Rhodesmen at Swarthmore

(See front cover)

U. S. colleges and universities had by this week gotten their commencement announcements and invitations printed, their degrees engrossed and signed. There would be academic processions, speeches, sermons. Old grads would come trooping in with golf clubs, tennis rackets and bottles, many of them to put on rakish costumes, to talk of hard times, old times, babies. Eminent Men were ready to receive honorary degrees. The U. S. educational scene was in its most public and familiar phase. Last week one college was ready to celebrate with a difference.

On the tree-girt campus of Swarthmore College near Philadelphia, 150 of the 1,200-odd Rhodes Scholars in the U. S. and Canada would for the first time hold a sizeable reunion. For them, few bottles, no antics. Most of them would bring wives and for those who brought children a nursery had been established. The program was to be scholarly indeed. Dean Willard Learoyd Sperry of Harvard Theological School, first Rhodesman sent abroad from Michigan, would deliver the Swarthmore baccalaureate. English Professor Charles Frederick Tucker Brooke, first Rhodesman from West Virginia and now Yale's expert on Marlowe, would give the Phi Beta Kappa address. The Swarthmore commencement address would be delivered by Sir Francis James Wylie. who lately retired as resident host and welcomer to Rhodes Scholars at Oxford (TIME, March 7, 1932) and this year, with his white-haired, U. S.-born wife, has been visiting Rhodesmen old and new about the land (TIME, May 22). And. to tune in with the times, the Rhodesmen would hold a symposium on International Cures for Depression, chief speaker Newton D. Baker on "The Superstate."

Rhodes's Idea. As the Rhodes Scholars assembled for their first big reunion, some of them now greying after 31 years, observers pondered their record. Had they fulfilled Cecil Rhodes's plans? Had they, as a group, showed themselves more able than their U. S. classmates?

Rough, strong-headed Cecil John Rhodes who dug a fortune out of Africa was a strong believer in Anglo-Saxondom. One day he took seriously a conversational suggestion by the late Editor William Thomas Stead of the British Review of Reviews that the British Empire join with the U. S. Republic under a constitution based on the U. S. Cried Rhodes: "I take it--I take it! ... Dear me, how ideas expand. I thought my ideas were tolerably large, but yours have outgrown them. Yes, yes, you are quite right!" So Cecil Rhodes set up a -L-1,000,000 trust fund (now grown to -L-2,000,000) to bring 68 young men annually from the colonies, from the U. S. and Germany to attend Oxford for three years, to learn England and understand it. The young men should be of good character, high scholarship: they must be athletic and "leaders." Through them, hoped Rhodes, would come Anglo-Saxon world unity. That was in 1902.

Rhodes's Results. Some Oxford men have long regarded Rhodesmen as disagreeable blighters, scarcely fit even for one another's depressing company. Gentler observers reflect that Oxford does not represent all of England. Its young men are mostly of the gentry. And British gentry are alien to youths from big U. S. cities, not to mention those of the U. S. hinterland whence most Rhodes Scholars come. Cecil Rhodes's will provided that Scholars be chosen two from a State, which has sometimes resulted in thinly populated States sending up indifferent candidates. In 1929 Parliament was persuaded to make a change. Candidates are now chosen from eight districts of six States each.

No Rhodes Scholar has yet become President of the U. S., member of the Cabinet, Governor of a State or mayor of a great U. S. city. There are only 20 Rhodesmen in Federal service; 195 are in law. But the rise of pedagogs to high government positions under the Roosevelt Administration may point toward the fruition of Cecil Rhodes's idea, for the biggest group of Rhodesmen (40%) have become educators. Eight are college presidents, 13 deans, one (John James Tigert) was U. S. Commissioner of Education from 1921 to 1928. Other distinguished Rhodesmen include Minister to Austria Gilchrist Baker Stockton, onetime Amateur Boxing Champion Edward Francis ("Eddie") Eagan (now a lawyer), Rev. Arthur Lee Kinsolving of Boston, Stanley Kuhl Hornbeck who advises Secretary Hull on the Far East, Police Commissioner J. K. Watkins of Detroit, Astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble of Mt. Wilson (whose conception of the expanding Universe is called the "Hubble Bubble"), Chairman Francis P. Miller of the World's Student Christian Federation, Pulitzer Prize Historian Bernadotte Everly Schmitt, Geneva Newsmen Clarence K. Streit (New York Times) and Lewis Rex

Miller (Christian Science Monitor), Authors James Saxon Childers, Walter Stanley Campbell ("Stanley Vestal"), Elmer Holmes Davis, Christopher Darlington Morley.

Host & Hostess. At Swarthmore this week many a Rhodesman would hasten to shake the hand of Sir Francis Wylie. He, a wrinkled onetime philosophy don, never forgets the name, college and home town of a Rhodes Scholar. Once he presented 250 Rhodesmen to Edward of Wales, remembered them all. Lady Wylie always presided at tea, had every Scholar to dinner once a year. Sir Francis, wise and tactful, was knighted in 1929 for his Rhodes work. In 1931 the current crop of Rhodesmen gave the Wylies a silver salver, a scroll, a dining room suite.

Oxford v. Punch. Also very much in sight at Swarthmore would be Frank Aydelotte, president of the College and key man in Rhodes affairs on the west side of the water. Frank Aydelotte was an early Rhodes Scholar (1905-07). A shy country lad from Sullivan, Ind., he had gone to Indiana University, played football despite the admonitions of his parents and doctor, later coached a crack high school team. At Oxford, he rowed, played rugby. Back in the U. S., he taught English at Indiana University until 1915, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology until 1921. U. S. education was growing rich and vast and Frank Aydelotte's notion was that it needed culture. All very well to provide education-for-all, but he feared pedagogs were neglecting the bright students who, if given the chance, could strike out for themselves and get ahead of their duller fellows. Democracy was a good thing, but applied to education it dragged the able men down. Dr. Aydelotte would reprieve democracy from mediocrity. Oxford was his model, where well-bred young men did not "take courses" but studied subjects whole with their tutors and, on their own initiative, went to lectures when they felt like it, getting their work up not in term-time but during vacations. He observed that Rhodes Scholars went to Oxford full of U. S. "punch." Oxford smoothed and quieted them, sent them home to spread scholarliness among their fellows. In 1921 Frank Aydelotte had a chance to put the Oxford idea into practice, when Swarthmore made him its president.

"Work, Golf and Work," say his friends, are Frank Aydelotte's hobbies. Golf he shoots under So. Work he does at high speed. Bald, far from handsome (his large ears are always a target at the annual Swarthmore ''Hamburg Show''), he is dynamic and persuasive, with a disarming sunny smile. He talks forcefully, sometimes lurching a shoulder forward, sometimes clasping hands on his stomach and swaying. He it was who in 1918 persuaded the Rhodes Trust to let new Scholars be chosen by old ones, and got the job of managing it for himself. In 1929 he pounded on Parliament's door, got the bill through to redistrict--equivalent to breaking the Rhodes will. For the great copper family he organized the Guggenheim Fellowships, is still chairman. For Swarthmore he put across two $2,000,000 endowment drives, thereby tripling the endowment to $6,268,000. Frank Aydelotte did not try to enlarge the college enrollment (now 588, half female). He sniffed at people who thought it would be nice to have 5,000 students. He preferred to raise it from an average small college to one of the best.

Honors for Quakers. Swarthmore's aims under President Aydelotte were the same as those of the other pioneers in liberalized college training--Harvard, Princeton, Reed College, Smith. Swarthmore's method was the Honors Course, which is now used by some 80 institutions. Half the Swarthmore juniors and seniors take honors, devoting their full time to reading in any one of ten fields of correlated subjects. They are free from class attendance and examinations, meeting twice a week in small seminars (with tea). At the end they are graduated with honors, high honors or highest honors. And honors do not imply remoteness from the world of today: they may be taken in chemistry as well as classics, in engineering as well as English. Swarthmore honors examinations are given not by Swarthmore professors but, to insure strictness and impartiality, by visiting professors from places as widely separated as Oxford, Virginia, Wisconsin, Amherst. Last week examinations took place. Orals are public, and Swarthmore students may drop in to examination rooms to see how their friends are doing.

About one-quarter of the Swarthmore students are Quaker. No Quaker himself, President Aydelotte admires Quaker liberalism and forthrightness, seeks to keep its influence alive in his college. Older professors sometimes "thee and thou" their students. Sundays there are "first-day meetings'' in the bare Quaker meeting house. The Swarthmore board of managers opens its sessions silently, does business by taking the ''sense of the meeting." Swarthmore students dress simply, do not gad about Philadelphia as much as students from Haverford and U. of P. The men meet nightly in the ''Cracker Room" in their main dormitory. No beer is sold. This year the Swarthmore girls voted to disband their sororities, to which 75% belonged. Alumnae protested and the matter is still open. Yet Swarthmore is not all innocence. Two years ago Dean Alan C. Valentine, Rhodesman who is now master of Yale's Pierson College, staged a surprise raid, found liquor in the rooms of two dozen students.

Frank Aydelotte still talks Oxford and Rhodes but concentrates on Swarthmore. He met, and silenced. George Bernard Shaw at a British garden party by telling him about his Honors Courses. President Aydelotte got Swarthmore a Rhodes Scholar football coach and numerous professors. Other colleges have taken some of his best men--Dean Valentine, President Raymond Walters of the University of Cincinnati, President Frank Parker Day of Union College, Dean Frances Burlingame of Elmira College. President Aydelotte introduced scholarships of a Rhodes type at Swarthmore, doubled the number for next year hoping to get more and abler students. Among Swarthmore alumni are onetime Governors Sweet of Colorado, Sproul of Pennsylvania, Alice Paul of the National Woman's Party, onetime Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer. Swarthmore has produced no Einstein. That is what Frank Aydelotte wants to do next.

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