Willmar tribune. [volume] (Willmar, Minn.) 1895-1931, 1913-04-23
CHAPTER VII.
Princeton's New President.


~ He presidency of Princeton
university is position of dig
|M%MSI nifty and consideration. The
lSGSgD long line of men, reaching
back 100 years, who had filled it were
each in his time among the most dis
tinguished divines and scholars of the
land. BY sort Of instinct or chance
Princeton had gravitated toward the
aristocratic. Latterly the university
fad come to be known as 1.-The most
charming country club in America.
Its retiring head had avowed it impos-
sible that it should be other than col
lege for rich mems sons.
Whatever may have been expected
of him, it was impossible for the new
president, who, by the way, was the
first layman to occupy the chair, to
fall into the easeful tradition Of the
Office. 1t was impossible for him mere
ly to institute few necessary reforms
and let things go on much as before
He had scarcely been inaugurated
when everybody became aware that,
for good or i'll. the judgment day had
dawned over the quiet campus and the
ivied halls. There was to be no lack
of initiative. no fearfulness and trem-
bling before novel proposals, no shirk-
ing Of responsibility, no failure Of
nerve.
There was no undue precipitancy.
President Wilson spent year study
ing conditions-he already knew them
pretty well-from his new vantage
point. He did not, however, feel any
necessity of awaiting the lapse of
year before undertaking to bring the
scholarship and the discipline Of the
school up to what they already were on
paper Students who failed to pass
their examinations were dropped, rich
or poor, with or without social pull"
Work was absolutely demanded
There was, of course. an immense
sensation when the Princeton students
found that from that day forth they
must go to work. Work had not been
a Princeton tradition. The reverbera-
tons Of indignation rolled through the
skies for several years until there
came in new body of students, pre-
pared and willing to live up to the new
standards.
During that first year also a COM
mittee on revision of the course Of
study was appointed to report the fol-
lowing year.
If Princeton was to be a place Of
work it was to be fruitful work, work
worth doing, worth taking four years
out of a young mans life to do. It
was to be, above all, as President Will
son saw it and continually phrased it,
work that would fit young man to
serve his country better.
He even went so far as to say that
he wanted the university to make its
graduates henceforth as unlike their
fathers as possible-by which, Of
course, he meant that fathers, being
settled in their opinions and in rever-
erence for what is established, have a
part to play different from that of
sons, who particularly must sympa-
thize with the recreative and reforma-
| saying blanched the cheek of many an
elderly Princetonian; it was spoken in
an understanding of the necessity of
opening college doors to the new facts
which modern science has added to
the store of human knowledge; spoken
also in appreciation of the new social
conscience that has been born in the
world, though it is slow in coming to
the birth in colleges.
If it had fallen to President Eliot OF
Harvard to proclaim the new age in
which the old educational ideas had
ceased to suffice, Princeton, under the
presidency of Wilson. now took up the
completing work of positively con.
structing a system which should con.
tain the new ideas, the new subjects
and not only contain them. but organ
iZe them, coordinate them, put them
into proper sequence and relation.
President Wilson's committee after
months Of labor, the freed and en-
thusiastic labor of eager men, promul
gated a revised, or, rather, new, sys
| lcA VI COIlcSAdCC ~ WoS lAS
first positive attempt made to bring
the new college education into intelli
gent and systematic relationship as 6
body Of discipline. All Interested IL
education know of the revolution
wrought by the department system
that has ever since prevailed at Prince
ton. While it offered the widest scep'
for the ELECTION" Of studies, it prac
tcally assured that the studies "elect
ed" should lead to one settled purpos
that is, it intelligently co-ordinated 1
students work. It turned him out o
college not with a smattering of
thousand subjects, but with a prett.
thorough training in some one broa'
group of subjects: =-
President Wilson is entitled to tn
credit of presiding over this revision
It was first evidence and result q
that principle of Wilson's mind ~whic
demands coordination and right rela
tonship, and it was the first step tt
ward the transformation of Princeto
into university for the people. :.
President Wilson's next step was t
commit Princeton to the revolutio