President at Penult

(See front cover)

Golden mace aloft, Yale University's Provost Charles Seymour this week marched, between bristling rows of the Connecticut militia, through the leafy streets of New Haven to Yale's round-faced, granite Woolsey Hall. Behind him, in robes of green, brown and scarlet, gravely filed Yale's faculty, bound for the 235th annual commencement exercises of the University. To the families and friends of the graduates in their sombre caps & gowns, the occasion marked some 600 important personal milestones in some 600 young lives.

To the faculty, the exercises were scarcely less momentous. Since the Class of 1936 was the first to experience the full three years of the College Plan, it could be regarded as the first fruit of the New Yale. To the great and potent body of Yale alumni and to the world of U. S. Education, the New Haven ceremonies had an even wider significance. Having supervised a period of expansion the like of which he could not have dreamed of when he took office a decade and a half ago, James Rowland Angell, father of the New Yale, was beginning the penultimate year of his epic administration.

Unknowns-- In 1921 Yale turned out with brass bands and welcoming streamers to greet its new President James Rowland Angell. It was a meeting of two unknown quantities. Of the two, Yale was by far the more perplexing. A hectic period of social and spiritual campus unrest, later identified as the Jazz Age, had just begun. And in the teeth of it, the nation's Second School had just undergone a sweeping reorganization at the hands of a committee of faculty and trustees headed by Publisher Henry Johnson Fisher of McCall's and the University's Secretary Anson Phelps Stokes. The reorganization plan unified by departments all instruction given in the hitherto strictly autonomous College, Sheffield Scientific School and graduate schools. It set up a Provost to conduct the faculty's business with the Administration, established a single board of admissions and a common freshman year, with a separate freshman faculty, for "Sheff" and "Ac." Simple and sensible though these reforms seemed to outsiders, they cut deep into Yale's vital fabric of traditions, left a mass of supersensitive and unsutured ganglions. At that point, Yale's Grand Old Man, Arthur Twining Hadley, resigned the Presidency, thus leaving Yale not only suffering from postoperative shock, but without an attendant.

When the Corporation announced that Yale's next President would be James Rowland Angell, Michigan '90, a large body of alumni, who felt that no one could cherish Good Old Yale but a Good Old Yaleman, were stricken with grief and shame. Few had the perspicacity to divine that now if ever was the time Yale needed the unemotional guidance of a man who, like a foreigner in the Orient, would not be judged too severely for short-cutting an unwieldy mass of custom and precedent. An Angell might march boldly in where an alumnus President would timidly fear to tread.

To Yale in 1921, however, James Rowland Angell was, as in a measure he still remains, an unknown indeed. Faculty scientists heard that he had been a psychologist, pupil of John Dewey at Michigan, student of William James and Josiah Royce at Harvard, one of the first of the bright young men who went to Germany to explore what was, at the century's turn, an exciting new field of learning. Administrative officers of the University knew that President-elect Angell had long since given up pure scholarship to become faculty dean and acting president of the University of Chicago, chairman of the Na tional Research Council after the War, then President of Carnegie Corporation. Only those grown very old in the service of Yale and Education were aware that James Rowland Angell was the grandson of one college president, Brown's Alexis Caswell (1868-72), and the son of an even more celebrated journalist, diplomat and pedagog, Dr. James Burrill Angell, for 38 years President of the University of Michigan.

Breeze-- "Mr. James Rowland Angell," said the Harvard Alumni Review of sister Yale's new President, ''comes like a breeze from somewhere outside New England." This was only technically true. For although James Rowland Angell matured on the campus of Chicago and was raised on the campus of Michigan, he was born on the campus of Vermont when his father, having edited the Providence, R. I. Journal during the Civil War and taught a spell at Brown, briefly took over the sickly State University at Burlington. James Rowland Angell does not like to have it forgotten that he is descended from nine generations of Rhode Islanders and he en joys recalling that since the old Angell farm lies at the bottom of Providence's reservoir, the citizens to this day drink water filtered through his ancestors' bones. But the Harvard Alumni Review made no mistake in its simile. Like a breeze, Angell had in his 53 years moved freely far & wide. His horizon had always been broader than the campus at Burlington, Ann Arbor or Chicago. It has consistently remained broader than the campus at New Haven.

Significantly, President Angell recalls more vividly than any other period of his life the year, when he was 11, spent with his parents in Peiping. President Hayes had made his father Minister to China. The sights and sounds of the legation compound, the stillness of the Orient under snow, the pony the British Minister gave him, the hard-packed clay roads in summer, the incredible remoteness of the place and the kindliness and decorum of the Chinese are memories which return to President Angell with infinitely more clarity than the last meeting of the Yale Corporation.

Mr. Angell's very successful social personality, which has done much to smooth his long academic route and manifests itself at once in the friendly twinkle of his eye, emerged shortly after the Chinese interlude. At the University of Michigan, "Jim" Angell learned to strike a discreet mean between the propriety expected of the president's son, the humanity expected of a normal undergraduate. He became a Phi Beta Kappa and a Delta Kappa Epsilon almost simultaneously. He shortstopped for the baseball team and won the University and State tennis championships. He played a clarinet in the University band and fell in love with (and later married) Student Marion Isabel Watrous of Des Moines, Iowa. By the time President McKinley borrowed Michigan's president to be his Minister to Turkey, Son James Rowland was already an up-&-coming psychologist at Chicago, starting the career that was to lead him to one of the half-dozen great academic seats of the nation.

Money-- The task of a university president is largely one of husbandry. The faculty supervises the breeding of strong academic stock. Rich friends and alumni see that stock is materially nourished. The president, however, must exercise constant broad vigilance lest the flock's young and the flock's runts be driven from the trough and starve. Surveying James Rowland Angell's 15 years in the President's office in Woodbridge Hall, the most acquisitive Yale alumnus cannot quibble at the tremendous wealth that has fallen to Yale. Since taking office. President Angell has doubled ($3,098,000 to $6,900,000) the amount annually expended for maintenance and instruction. He has trebled ($35,000,000 to $100,000,000) the value of the University's plant. He has quadrupled ($25,000,000 to $95,000,000) its endowment. Nevertheless, by the uniformity rather than the magnitude of their growth do Yale College and the Yale graduate schools testify to the spectacular pedagogical husbandry of President Angell.

Men. The man under whom Yale has undergone its greatest material changes takes no special credit for them, modestly insists that he was simply sitting in Woodbridge Hall when the money rolled in. It is rather by the men who have surrounded him and their strictly educative works during this exciting period that James Rowland Angell would like to be judged.

Many an important pedagogical name has arisen at Yale during his regime: Economist Edgar Stephenson Furniss, hard-driving Dean of Yale's Graduate School; Economist James Harvey Rogers; Lawyer Walton Hamilton; Historian Michael Ivanovich Rostovtzeff; Geologist Charles Hyde Warren.

But it is a tribute to President Angell's co-operative ability that most of the prominent men in the New Yale are legacies from the Hadley administration. President Angell's moneyman is canny, thin-lipped George Parmly Day, one-time Manhattan stockbroker, Treasurer of the University since 1910. He founded the University Press, sponsored the Yale Review and in 1927 set an all-time record for academic high finance by striking 22,000 graduates for $20,993,000.

When President Angell went to Yale, the institution was a university largely by courtesy. The Medical School was almost literally a shack. Pathologist Milton Charles ("Nitzy") Winternitz became Dean of the Medical School in 1920. Encouraged by the new President, financed by Rockefeller and University money, he boosted the school in a decade to one of the nation's finest.

Launched by Dean Winternitz in 1923 was the graduate School of Nursing, first and most famed in the U. S.

One of Yale's most celebrated pre-War graduates was aware of the Law School only because one of its students was on his water polo team. Under Deans Thomas Walter Swan (1916-27) and Robert Maynard Hutchins (1927-30), the Yale Law School enjoyed its Angellic renaissance. Then Milton Winternitz and Robert Hutchins collaborated on the Institute of Human Relations, dedicated ambitiously to the general study of human behavior, a unique co-operative research centre that unites the best of Yale's postgraduate brains.

Under Dean Everett Victor Meeks, the School of Fine Arts began winning the Prix de Rome with an almost monotonous regularity.

To President Angell, this is the growth he calls "dramatic." It is not without significance that Yale College, the undergraduate school, got its turn at the trough last. One reason is that the College itself, largely home-ruled, resisted change. Another is that James Angell is not deeply impressed by Yale College either as a parcel of ancient traditions or as a seat of learning. Even now his eye wanders when visitors babble about the almost flagrant picturesqueness of the acres of neo-Gothic and neo-Colonial stone and brick with which some $60,000,000 of Edward Stephen Harkness' and the late John William Sterling's money has entirely redecorated the city of New Haven. If anyone typifies the elegance of the nine undergraduate colleges' 28 squash courts, the urbanity of their comfortable common rooms, the easy-going new grace they bring to undergraduate life, it is Provost Charles Seymour, a highly civilized man who edited Colonel Edward M. House's papers, is the master of swank Berkely and looks like suave Cinemactor Frank Morgan. Even so lively an enthusiast for the College Plan as Provost Seymour admits that so far the changes have been residential rather than tutorial. But President Angell definitely believes that the Yale class of 1936 is four or five years further toward informed maturity than his Michigan class of 1890, though he concedes that the phenomenon of youthful gravity is national, attributable largely to the cares of the depression.

President. An indication of the loneliness of his office rather than any want of humanity on his part is the fact that President Angell will next year reach retirement age (68) without having acquired a nickname at Yale. Many an undergraduate does not recognize him as he plays on the University golf course. At his Hillhouse Street home he smokes, drinks and entertains sparingly. His second wife, once Mrs. Katharine Cramer Woodman of Ardmore, Pa., came to the campus in 1932, already outshines her husband as a New Haven character. Last year a merry undergraduate sat down to chat with her at a fraternity dance, inadvertently dozed off. Into his hatband she inserted her card, slyly inscribed: ''Sorry to find you out."

The final measure of a college president is not so much what he does as what he thinks and how he says it. In President Angell, Yale and the U.S. academic world have a highly articulate moral spokesman. Last November at the inauguration of his protege Alan Valentine as President of the University of Rochester, he delivered himself of a passionate statement of his idea of a university:

"The university is dedicated to the discovery, protection and dissemination of truth. As such, it has been subject to attack time immemorial from every agency that fears new truth, or that arrogates to itself the exclusive possession of particular areas of truth. In one generation this attack has come from organized religion, in another from vested business interests, and in yet another from political forces that cannot, or will not, brook the light of disinterested investigation and discussion."

President Angell does not have to look far into the past to find that the liberal institution of private education is one of the first targets of dictatorship or collectivism. As he sees it, the current threat to private education in the U. S. is punitive taxation of the rich. And who soaks the rich, soaks Yale and him. Particularly is President Angell disturbed at the cessation of the steady flow of small legacies on which in the past Yale could annually rely to balance its budget. President Angell knows that nowadays testators, foreseeing high inheritance taxes on their estates, have adopted the practice of earmarking for the Government what they originally intended to leave their university. All such evidence of the invasion of the State into the realm of private learning, President Angell views with grave alarm.

When James Burrill Angell went to Michigan in 1871, his most heart-breaking task was to try to persuade the State Government to take an interest, if only financial, in its university. So radically has the tide changed that his son's chief crusade is to keep the State as far away from Yale as possible. In his 1934 annual report he best stated his current concern by declaring:

"A complete reorganization of education in the U. S., with a shift in its objectives and a complete change of its center of gravity, may, as some persons believe, be highly desirable; but to bring this about by indirection and more or less unintentionally as a result of a panic-stricken effort to mitigate through injudicious taxation the effects of a transient economic crisis, or as the result of a merely emotional assault upon the results of thrift and industry, would be a sorry product of our democratic society, and one ruinous to some of the highest values that have been built up in our century and a half of national life."

As if extending his famed father's remarks, James Waterhouse Angell, 38, Harvardman and orthodox professor of economics at Columbia, last week voiced even deeper concern for contemporary U.S. Education at Columbia's commencement: "Down to the present day the universities, save where overwhelming force has crushed them, have remained rightly jealous of their hard-won privileges, proud of their part in the world's history, and almost fanatically consecrated to those ideals of spiritual and intellectual integrity for which they have so long fought. . . . Particularly is this true in this country today. We are in the midst of the most ominous economic, political and social up heavals which we have known in more than half a century. Self-interest, partisanship and deceit have never been more powerful, the confusion of issues never more profound. In such a situation, the universities and their members have an all-important part to play. If our universities of today stand for anything at all, they stand not only for knowledge, but also for intellectual and spiritual integrity. . . ."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.