College at a Corner

(See front cover)

A girl on horseback rode into Baton Rouge one day last week, driving nine head of cattle before her. She drove them into the campus of Louisiana State University and turned them over to the authorities. President James Monroe Smith of the University had announced that farm produce would be accepted in lieu of cash for tuition. She was Elena Percy, 17, of West Feliciana Parish. She wanted to be a freshman. She was accepted. . . .

Throughout the land at colleges opening or about to open, similar scenes occurred last week. Boys and girls without money sat down with officials whose earnest wish was somehow to finance the spread of culture in a time of shrunken credit. It was a realistically strained fortnight in a world where strain is usually academic to the adults and exaggerated to the young.

Just above the middle line of New Jersey the elm-lined streets of Princeton lay immemorially somnolent. In the buff colonial parallelepiped that is Nassau Hall, the permanent cogs of Princeton University prepared in time-honored fashion to open the college, not particularly exercised over the fact that higher education in the U. S. faced a trying moment, and that Princeton, one of the traditional leaders of U. S. pedagogy, was at a corner in its course through its second century.

A college is the quotient of its tradition divided into its student body and Princeton's tradition was taking a turn. Dr. John Grier Hibben, the gentle scholar who succeeded strenuously scholarly Woodrow Wilson in 1912, had retired. Into his place, part-time and ad interim, was coming a figure as interesting in the traditional academic scene as is onetime Morgan Partner Thomas Sovereign Gates who took charge of Pennsylvania's big, down-at-heel University two years ago. From its board of trustees Princeton had drafted the lumbering, plainspoken, understanding head of the country's second biggest life insurance company--Prudential Life's Edward Dickinson Duffield of the Class of 1892, descendant of Princeton's first president, Jonathan Dickinson, son of Rev. Thomas Duffield who taught in Princeton for 56 years, brother of Princeton's longtime (1901-30) Treasurer Henry Green Duffield. He would be in Princeton whole Tuesdays and Saturday mornings (inevitably staying over for football games).

"Ed" or "Duff" Duffield was graduated the same year as the late Author Jesse Lynch Williams, the late Georgia Publisher Boudre Phinizy, Alonzo Church, vice-chancellor of New Jersey, Dr. Evan Evans, rich Manhattan physician. Lawyer Theodore Wilson Morris Jr., partner of Democrat John William Davis, and Varnum Lansing ("Wilkie") Collins, Princeton's Secretary. "Duff" was celebrated for an oration called "Scotch Granite," extolling Princeton's early President John Witherspoon. With generous gestures and booming voice, he delivered "Scotch Granite" whenever asked, passing it off many a time as extemporaneous. Because Edward Duffield's large bulk was mounted heavily upon large feet, he was sometimes called "Paddlefoot," 'and sometimes "How Firm a Foundation'' would be played when he entered prayer meeting.

Taking an A.M. in 1895, Edward Duffield, good Republican, was elected to the New Jersey State Assembly, in 1904, became floor-leader. One of his first accomplishments was a bill requiring the State to buy a portrait of Princeton's John Witherspoon. Said he: "I intended on the occasion ... to deliver a large hunk of 'Scotch Granite' but ... I feared it would not be appreciated." In 1905-06 Floor Leader Duffield was New Jersey's assistant attorney general. He has been president of the Village of South Orange (1917) and of its board of education (1901-04). A friend of the late Dwight Morrow, he has been talked of for Senator, and for Governor as late as last year. But a large amount of Duffield energy went into other things than politics. A devout Presbyterian, he occupied himself with church councils. He has served Princeton for twelve years as a life trustee. Last year he represented New Jersey on President Hoover's Organization for Unemployment Relief. Besides Princeton and insurance, other Duffield enthusiasms are his daughter Elizabeth and her Carteret Book Shop in Newark, his farm in Rhode Island, golf.

Princeton's biggest problem lately, like so many other places, has been financial and "Ed" Duffield was selected, after hopeless disagreement among the trustees as to a professional educator,* to continue Princeton's financial stability as well as its human function. While many an institution ran a deficit last year, the orange & black stayed out of the red, not without counsel in the boom time from Mr. Duffield to 'ware common stocks. Built up as far as need be (unless some one wants to give a couple of millions for an undergraduate centre, a new library or a reading room), Princeton's physical expansion is for a while complete. Remains only, when possible, to restore faculty salaries to where they ought to be and to care for such brothers of Elena Percy of West Feliciana Parish as may come driving their honest cattle to Princeton seeking scholarships or jobs.

Acting President Duffield finds Princeton at a longtime high. The new class-- to ensure fullness of the limited enrollment and hence of tuition income--is the biggest the college has ever accepted, more than 650. Also it is the highest-ever batch of matriculants as to scholarship. The student body has reacted healthily to last winter's public discussion of the Princeton "smoothie" (parlor snake) complex and on University Field last week cavorted half a hundred young men as husky as Princeton ever boasted, under Coach Herbert Orrin ("Fritz") Crisler from virile Minnesota. If anything further is needed to discourage smoothiness on the campus, the large, ambulant form of Acting President Duffield will be there.

Franklin D'Olier, Princeton 1898, an American Legion man of the patrician, soldierly, anti-Bonus type, is President Duffield's right-hand man. His definition of "Ed" Duffield, who never won his P or key at college, is that he is a Phi Beta Kappa citizen whose interests have been four P's: Politics, Prudential, Presbyterians and Princeton. When Prudential Insurance Co. asked him to form a legal department, he accepted with no idea of staying always with the company but stayed long enough to be drafted for president ten years ago. As he walks downstairs from his big office on the 7th floor of Newark's rococo Merchants' Bank Building to his private office on the 6th floor, filled with photographs of famed citizens and devoted classmates, he may by now be self-conscious enough to reflect that his new Princeton job too, having sought him, may hold him.

If so, it will hold a new Big Three president whose interest is entirely human. It is the conviction of most Princeton trustees that Princeton had best remain, in its country site and simple organization, a first-rate big college instead of becoming a second-rate big university. That would be Acting President Duffield's conviction, with this thought expressed:

"My aim and effort will be to perpetuate the tradition of a residential undergraduate college, and if possible to develop that ideal even further, which entails responsibility not only in classroom work but on all that enters into the student's life."

He will not go charging in to effect reforms. He thinks colleges should change from within. Last spring a Daily Princetonian reporter asked him: "Will you take up the club system?"

Replied Acting President Duffield: "Sure. If you'll bring it up, I'll tackle it."

"Ed" Duffield has been for years chairman of the Undergraduate Affairs Committee of the Princeton trustees. His emphasis on the college's meaning to those who go there is expressed in his view of the college as he knew it in the Golden Nineties. He recognizes the absurdity of "dying for dear old Rutgers" but adds this: "That spirit has its points. It at least gives boys a concentration point outside their little selves. It would counteract this disinterested, selfish cynicism.

"We're lost if we can't use our colleges to insure against Kreugers and Insulls."

Of Acting President Duffield the Presbyterian there is this to be added: Buchmanism, the doctrine of soul-baring which Princeton ousted from its campus in 1926, revolts him. He concurs in a brother alumnus' definition of it: "Christian nudism." He thinks that Dean Robert Russell Wicks, guardian of the handsome new Princeton Chapel, is religion's perfect ambassador on the campus. The Wicks thesis is that compulsory chapel on at least half the Sundays of a term is most salutary. If chapel were entirely voluntary, the men who come to hear Wicks sermons in droves would be selfconscious, would fear that the Fellows would think they had got Religious.

Toward the Faculty and affairs scholastic, Acting President Duffield proposes to maintain a judicial rather than executive attitude. He will not go popping his head into classrooms or make long speeches at faculty meetings. The academic side of Princeton will remain in the capable hands of Dean of the Faculty Luther Pfahler Eisenhart, a quiet, smiling little mathematician, baseball addict, Princeton teacher for 32 years, whose memory is so prodigious that he needs no filing cabinets in his office. Dean Eisenhart's monument is Princeton's famed four-course plan, instituted in 1924, by which upper-class students choose two major courses and two minor ones and write a full-size thesis. Scholastically, Princeton is at its peak, the Depression perhaps having had something to do with making the students take brain-training seriously.

*All the Princeton classes whose members were aged 35 or more were polled for suggestions. Greatest number of votes for any name was six.

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