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
