Death of a Patriarch

Every good college has its Grand Old Man, its patriarch. So necessary is he as an object of veneration, as an oracle, as a figure about whom to swap reunion anecdotes, that if a college did not have a patriarch it would soon invent one. Last week, having reached the halfway mark on a world cruise, Yale's Grand Old Man --President Emeritus Arthur Twining Hadley--died in Kobe, Japan. With Chauncey Mitchell Depew two years in his grave, with William Howard Taft dead two days later, the end of President Emeritus Hadley left Yale for the present without a Grand Old Man.

Unique was Patriarch Hadley's place in his college. Son of a Yale professor, he was graduated with the class of 1876. Even as an undergraduate the omnivorous character of his brain, later to become a legend, commanded amused respect. Upperclassmen liked to perch his little body on a soap box and make him deliver ponderous schoolboy philippics. Along with his A.B. degree (with highest honors), he won prizes for proficiency in the classics, astronomy, English composition. Socially also he reaped Yale's richest rewards.

After studying in Germany, he returned in 1879 to join the Yale faculty as a tutor. Twenty years later he became Yale's 13th President, stipulating that he must be retired when 65. Under his regime the institution took an unprecedented scholastic polish. Its endowment was doubled. To wife he took, in 1891, Helen Harrison Morris of New Haven, whose father had been a Connecticut governor. Both his sons, Hamilton and Morris, were raised good Yalemen. Fulfilling his inaugural request, he was made President Emeritus in 1921.

The name of many a patriarch is sacred within the walls of his college but comparatively unknown outside. Not so with Patriarch Hadley. His fame as an economist outshone even his pedagogical career. "Hadley on Transportation," written 45 years ago, is still the Good Book to railroaders. Dr. Hadley, who wrote it while he was a college lecturer on railroad administration, assembled his material by logical digestion of previous works, not on the right-of-way. His good friend William Howard Taft, graduated two years after him, appointed him chairman of a commission to investigate the condition of U. S. rail transportation in 1911. The Hadley Commission's report resulted in the railway valuation act of 1913. Two railroads, the New York, New Haven & Hartford and Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe, made him a director.

Proud of his intellect, Yale has built up a fund of tradition about Patriarch Hadley. One campus tale has it that he taught his son Morris calculus one afternoon while out walking, illustrating his discourse by scratching geometrical figures on the hard ground with twigs.

His talent for speechifying has also bred many a college legend. At a banquet tendered to the Swedish Ambassador and attended by the late William Jennings Bryan, the diplomat read an address in

Latin. With his habitual rising and falling inflection accompanied by a pumping motion of the hands, Patriarch Hadley responded in the same tongue extemporaneously. Yalemen say that Bryan leaned over to Patriarch Hadley, complimented him on his excellent Swedish.

Unlike that Grand Old Man of Harvard, the late President Emeritus Charles William Eliot, Dr. Hadley was not an educator save by his example as an educated man. He, for instance, would never have suggested that the nucleus of wisdom could be placed on a 60-in. bookshelf. Nor is it likely that President Emeritus Eliot, liberal though he was, would have ever taken his politics so liberally as to endorse Alfred Emanuel Smith, as did practical Patriarch Hadley in 1928.

Other Patriarchs. To be a patriarch, one need not retire into prophetical obscurity. Jacob Gould Schurman is the patron saint of Cornell. President from

1892 to 1920, his influence on Cornell was sometimes exerted from afar; he was away from the university for some three years filling diplomatic posts. His influence has continued since he left the presidency for good and during his terms as Minister to China (1921-25) and Ambassador to Germany (1925-29).

The year before President Schurman began directing the affairs of Cornell, another teacher who now is a Grand Old Man-- David Starr Jordan--became president of Leland Stanford Jr. University ("Cornell of the West"). Cornell-bred, a onetime member of its faculty, Stanford's Jordan varied his executive duties with an interest in simplified spelling, Peace, and fish. His naturalistic labors brought him the appointment (1908-10) of international fisheries commissioner for the U. S. and Canada. In 1916 Stanford made him President Emeritus.

Brown's patriarch was not spared long to her. Portly, genial President Emeritus William Herbert Perry Faunce, who shaped Brown destinies for 30 years, died less than five months after he had retired from the Presidency (TIME, Feb. 10).

Revered at Western Reserve (Cleveland) is the name of Charles Franklin Thwing, who became President nine years before Dr. Hadley headed Yale's executive and who retired, Emeritus, the same year (1921). He is now national President of Phi Beta Kappa, a Congregational minister, an elector of New York University's Hall of Fame, an experienced promoter of "floating" universities.

Princeton's active Grand Old Man is Professor Emeritus Henry Van Dyke, author, poet, preacher, onetime (1913-17) U. S. Minister to the Netherlands and Luxemburg. He it is who is brought out to show to visiting notables. But Princeton sentiment also embraces the aged Francis Landey Patton, President from 1888 to 1902. Upon his resignation, he took up the Presidency of Princeton Theological Seminary. In 1913 he went into retirement in Bermuda where he was born 87 years ago and whither he returned still a British subject. Holidaying Princetonians go to see him, shake his thin hand. They must stand very close because Patriarch Patton is going blind.

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