Yale alumni magazine. ([New Haven]) 1937-1976, January 17, 1900, Page 1, Image 1

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THE NORTHWESTERN DINNER.
A Further Exposition of Vale Policy
—Great Enthusiasm,
Record-breaking Yale alumni dinners
seem to be the rule in the West at
present. That of the . Northwestern
Alumni Association held in St. Paul on |
the evening of January 5, at the Aber-
deen Hotel, was marked by probably
unprecedented numbers, by unusual en-
thusiasm and by very hearty endorse-
ment of the ideas and ideals of the new
head of the University: This was the
sixteenth annual banquet of the Asso-
ciation. The previous announcement
that the banquet was to be held in
Minneapolis was a mistake. President
Hadley was taken to Minneapolis on the
Saturday following the dinner, through
the courtesy of Mr. Munn, ’81S., and
was given a lunch at the Minneapolis
Club by the local alumni.
The St. Paul dinner was full of col-
lege flavor as-well as of all other good
things. The President was greeted, as
he entered the hall, by the Senior bow,
performed by two long lines of North-
western alumni, who showed that they
had not forgotten how to do it. The
tables were arranged in the form of a
large “U” with a large “Y” enclosed
therein. The menu card was of an
original design. It was prepared
through the efforts of Mr. Noyes and
Mr. Halbert of the Banquet Committee.
The front cover had a large cog-wheel
in the middle, with four smaller cog-
wheels running round it in the four
corners. The large cog-wheel was the
President and the rim was the motto
of the University. In the smaller cog-
wheels were pictures of all kinds of
things that go on in college and go
into and out of it. There were several
interesting things in this last classifica-
tion.
The center piece of the back cover was
the Miller Memorial Gateway and about
this was the Campus motto of the Uni-
versity, “For God, for Country and for
Yale.” Pictures of the rapid-fire gun of
the “Yale,” Lieutenant Greenway and
Colonel Roosevelt, the Chapel pulpit and
Supreme Court, or some other court,
surrounded it. The menu itself was il-
lustrated by proper University symbols,
including the picture of “red-headed
goose eggs,” of November 18.
The toastmaster of the evening was
the President of the Association, Mr.
Charles S. Jelley, ’71, whose name the
newspapers, in an attempt to conform
to the recollections of the dinner, in-
sisted on spelling with an o in place
of the first e.
The speech of President Hadley was
noticeable for its thoroughness and for
the new ground covered as contrasted
with his former speeches. In the report
given below, that part which referred
distinctly to the building plans which
he so carefully elaborated at Cleveland,
is omitted. In most other respects, the
speech is either new or much varied and
contains further information and sug-
gestions on some of the main points.
The toast was The Yale “Trust” and
_the sentiment, “The ability to handle
such a ‘Trust’ must be the result of a
long process of legal and moral educa-
tion,” quoted from Hadley on “For-
mation and Control of Trusts.”
President HWadley’s Speech.
President Hadley spoke as follows:
Mr. President and gentlemen of the
Yale Alumni Association: I thank you,
and I thank all here, most heartily for
the welcome which you have given.
It is just ten years since I last at-
tended a meeting of this alumni associa-
tion, and the memory of that meeting
NEW HAVEN, CONN., WEDNESDAY, JAN. 17, 1900.
has remained in my mind as perhaps
the pleasantest among all the many meet-
ings I have ever attended.
It is a double pleasure now, coming
at a time of responsibilities so great
that only the sympathy and help I get
from my friends everywhere can enable
me to bear them and feel them an in-
spiration instead of a burden; for Yale
needs the loyalty of her alumni more
perhaps than any other college or uni-
versity in existence. If she were merely
a technical school preparing isolated
groups of men to make a living, her
need would be a need of money and of
appliances rather than of sentiment.
But she is something more than this.
She prepares men for citizenship, for
patriotic and Christian citizenship;
makes them men in the very largest
sense; and for this we need sentiment
and devotion a great deal more than
we do anything else.
And we need it more now than ever
before; for with the development into a
university a larger number of men need
to be educated, and, educated as they
are in more diverse lines, it is harder
to keep the old college traditions intact
and more is needed from the alumni in
the way of coherent Yale spirit and Yale
enthusiasm to make the university of the
twentieth century what the college was
in the nineteenth for the members that
come under its influence. —
I shall not spend time in trying to
thank the members of this association
for what they have done, but shall try
at once to deserve your support and
your sympathy, which you have thus
accorded, by telling you plainly and
frankly the various things that Yale is
now doing and hopes to do in the
future, that you may be of use in the
fullest sense and be codperatives with
your sympathy and with your sugges-
tions.
THE NEW TREASURER,
Of the events in the immediate past,
one of the most important, and indirectly
most significant, is the success we have
had in filling the office of treasurer.
Six months ago, when the secretaryship
and the treasurership, which had been
held by such devoted men as Dexter and
Farnam, were vacant, I felt indeed dis-
couraged. I soon found a secretary.
What Anson Phelps Stokes is you know
too well for me to consume the time to
tell you. It was only three months ago
that it was possible to fill the office of
treasurer, but it was filled by a man
who left the work of one of the most
successful private corporations in our
part of the country (The Southern
New England Telephone Company), a
graduate of Yale in the Class of Seventy,
who took up the office and who is
bringing into it the order and the
organization and the progressive spirit
which he took into the affairs of every
corporation with which he has had any-
thing to do; taking it up at personal
sacrifice from a pecuniary standpoint,
but as an object of honorable ambition;
and I know of no better example for
Yale men in the future than to see a
man of such splendid business capacity
as Morris Tyler leaving a position like
that—the headship of The Southern
New England Telephone Company—and
doing enthusiastically and in the highest
degree helpfully the work of the treas-
urership of the university.
Inasmuch as he took office in the
midst of the fiscal year, I suppose the
annual report covering the rest of that
year will.be in the same form as before;
so do not be in too much of a hurry
for a change there; it will be a year and
a half before the Yale treasurer’s report
shall be made that model of clearness
which we ultimately hope to see it. And
as Mr. Farnam, the previous incumbent
of the treasurership, has generously con-
‘university athletic enterprises.
.Faculty the benefit of his advice;
sented to give his invaluable. services
and suggestions with regard to buildings
and building contracts, we are a great
deal stronger in that department than
ever we were before.
THE APPOINTMENT OF CAMP.
Another new development in the ad-
ministrative department of the univer-
sity is the appointment of Walter Camp
as Treasurer of the Yale Field and
Graduate Adviser in Athletics. You
probably remember how chaotic before
was the administration of college -and
l Some-
thing had been done by the organization
of the Financial Union of Yale Athletics,
which handled all the income; and even
then the income was handled by one
body (this Financial Union), the ex-
-penditures on capital account were made
by another body (the Yale Corporation),
and the control was exercised more or
less effectively by a third (the regular
university authorities):. Now, owing to
the efforts of Mr. Brooks, Mr. Bertron
and others, it has been arranged, with-
out any question, that the debt on the
Yale Field will all be paid off before
the next annual meeting of that cor-
poration. The Field will then be trans-
ferred to the President and Fellows of
Yale University. Walter Camp will be
appointed treasurer of the Yale Field;
the managers of the different athletic
interests have arranged to place the
revenues under the control of a per-
manently constituted board of which
Camp will be a member, which will
result .in affairs being administered in
unity—the student part as well as the
Corporation part. Camp himself will
give to this matter the whole time which
he has hitherto given to the writing
of magazine articles of various kinds.
He will give the students and the
and
we hope his work will turn to much
needed reforms. ;
(President Hadley then described the
bicentennial building plans. He ex-
pressed the hope that before the year
was over there would be a fence like
the old fence where the new fence is.
Describing the auditorium he said: “It
will have a raised stage, a level floor,
and removable seats, so that the floor
can be used, according to the taste of
the individual, either for a game of bas-
ketball; a promenade concert, or an
annual examination.”’)
YALE AS THE UNIVERSITY LEADER.
Now what are some of the things we
may stiggest as immediate needs of the
University? In the first place, we wish
so to organize our work that we shall
get a leading place in educational affairs
in the United States; so that we shall
be looked upon not only as leaders, but
as the leaders in the university life of
the country. In order to do this we
need to get into closer connection with
the schools and work in cooperation
with them. Hitherto it has been the
tendency of our colleges and universities
each to pursue its own independent plan.
Take the matter of entrance require-
ments: they have decided what they
wanted to do—the universities have de-
cided what they wanted to do. Some-
times those things have been good for
the schools, and sometimes they have
not. But there has been a policy of
isolation.
HARVARD S POSITION.
An exception is to be made with
regard to university policy in favor of
Harvard, which has
planned its work in connection with the
schools and has got for itself a position
of magnificent leadership of the schools
~ * Copyright, 1900, ;
by Yale Alumni Weekly.
systematically ,
Price 10 Cernrs.
in eastern Massachusetts. There has
been fixed, however, a certain line of
development which makes Harvard very
‘powerful there and more powerful than
any other university, but which has in a
measure restricted. it also. It is not the
first time that Harvard has had at once
the strength and the weakness connected
with a definitely local character.
YALE’S GREAT AMBITION. -
Now, Yale has had a national charac-
ter always, and it is my hope that in
ten or fifteen years Yale may have
gained the same position in the school
system of the whole nation that Harvard
now has in the school system of Eastern
Massachusetts. It is not, of course, a
thing to be done in a day or in a week.
It is a thing that can only be done by
careful judgment and management. It
will not be altogether easy to persuade
the different faculties of the university,
and members of the different academies
and high-schools, private and public, to
work in harmony; but I. believe there
is a cordial spirit of codperation and a
cordial wish that something of that kind
may be done, and if it can be done it
means unbounded greatness for Yale;
for the size of a university is not to be
measured by the number of students
on its annual catalogue, it is not to be
measured by the number of people who
put their names in a particular book, but
the greatness of a university is to be
measured by the extent of country and
the kind of people that look up to it for
leadership in matters educational. If
we can put Yale in a position where
the high school men and the teachers
of academies and: endowed schools
throughout the country will ask as the
first question in matters of educational
policy, “What does Yale think about it ?”
we shall have done more in the way of
real leadership than if we had padded
out our catalogue by the inclusion of
a thousand members of summer schools.
PRESIDENT ELIOT'S WORK.
I do not wish in any of these remarks
to seem to reflect on Harvard in the
least.: It would be idle for any Yale
man to deny that President Eliot has
done magnificent work there during the
period of his administration; it is an
example to us and a standard to us—
but not as some people think, a standard
for us to come up to—it is a standard
for us to begin at and go beyond if we
can.
So much for the relation to the
schools. Of course it is impossible to
do more than to indicate the direction
of the possibilities. No man, if he ex-
pects to carry through a delicate negotia-
tion begins by telling exactly what he
intends to do, because it may turn out
a different way. But the general aim
and goal is easy enough to give.
THE RELATION OF DEPARTMENTS.
In the second place, in regard to the
relation of the different departments to
one another. There has been in the past
a good deal of isolation. There has not
been so much duplication of plan as you
might think. The waste has been that
where there was one man in one depart-
ment that was good for one thing and
another man in another department that
was good for another thing, the students
' of the first department, whose bent was
toward the second, did not have an op-
portunity to go to the man who could
do them the most good. It was not a
duplication, it was a wrong and tunneces-
sary diversion.
There is now a spirit manifested
which looks to a remodeling of different
[Continued on 156th page.]