NovaVib

In the memoirs of the late Vice President of the U.S. Thomas R. Marshall, published serially by The New York Times and other newspapers, appeared these Hoosier philosophizings upon pedagogy in general, the Classics in particular: “My people chose to send me to Wabash College, at Crawfordsville, Ind. It was staid, as it is yet. An old-fashioned institution, founded for the purpose, if possible, of giving to a young man what I am pleased to call a cultural education; that is, to train him in those studies and direct his mind along those lines which will give to him powers to reason accurately, or practically so, upon the great problems of life, and to be philosophic under all the misfortunes that may come to him.

“. . . How clearly I am enabled to express myself I do not know; but of one thing I am quite convinced: That I should have suffered a far greater handicap in life than I have in the way of expression of thought, clarity of statement, had I not studied the classic languages. I realize that nobody is now paying any attention to them and that a man may be a Master of Arts with a mere smattering of Latin and no Greek whatever, but I am not convinced that the loss of these two languages is contributing to accurate English.

“… I think all of those who have gone through the grind of the study of the Greek language will admit that it is the whetstone of the human intellect. None of the stone may be left upon the knife after the sharpening process, but the knife is the keener for the use of the stone.”

“Oxford Prep”

U.S. students who go to sit at Mother Oxford’s ancient knee frequently find themselves embarrassed by lack of the right sort, and extent, of preparation. The same applies to U.S. students entering other English universities, to many entering U. S. institutions. These facts, and the fact that many U.S. parents long to give their sons “a year abroad before going into business,” have encouraged the organization of a preparatory school at Oxford, of and for Americans only, by Professor Edgar C. Taylor of Washington University. Himself a former Longfellow Scholar at Oxford (from Bowdoin), Prof. Taylor will employ both American and British colleagues in a school organized along the combined lines of an Oxford hall and a U. S. preparatory school. The school opens “soon.”

Re-Postponed

Imagination circumnavigates the globe at will. So do radio, millionaires, white whales, tramps, salesmen, sometimes, U. S. Army fliers. To organize a college, enroll a student body of 450, put it on a ship and send it through the seven seas is another matter. The mind is willing but obstacles overwhelm. In 1924, New York University attempted it, bowed to “unforeseen difficulties,” postponed it a year. Last week, “the detail work” caused postponement for another year. This announcement followed upon a statement, a fortnight ago, from Dean James E. Lough, author and sponsor of “Around the World College” (TIME, June 29), that the S. S. University only awaited a full passenger list (men only) to set sail.

The attractions of the scheme are manifold: only $2,200 for board, passage and tuition; stops in 35 foreign countries; a 34-course curriculum, with college credit promised by the land universities; an able faculty, headed by erudite, much-traveled Dr. Charles F. Thwing, President-emeritus of Western Reserve University.

Presumable lets and hindrances: interruption of satisfactory courses ashore; suspicion of organized tours; absence from home and family for ten months; “unforeseen difficulties”; “detail work”.

Colleges

Out swung the gates of higher education in the U. S. In poured the knowledge-thirsty multitude. Already there had returned that serious-minded element of every undergraduate body which cannot wait for the gates to open before setting about the important business of football. And the professors were most of them settled once more in their lodgings, freshened by a good summer of golf and fox-trotting (the young ones) or by a trip to Europe (the older ones) away from their families, thanks to the new “tourist third cabin” on the steamship lines.

Presidents and other high dignitaries put away their press clippings of speeches made during vaciation at institutes, banquets, cornerstones and places, and fell to jotting notes for speeches of welcome to the Freshmen, remarks to the faculty, explanations to the trustees, exhortations to the alumni.

At New Brunswick, N.J., Dr. John Martin Thomas entered his new Presidential Office at Rutgers University with the words: “I do not come here as an iconoclast. It will not be my purpose to make radical changes, either in the personnel or in the academic program. Nevertheless … I am not interested in organizations which remain stationary.”

Columbia University, largest in the U.S., opened as usual with a speech from President Nicholas Murray Butler, whose eloquence was in no way affected by a convalescent shoulder (lamed by golf, inflamed by ocean bathing).

Toward Ann Arbor, Mich., in a roaring automobile, sped Dr. Clarence Cook Little, athletic young biologist, leaving behind him the presidency of the University of Maine, for that of the University of Michigan. He is the first in three generations of his family to leave New England, but he was visibly delighted with his lot. As he departed, sung and cheered to the echo by hearty Michiganders in Boston, said he: “Education should have one great aim, I think. And that aim should be to add intellectual development the cultivation of those intangible qualities which make us humans rather than beasts.”*

A day or two later, Miss Jean Hamilton, whom Dr. Little is soon to know well in her capacity of Dean of Women at Michigan, received a newspaper reporter at her cottage in Maine. He asked: “What difference between girls now and 20 years ago?” Said she: “The girl of today, generally speaking, has no sense of there being any question that any of these educational openings which are all hers now should not belong to her . . . It is not ambition for the best, often . . . but it is merely ambition to get ahead in the world . . . [Young women crowd into teaching] because for the first two years the teaching profession pays better than any other . . . After that, the plan is marriage . . . There are too many young people who are going to college.”

At the University of Chicago, President-elect Max Mason entered upon his new dispensation. At the University of Wisconsin, President-elect Frank went briskly ahead with his. At Galesburg, Ill., Albert Britt took over Knox College. At Lubbock, Texas, President Paul Whitfield Horn spurred the builders of The-College-That-Is-To-Be.

Toward Winter Park, Fla., another automobile roared its way, quite as loudly as Dr. Little’s. It was bound for Rollins College and it bore Hamilton Holt, Democratic candidate (defeated) for the U. S. Senate in Connecticut’s special election last December. Mr. Holt was a president-elect, too, just notified. Folk who marked his passage said to themselves that, far though it was to Rollins College, Mr. Holt might go farther if he were entering pedagogy for good. For ‘he is energetic.

Graduated by Yale in 1894, Hamilton Holt studied sociology for three years and then, aged 25, undertook the editorship of The Independent, a weekly review inherited from his grandfather. If the paper had its financial ups and downs, that was because socialist-pacifist thought has never had a paying audience in the U. S. and because the editors of such papers invariably spend much of their time organizing, directing and exhorting sympathetic organizations. Some of Hamilton Holt’s extra-editorial activities were connected with the New York Peace Society, the Conciliation Internationale, the American Society of International Law, the American Peace Society, the World Peace Foundation, the League to Enforce Peace, the American -Scandinavian Peace Foundation, the Mexico Society of New York, and the Simplified Spelling Board. He attended (as observer) the Second Hague Convention (1907), the battle fronts (1915), the Third Assembly of the League of Nations (1922). The Independent has enjoyed his services only as a consulting editor since 1921 and has become, save for a page of book talk by learned and witty Critic Ernest Boyd, a very dull and amateurish sheet indeed.

At State College, Pa., the privilege of welcoming freshmen to Penn State was tendered to Dr. Fred Lewis Pattee, head of the English Department. How pleasantly surprised were the neophytes to have the venerable academician come forth and greet them on their own ground, thus: “Most college men are unable to use slang with variation.” A boring cinema is lazily called “rotten.” An attractive girl, a tasty piece of pie, “fine.” “Be able to make use of slang if you want to, but don’t be mastered by it. I can talk for an hour without using one slang word or expression, but I can also talk for an hour and use nothing much else but slang If a college freshman has no hobby, he should get one without delay, whether it be masterpieces of literature or collecting stamps or even match-boxes.*. . .”

Aristocratic

Near Mena, Ark,, in a virgin dip of the Ozark Mountains, the whacking of hammers and the whine of saws and planes attended the opening of the third year of Commonwealth College. Fifty students and their 13 instructors were the workmen, erecting frame dormitories to go with the barn, log cabin, farm machinery, live stock and 3,000-volume library that constitutes Commonwealth’s physical equipment. (Last year, classes were held in rented rooming houses in Mena.)

It is a labor college. Tuition is but $50 a semester. Every one works four hours a day at the community tasks. The endowment is less than $5,000. But unlike Brookwood College (Katonah, N.Y.), the Rand School (Manhattan), and other labor colleges, Commonwealth teaches no economic, historical or social dogma. Conservatives and Communists, I. W. W.’s and Single Taxers, Liberals and Laborites—all are presented with “the facts of existence” and allowed to choose.

Unique (some will say unAmerican) is the college’s reiteration of but one old catchphrase, reminiscent of Thomas Carlyle and Alexander Meiklejohn, “an aristocracy of intellect.” Applications are cordially received from Pennsylvania garmentworkers, Vermont mechanics, Arizona masons, Minnesota farmers, California plumbers, but only demonstrably exceptional intellects are admitted. The institution’s ultimate capacity, even after the installation of a dairy, hydroelectric plant, cannery, shingle mill, sawmill and print shop, will be kept at 150.

At Urbana

Last week Labor called Scholasticism to an accounting. Convening at Champaign, the Illinois Federation of Labor asked to know what was all this that one delegate was telling them about moral laxity at the State University down the street in Urbana.* The delegate was Edwin R. Wright of Chicago, a onetime President of the Federation, surely no man to bring grave charges lightly.

He had said: “Better burn the universities to the ground than pay them money if our sons and daughters attend them to learn immorality. My attention to university morality was provoked by recent magazine and newspaper literature, some of it by college officials. And I have found evidence to support the reports in some places. I have been told of a fraternity house which was completely covered with a canvas shield while inside a drunken orgy took place which even savages would not have tolerated.”

Three dignified deans of the University of Illinois hurried over to the convention. First to speak was Dean Kendric C. Babcock, Acting President of Illinois. It was impossible, he pointed out, to congregate 9,500 boys and girls and expect to find no isolated cases of misbehavior. But just let him read the actual list of disciplinations for misconduct last year: 13 for drinking, 3 for bootlegging, 3 (women) for poisoning food, 1 for ticket-scalping, 1 for check-forging, 1 for receiving stolen property, 1 for defrauding the library. It was the spirit of the faculty to uplift the moral tone at all times. Was the place healthy and clean? Less than 1/5 of 1% had venereal diseases.

Up stood Dean Thomas Clark, these 25 years an official at Urbana: “If any one tells you of drunken orgies and subsidized vice here, that person is a liar.” And he named one liar, a bogus fraternity man, never at the college, who had confessed to fabricating, for good pay from a newspaper owned by William Randolph Hearst, the cock-and-bullery that Delegate Wright had seen.

“Judge not all men by the actions of one,” was the gist of Dean Charles M. Thompson’s remarks; and Sheriff John Gray of Champaign County concluded the University’s defense in this wise: “I’m not an orator, but just a hick sheriff, but I know in 500 raids I’ve conducted on gambling and booze joints I’ve never found a student. . .The trouble (if any) nowadays is that old bozos of my age don’t set the right example.”

Convinced, the convention went about its business.

Rosenbaum’s

There is one in almost every college class—a shrewd, snapping-eyed student who darts through his week’s work with such vigorous agility, such accurate comprehension and sure mental retention that, come term end, he—unlike his classmates—is guilty of no shuddering before the looming shadow of examinations. He is different from the class “grind,” who labors long and alone. Different too from the versatile class organizers and politicians, who sandwich fairly able academic work into the tiny crevices left between running their newspapers and student government boards, winning votes, signing petitions, leading cheers, etc. He is called the “flash,” the “whiz,” the “shark,” the man who can, with little visible effort, rip and rend the more indigestible portions of the curriculum into tender shreds; the man who singles out tough courses for the sheer delight of picking high marks out of them; the man, the exceptional man, who would snatch at an honors course if only his university offered one.

Often the “shark’s” name is Cohen, or Levi, or Weinstein. In Princeton ’23 his name was Saul Makrauer. In Yale ’07 (Sheffield Scientific School) his name was Samuel B. Rosenbaum. It is the post-graduate careers of these men that is interesting, for they are usually born teachers of an efficient, 20th Century kind. This month, the opening of a new preparatory school, The Milford School of New York, was an illustration of the “shark” type’s capabilities. Thereby also hangs a story about stepladders to the golden apples of learning.

But for the tutorial abilities of Sam Rosenbaum, the list of Yale graduates in and around the Class of 1907 might have been much smaller than it turned out. And having been graduated, Sam Rosenbaum, no man to underrate his abilities, saw no reason why succeeding classes should deminish for want of his services. Not only did he see a fat living in it. He was “a good Yale man.” And as the tutoring classes he conducted around examination times grew with the years in size and fame, he constituted himself “brain coach” to many a thick-witted Yale athlete, gratis.

“Rosie” had intelligent relatives. There was tall, cadaverous Joseph (“Old Joe”) Rosenbaum, Cornell and Yale graduate, a mathematician who even cranked his automobile with the precision of a man bisecting a hypotenuse. There was tall, cadaverous Hyman (“Hymie”) Rosenbaum, Pennsylvania graduate, another mathematician, a genius so absent-minded that the adolescent oafs he taught often mistook him for a “nut” at first. There was Harris Rosenbaum, Yale physicist, terse, timesaving, efficient. Later there was Joseph Rosenbaum II, Cornell botanist.

All of these eventually joined the able tutorial staff formed with Harris, by sauve, swarthy Samuel, who has always remained the driving power of their educational projects. His brisk, confident speech, the quick movements of his chunky body, the very sheen of his black hair and the flashing smile on his wide mouth, gave an impression of prime mental masculinity that has attracted colleagues and stimulated faltering students. “Here,” say the latter, “is a man who makes molehills of mountains. He is swift, sure, knows what is wanted. Though warmhearted, he is cold-blooded toward examinations. He spots them, stabs them. I am a fool, but he will, for a deserved sum, equip me for this coming crisis.”

“Rosie’s,” in New Haven, swiftly became as famous as those other academic stepladders— the late “Widow” Nolan’s (into Harvard) and witty John Hun’s (into Princeton). Its doors widened to receive, as well as shaky seniors, floundering sub-freshmen anxious for summer work or seeking to continue their studies after expulsion from boarding schools.

It was the advent of roving spirits from prep school that brought upon “Rosie’s” school a certain odium, in the eyes of proper parents and professors. At tutoring schools, discipline is a matter of small import. The pupils pay roundly for intensified instruction; they are bound, in common sense, to attend classes. What has conduct to do with passing examinations? And what more natural, with a long year of college discipline ahead of them, than for boys who have been grilling through hot summer afternoons to brighten their evenings and weekends with mad pranks? Particularly when some of the boys are rich and spoiled, with a suite at the Taft Hotel, another in New York, and a sleek roadster in the garage; or when they are bumptious zanies anxious to impress the loose-lived upperclassmen with whom they find themselves thrown; or full-blooded Nordics soon to go into training? The parental attitude was: our son is unusual (or erratic or talented or temperamental or stupid) and he needs special, individual attention. The Rosenbaum Tutoring School gave him special attention, mentally, and left him to his own devices out of the classroom as any businesslike concern naturally would.

Nevertheless, there came a time (1916) when it was thought that there were “more distractions in the town than was good for the students.” And the Rosenbaum brothers founded the Milford School at a village thus named, hard by New Haven on Long Island Sound. This was distinctly not a cramming or tutoring school, yet retained “all the charm of the old regime”—i. e. special attention to individual cases, never more than five boys to a class. To the tutorial system were added dormitories, rules, athletics, school spirit. To the various types of scholastic failures, make-up students, sickly and discouraged boys, was added the brilliant type who sought to escape the lockstep of his former school and get ahead on the double. It was a distinctly successful experiment, as proved by a high record in the college board entrance examinations of the past nine years and a constantly enlarging student body.

Now the Rosenbaums have turned their attention to the problem of the city boy. “If he lives at home, he is handicapped by the many conflicting interests and the social life of the city. If he attends one of the larger public or private schools, he is swallowed up in crowded classes.” In a big mansion far uptown in Manhattan, their Milford School of New York will meet, efficiently one may be sure, the “vital need” of a few special students of two kinds: the youngster about to enter preparatory school for whom a running start is desired; the collegebound lad for whom the council and equipment of famed conquerors of the board of examinations is thought necessary.

“This is a time of year when great, numbers of people simultaneously come to the conclusion that Education ought to have “one great aim.” Two other recently suggested great aims:

“Citizenship”—The American Bar Association.

“To build into the life of every citizen nn appreciation of the precious obligation to be intelligent”—Joy Elmer Morgan, Editor of the Journal of the National Education Association

*The best collection of matchboxes in the U.S. is probably that of Registrar William S. Hoffman of Penn State College. He has 430, all different.—Ed.

*The University of Illinois straddles with its buildings the two towns named, which are twins. The official home town: Urbana.

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