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About Yale Alumni Magazine | View Entire Issue (Oct. 25, 1899)
Vou 1X. No. 5. NEW HAVEN, CONN., WEDNESDAY, OCT. 25, 1899. Copyright, 1899, by Yale Alumni Weekly. Price 10 Cente: MORRIS FRANK TYLER, M.A. Photo by Phelps. Chosen Treasurer of Yale University, Oct. 18, 1899. YALE'S NEW TREASURER. Mr. Deming Describes the Man and his Unusual Equipment for his Work—Problems of Great Moment Pressing for Solution — Dormitory Investments, Taxation and Town and Gown Feeling—A Tribute to the Closing Treasury Administration. The Treasury of Yale is the nerve center of the physical organism of the University. While less in touch with undergraduate life than in earlier days, in other directions the functions of the fiscal head of the University have vastly expanded, his responsibilities have in- creased and his place now calls for a financial judgment at once broad and acute. It is no figure of speech to call him the executive vice-president of the University with powers, advisory in form, but in practice hardly second to those of the President himself in those material things which relate to Yale’s material well-being and growth. Morris Frank Tyler, elected by the Corporation at its last meeting Treas- urer of Yale University, is the son of Morris Tyler, who a generation ago was a prominent and honored citizen of New Haven. The elder Tyler, prospered as a merchant, was twice Mayor of the city, served one term as Lieutenant- Governor of the State and was an active promoter of the New Haven and Derby Railroad, which opened a new and shorter route between the city and the Naugatuck Valley. The son is fifty-one years old. He was fitted for College in the New Haven High School and en- tered Yale in the Class of 1870. On the honor list of his class his name appears often. He took literary or debating prizes during every year of his college course and was first on the “oration” list at graduation. During freshman year he was a member of the only open freshman society “Gamma Nu,” small in numbers, but made up of earnest men, most of them noor, ‘whose names appeared more often on the College prize lists of those days than in the annals of athletics or the honors of the Wooden Spoon Committee. Throughout his college course Mr. Tyler was a tireless reader, studied outside the curriculum and was self-trained into an expert shorthand writer. In the Autumn following graduation Mr. Tyler entered the Yale Law School, but left it a year later to accept a position on the Hartford Evening Post, where service of a few months was fol- lowed by promotion to the Associate Editorship of the New Haven Palladium, at that time a close rival of the Hart- WILLIAM WHITMAN FARNAM, M.A. Photo by Phelps. Retiring Treasurer of Yale University, appointed in 1888. ford Courant for the journalistic primacy of Connecticut. He soon dropped journalism, however, re-entered the Yale Law School and was admitted to the bar in 1873. Several years of active law practice in New Haven fol- lowed. During that time Mr. Tyler took a lively interest in city affairs, sitting for two years in the Board of Education, and once in the City Council. his membership in each body, Mr. Tyler on tempestuous local issues ranged him- self with the reform element and by a “bolt” from the party caticus in the City Council incurred the fierce and long hatred of the politicians. In the two years following 1880, he was the Execu- tive Secretary of Governor Bigelow, of Connecticut. Service a few years later on the commission appointed to revise the tax laws of the State closed Mr. Tyler’s record as a public officer. As early as 1878 the scope and utilities of the newly invented telephone began to divert Mr. Tyler’s attention from the law and, from the position of Counsel of the Connecticut Telephone Company, he stepped in 1883 to the Presidency of the successor corporation, the Southern New England Telephone Company, the upbuilding of which through the last sixteen years has been his magnum opus. The task has been no simple one. Elec- During, trical problems and economies in a novel enterprise, threatened rivalries, adverse phases of legislation, obstacles public and private in many forms have had to be met and mastered. But the company, once aqueous, has been solidified, its plant extended through Connecticut un- til it includes some 12,000 stations, its service perfected, its rates lowered, its shares conservated as a sound invest- ment and, along with these results, Mr. Tyler has created a corporative mono- poly popular as well as potential. The business traits which have wrought so signal a sticcess and promise so much for the future administration of the Yale Treasury have, logically, called Mr. Tyler to other places of local responsi- bility and trust. He is a Director of the First National Bank of this city, of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, of the New Haven Trust Company, of the Norwich Electric Light Company, and of the National Pipe Bending Com- pany, a corporation which he organized. The activities and exactions of cor- porative work, however, have not stifled Mr. Tyler’s cultivated tastes. He 1s versed in modern languages, a lover of good books and good bindings and an artistic authority whose judgment willbe of high value in shaping the architectural erowth of Yale. As a public speaker
