Cowley to Hamilton

Much like the late Elihu Root, who knew every leaf of its venerable trees, is 126-year-old Hamilton College (425 students), which stands on a plateau near Clinton, N. Y. overlooking the Mohawk and Oriskany valleys. Like Statesman Root the classical character of this stanch old institution, named after Alexander Hamilton, its first trustee, is illustrated in the apocryphal story that its quarterbacks call signals in the language of Euclid. The College has not fallen in with the parade of modern big-time intercollegiate athletics, it still has a rule against drinking, it proudly rejected the National Youth Administration's offer of aid to its students. But even Hamilton, on whose board of trustees sits Old Grad Alexander Woollcott, as well as Elihu Root Jr., has made some concessions to the times. Last year it dropped Latin and Greek as an entrance requirement, later abolished the fraternities' "Hell Week" (hazing of initiates). Last week it took as president a young man who stands with the reformers rather than the traditionalists of U. S. education.

When he was a Dartmouth undergraduate, Hamilton's new 39-year-old president, William Harold Cowley, crusaded as editor of the Dartmouth against class fights and other hallowed horseplay, induced the college to re-study and eventually change its curriculum. His classmates voted that he had "done most for Dartmouth," was "most likely to succeed." From Dartmouth, husky Bill Cowley, who had taken a crack at newspapering and industrial personnel work before graduation, went to the Bell Telephone Laboratories and then to University of Chicago, where he had charge of vocational guidance and placement. Since 1929 he has been head of the personnel division of the Bureau of Educational Research at Ohio State University. He has also given personnel advice to business organizations, has edited Ohio State's Journal of Higher Education. A critic of the "intellectualistic" educational theories of University of Chicago's President Robert Maynard Hutchins, Dr. Cowley believes in educating "the whole man,'' personality and all. Going last week to succeed Dr. Frederick Carlos Ferry, who is retiring after 21 years as Hamilton's president, Bill Cowley professed to be not worried but delighted at Hamilton's sturdy traditions, which he thought offered him a strong foundation on which to build.

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