceremony in Stanford's roomy football stadium, where 90,000 persons can look on. They prepared to throw some of the campus fraternity houses open to visiting newsgatherers. Distinguished guests were to be accommodated in faculty homes, including the small model residences which Mrs. Hoover has been building with quiet generosity for low-salaried instructors to buy on the instalment plan.
No account of Stanford's Hoover reception would be complete, however, if it represented the university's attitude as one of unalloyed satisfaction with Herbert Hoover. Like any other social microcosm, the Stanford community (faculty, students, trustees, alumni) has its discontented minority--men who will never agree that all Hoover has done for Stanford has been for the best. They complain, chiefly, that under the Hoover influence--he has been on the Board of Trustees since 1912 --Stanford has changed from a liberal arts college of limited enrolment, which it was founded to be, into an evergrowing institute of technology. None knew better than Herbert Hoover the stipulations of the late Senator Stanford's bequest. But after he had formed his own philosophy for industrial civilization, Hoover said, "It can't be helped. Stanford must be changed." So mass education came in. The oldtime stars of the faculty, like John Branner and Dr. David Starr Jordan (since 1916 president-emeritus), were surrounded and succeeded by run-of-the-mill instructors. Classics receded before technical subjects to the point where, for example, courses in art are now open only to students requiring such knowledge as the utilitarian equipment of a teaching career.
Another, perhaps sharper cause of cleavage in Stanford life was Hoover's attitude toward the fraternities. It happened that he was a non-fraternity man, a "barb,"*in his day. It happened that a successful "barb" revolt in campus politics was effected with him as one of its leaders. He and the fraternity element have never forgotten their differences, as witness the lies about him circulated by fraternity men last spring (TIME, May 14; May 21). For his part, he tried in 1912 to do the same sort of thing to Stanford's fraternity system that Woodrow Wilson had tried on Princeton's "snobbish," "undemocratic" eating-club system a few years previous. Hoover sought to superimpose a full-grown university union on Stanford. Theory told him that this was what was wanted to make the place socially efficient. But the huge, costly building he insisted upon donating never came into popular use.
It should only be added that, however loudly the Stanford minority may grumble at him, the Stanford majority is correspondingly enthusiastic and admiring.
* Short for "barbarian."