Torpid, Dismal

An undergraduate of Colby College wrote an editorial in the Colby Echo that bore reprinting in more than one other undergraduate daily. The title was: Our Most Prevalent Immorality. The thesis was: "If it is immoral to needlessly impair the body's vitality, then lack of sleep is Colby's most prevalent immorality. Students who ought to be firm-nerved, straight-thinking and clear-eyed go through their college course with a perpetual tired feeling, irritable, sluggish-eyed and languid-brained. They sit torpidly through classes and wonder why the professors are so boresome. They slump dismally into a chair and feed their minds on what takes the least mental effort. They wish that something would happen . . . A few men seem to be able to operate indefinitely on a very little sleep . . . But the chances are a hundred to one that you are not [able] . . . Nature always collects her bills."

At Boston

The powers of Boston University assembled in Old South Church to induct as their first dean of women Mrs. Lucy Jenkins Franklin, lately Dean of Women at Evansville College (Ind.). The dean-to-be made a short address: ". . . every educator hopes to see, both in industry and education, the restoration of the joy and holiness of hard labor. . . ."

President Lemuel H. Murlin then instructed Mrs. Franklin in her new duties. Bishop Slattery offered a prayer. The University glee club intoned a response.

Many gala caps and gowns rustled in the church. One so garbed rose from her seat by the old walnut-paneled wall as President Murlin read: "Grace Goodhue Coolidge; Student, university graduate, teacher; daughter, wife, mother; in every station exemplifying the finer qualities of mind and heart we most admire in women; your own works praise you; you have gained the confidence, admiration and love of the American people . . ." Going forward, Mrs. Calvin Coolidge received in her hands a script, and upon her shoulders a purple hood faced with red and white, that proclaimed her an honorary Doctor of Laws. Dr. Coolidge smiled her thanks and returned to her chair.

A similar ceremony honored Dr. Marion Talbot, Dean of Women at the University of Chicago. Dean Talbot spoke: ". . . . As the Little Lord Fauntleroy type of boy has been superseded by the vigorous, athletic boy scout so the girl, freed from corset and hoopskirt and chignon, in blouse and knickers or swimming tights, performs feats of physical agility and endurance which in the days of her great-grandmother would have condemned her to a social limbus, if not to something worse." She recalled the day when a college woman was considered "a freak and an outcast."

It was fitting that Dr. Murlin. should have the opportunity to confer a degree upon the first lady of the land just at this time. After Christmas, Dr. Murlin, honorably released (TIME, Oct. 6), leaves Boston University to assume the presidency of his alma mater, De Pauw University (Greencastle, Ind.). Last week, the Boston trustees voted Dr. Murlin an honorarium of $5,000 in appreciation of a 13-year administration during which the University grew from a body of 1,347 students to one of over 12,000. At the same time, the trustees appointed as Dr. Murlin's temporary successor Bishop William F. Anderson, prelate of the Boston area of the Methodist Episcopal church.

At New Haven

At New Haven, Conn., earlier in the fall, when the walls of a new dormitory authorized by the Yale Corporation started unexpectedly to rise, hard by sacrosanct old Connecticut Hall on the Yale campus, great was the shout that went up (TIME, Nov. 3, Nov. 17). Faculty, alumni, undergraduates blended their voices in the outcry: "Stop it! Tear it down! Hush hall!" Moved, the Corporation ordered that the walls cease to rise. Committees met and met, discussing what was wise and proper to be done. Dr. James R. Angell, Yale's diplomatic chief executive, went hither and thither, explaining, dissuading.

Last week, the Yale faculty voted to support the Corporation in whatever it saw fit to do with the mooted building. The Yale alumni voted likewise. The way was clear. The Corporation sent its masons back to work.

Rhodes and Scholars

Some 55 years ago, a sickly English boy was shipped by his family out to Natal, South Africa, to live with his older brother there and build up his constitution. That was the beginning of a longish story that empire-building Britons now teach their children very early in life. The sickly young man dug diamonds, bags of them, at Kimberly. As he dug, his health returned. At 19, he was a 19th Century Croesus with his life before him.

He trekked across Africa afoot, thinking what he would do with himself, when the expansive, fertile beauty of the unexplored country he was passing through gave him an answer. He would, after studying at Oxford University, strive to make the English race governors of air Africa, of all the world.

He wrote his name on Oxford's roster--Cecil John Rhodes--but never studied overhard. Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius, two boyhood friends, were about all he took back to Africa with him. Few men have as much; besides, the spirit of Cecil John Rhodes, essentially practical, essentially forthright and upright, needed little bolstering.

There was gold near Rhodes' diamonds, over in the Transvaal. The Dutch were there first, but Rhodes went in with them. Soon he controlled a huge combination -- De Beers Mining Co., British South Africa Co. and Gold Fields of South Africa Co. He became Prime Minister of the Cape Town Colony, which he governed as a benevolent despot, even strengthening the British grip on lower Africa with a vision in his head of "Africa British, from Cape Town to Cairo."

Then there was a raid on the Transvaal properties by foreign gold interests out to beat the Dutch control, led by Sir Leander S. Jameson, the administrator of Rhodesia, associate of Rhodes in this and other enterprises. As the biggest foreign mine-owner in the Transvaal, Rhodes was implicated. As Premier of the neighboring colony, he was deeply embarrassed, some said disgraced. With fine candor he accepted his responsibility for what had happened, resigned his office, set off for Rhodesia, an undeveloped portion of Africa up country, where he labored before his health broke and he went back to Cape Town to die, to build into the empire the colony that bears his name.

Rhodes wrote his will when he was 22. All that he had, he left to forward his "highest purpose," empire-building. One bequest designated that 176 selected scholars from the colonies and the U. S., and 5 from Germany should attend Oxford for three years each. Colonials and Americans were to receive -L-300 apiece per annum; the Germans, being nearer England, would get -L-250 each. Rhodes included the Americans because he believed there was an advantage to mankind in the union of English speaking peoples, to be gained "without . . . withdrawing them or their sympathies from the land of their adoption or birth."

Of the Germans he said: "I note the German Emperor has made instruction in English compulsory in German schools. I leave five yearly scholarships at Oxford . . . for scholars of German birth, the scholars to be nominated by the German Emperor for the time being." The object was to "render war impossible."

The U. S. Rhodes scholars in residence at Oxford each year number 96, two per state. They are elected from their states by old Rhodes scholars living therein, two elections coming in each state every three years. Last week, Dr. Frank Aydelotte, President of Swarthmore College and American secretary to the Rhodes trustees, announced the names of 32 appointees chosen from 507 candidates on the customary three-fold basis of "character, intellectual ability and physical vigor."

Alabama--Robert J. Van de Graf of Paris, University of Alabama.

Arkansas--J. W. Fulbright of Fayeteville, Ark., University of Arkansas.

California--John Whipple Olmstead of Berkeley, Cal., University of California.

Colorado--John L. J. Hart of Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University.

Connecticut--John C. R. Whiteley of Middletown, Conn., Wesleyan University.

Georgia--Robert Shields Sams of Princeton, N.J., Princeton University.

Illinois--Reuben A. Borsch of Collinsville, Ill., Illinois Wesleyan University.

Indiana--Philip Blair Rice of Bloomington, Ind., Indiana University.

Iowa--Neil Louis Crone of Grinnell, Iowa, Grinnell College.

Kansas--Ralph M. Hower of Lawrence, Kan., University of Kansas.

Kentucky--Robert Le Baker Jr. of Columbia University, New York City, Brown University.

Maine--Lawrence Brock Leighton of Brunswick, Me., Bowdoin College.

Maryland--Charles E. Saltzman Jr. of West Point, N.Y., United States Military Academy.

Massachusetts--Mason Hammond of Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University.

Michigan--Douglas V. Steele of Cambridge, Mass., Michigan Agricultural College.

Minnesota--Franklin D. Gray of Minneapolis, Minn., University of Minnesota.

Mississippi--Elijah Wilson Lyon of University, Miss., University of Mississippi.

Missouri--Arthur D. Bond of Columbia, Mo., University of Missouri.

Nebraska--John D. Westerman of Princeton, N.J., University of Nebraska.

New Hampshire--Standish Weston of West Point, N.Y., United States Military Academy.

New Jersey--Paul Swain Havens of Princeton, N.J., Princeton University.

New York--Frank D. Ashburn of New Haven, Conn., Yale University.

Ohio--Joseph Sagmaster of Cincinnati, University of Cincinnati.

Oregon--Clinton N. Howard of Eugene, Ore., University of Oregon.

Pennsylvania--Owen B. Rhoades of Haverford, Pa., Haverford College.

Rhode Island--Arthur W. Packard of Providence, R.I., Brown University.

Tennessee--Wm. S. Vaughan of Rice Institute, Vanderbilt University.

Texas--W. Terrel Sledge of Austin, Texas, University of Texas.

Vermont--James H. Macomber Jr. of Brooklyn, N.Y., University of Vermont.

Virginia--Coleman Carter Walker of Lawrenceville, N.J., University of Virginia.

Washington--Francis R. Johnson of Tacoma, Wash., United States Military Academy.

Wisconsin--Edward Francis D'Arms of Princeton, N.J., Princeton University.

Poet Pierre

Pierre de Ronsard, "Prince of Poets," bright, particular star of the Pleiade,* who that is not French remembers him? How he hymned the Bourbon monarchs in the voluptuous vernacular of the French Renaissance; how he invented gorgeous adjectives and ingenious flowers of imagery to describe the monarchs' wives and female friends; how he (mythically) quarreled with Rabelais over a point of style; how Queen Bess of England sent him presents where he dwelt in his fine chateau, fattening on the income from rich abbeys and priories; how Mary, the little prisoner queen of Scotland, addressed him from her dungeon; how Tasso, poet of Italy, consulted him on this and that matter of technique? With most of the other frills and furbelows of his day, priceless and brilliant though they were, Poet Pierre is all but forgotten save by those French folk who make it their business to keep alive the glory that was Gaul and the grandeur of early French letters.

But Smith College bethought herself, or was reminded, of Poet Pierre's 400th birthday last week. It was the first time an American college had so honored him and Poet Pierre would have swelled with pride to hear those professors and young women of Smith singing the airs of his period and applauding a sonnet written for the occasion in his honor.

From Washington, D.C, came a letter from ex-Ambassador Jusserand of France, telling Smith of Pierre the Citizen rather than of Poet Pierre, favorite of the Muse. Wrote M. Jusserand: "His relations were of a dual sort, strangely contrasted. Being a court poet ... he was in duty bound to praise the monarchs. . . . But what is out of the common is that, when he had performed this duty ... he resumed his right of free speech as a citizen to say to those men, who 'were men like ourselves,' he thought, and 'who happen to have been born kings,' what were their obligations, their responsibilities, the faults of theirs that should be amended, for the good, not only of their own soul, but of their people and country."

*The Pleiade, or Brigade as it was first called: a literary constellation including also Poets Du Bellay, Boif, Belleau, Pontus de Thiard, Dorat, and Dramatist Jodelle. Ronsard "launched" the group in 1549 with a literary critique urging a return to the classics.