On the Farm

(See front cover)

As one more commencement time came to the colleges and universities of the land last week, one of the grand old men of U. S. pedagogy lay dying of cerebral arteriosclerosis, diabetes, and heart disease, in a sickroom close by the campus of the university which he began building 40 years ago to be one of the country's greatest--Stanford of California.

Long an invalid, retired in 1916 from his 22-year presidency and three-year chancellorship, 80-year-old Dr. David Starr Jordan, chancellor emeritus, had no active part in Stanford's latter-day development. Yet when the Stanford trustees meet this week, they and Stanford's Grand Old Man will all know that the important business before the meeting, a major milestone in Stanford's history, not only rests upon the foundations of Stanford as Dr. Jordan built it but derives from a conception of Stanford's destiny which Dr. Jordan long ago passed on to his successors for execution.

The immediate question before the trustees is whether Stanford's absentee president, Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur. U. S. Secretary of the Interior, may continue to stay away during the remainder of President Herbert Hoover's term without forfeiting his Palo Alto position. The answer to that question will determine when Stanford will do the thing so long ago proposed by Dr. Jordan, planned and already begun by Dr. Wilbur: Abolish freshman and sophomore years, become a graduate-grade university like Johns Hopkins, now unique in the U. S.

Should Secretary Wilbur return to Palo Alto when his leave of absence expires next September, this plan may be completed within three years. Otherwise it is likely to remain in abeyance until he returns, as stipulated by the trustees when he left. Meanwhile, Stanford buzzes secretly but excitedly, torn by fierce controversy. The tall, once robust chancellor hears on his death bed the names of the chief protagonists--Herbert Hoover, Secretary Wilbur, Acting President Robert Eckles Swain--all of them his students once. If he was sorry not to live to see them make Stanford what he had dreamed it, he had other great memories to fall back on. His life at Stanford was only one of three lives that he had lived.

Children of California. Native of Gainesville, N. Y., Cornell graduate (1872), robustious baseball player (he broke his nose at it), studious teacher of Zoology, David Starr Jordan became president in 1885 of Indiana University at Bloomington, Ind. Aged 34, he was then Youngest U. S. College President. He began at once to reorganize his inland, politically controlled institution, to cajole dollars from lackadaisical Indiana legislators. He put in practice a then radical notion: to mold education to the student rather than to force the student into a tight educational jacket.

When he had about completed his program at Bloomington, there came to visit him an elderly Californian, Senator Leland Stanford, and his wife, Mrs. Jane Lathrop Stanford. Once Governor of California, Senator Stanford was a rich, celebrated horse breeder. To Dr. Jordan he explained his mission: his only son, Leland Stanford Jr. had died of Roman fever in 1884, aged 16, in Florence, Italy. To perpetuate his memory Senator & Mrs. Stanford had founded a university "free from traditions and precedents, one that will fit men and women for lives of service." The great Stanford horse farm in the wooded hills of Palo Alto, 30 miles "down the peninsula" (southeast) from San Francisco, was to be its site and all the Senator's wealth--some $30.000,000--would go to endow it. Because he wished it to be open to all, with tuition free, the Senator said: "The children of California shall be my children." He asked Dr. Jordan to help him build Leland Stanford Jr. University and be its first president.

"The Farm" was California's first derisive term for the new institution. Present day students still use the term with affection. In 1891 the 8,800-acre Farm was ready to receive its students and 465 of them--the famed Pioneer Class--came from up & down the Pacific Coast. There were difficulties at first: Senator Stanford died in 1893 and while his estate was tied up the Stanford faculty went unpaid until Mrs. Stanford managed to persuade a court to put the professors on her payroll as personal servants. In 1906 came the earthquake which destroyed all but the smallest and lowest of the buildings. But Stanford's rise was phenomenal, unequalled by any U. S. institution until Duke University was chartered in 1924 (TIME, April 27).

Jordan's Men. In the early days at Stanford, pioneering Dr. Jordan said: "The problem of life is not to make life easier but to make men stronger." One of his first students at Stanford in 1891 was lean, shy young "Bert" Hoover, just down from Oregon. Next year came 6-ft.-4-in., 17-year-old "Rex" Wilbur of Riverside, Calif.-- The friendship begun at college between these two--like the friendship between Co-eds Lou Henry and Marguerite Blake whom they later married --was to live long. Dr. Jordan was to be specially conscious of Bert Hoover who ran a laundry agency and engineered undergraduate elections.

"I have learned that it pays to look up a man's good points," Dr. Jordan has said. It was he who found Hoover the job that enabled him to go to college; he who, though Hoover lacked entrance credits in English Composition, admitted him to Stanford. After four years Bert Hoover, famed today as an infinitive-splitter, was still deficient in English, but "as he seemed to have all the other requirements of a useful citizen, we graduated him anyway and let him take his chances in the world."

In 1907 Dr. Jordan again met Herbert Hoover, a quiet, boyish engineer of 33. ''Hoover explained that he had run through his profession. It held nothing more for him except to lay up money, of which he already had all he needed. ... He intended ... to ... find some form of executive work in which he could be of service."

Hoover's personality began to be felt in Stanford's affairs soon after he built the spacious, flat-roofed house hard by the campus where in 1928 he was to receive the news of his election to the Presidency. In 1912 he went on Stanford's Board of Trustees. By that time Ray Lyman Wilbur was dean of the Medical School.

In 1913 Dr. Jordan, vigorous and powerful at 62 (he had played first base on the faculty baseball team until his 98th year), was not due for retirement for three years. The trustees offered him the chancellorship of the university. In his autobiography he tells how, abruptly on Commencement Day, his new appointment was announced: "The audience . . . was plainly dazed. . . . Hoover now rose and proposed 'Three cheers for the chancellor!' But few understood why they should cheer at what seemed (to most, at least) a painful separation, and he got only a slight response."

Dr. John Casper Branner, the geology professor in whose laboratory Bert Hoover first met Lou Henry, was promoted from the university's vice-presidency to succeed Dr. Jordan. Dr. Branner lived less than three years and in 1916 Ray Lyman Wilbur stepped up. That year Dr. Jordan became chancellor emeritus.

Fish & Peace-- "I would rather be president of Stanford than emperor, and so would I again if I had my life to live over," said Dr. Jordan on his retirement. Buthiskicking-upstairs could be attributed partly to his increasing absorption in two other pursuits, his two other lives, Ichthyology and Peace. To the hall that the trustees had named for him he repaired with all good grace to revise and add to his tremendous output of books and monographs (more than 6,000 of them). As Chancellor he could sally forth freely on his fish-collecting trips all over the world. No man ever caught and classified so many fish as he.

His passion for Peace was aroused when he found cause to suspect that the Spanish-American War was promoted for private profit (see p. 63). His scientific, nature-loving mind was shocked by the realization that "war takes the best men that nations produce. It kills them off and leaves the inferior ones to perpetuate the race." Familiar throughout the land became the tall, fine old figure, black-hatted and garbed in loose-fitting clothes, of Jordan the Peace-Maker, chief director (1910-14) of the World Peace Foundation, onetime (1915) president of the World's Peace Congress, vice president of the American Peace Society. When the World War came, he toured the country urging pacifism. In New Haven, Yale students hooted and jeered him. At the Baltimore Academy of Music in April 1917 he was almost mobbed by rioters who sang: ''Hang Dave Jordan on a Sour Apple Tree!" After the U. S. entered the War, however, he made no more speeches. And ten years after the Baltimore incident he received a letter from one Carter G. Osburn, who said he had led the Baltimore mob: "No apology is possible for such an act. ... I was at the time 20 years old. . . . In these ten years I saw something of the actuality of war. . . . You were motivated by the principles of civilization, while I was motivated by ... barbarism."

Long after he is gone Stanford will vividly remember its Grand Old Man-- his Thursday evenings at-home in a big firelit living room which he specially rebuilt to make room for more friends and conversation; the adult atmosphere he fostered on the campus ("College men should marry college women, as they are more nearly mental equals. ... A man sees the best women he'll ever see while in college"); his word-coining ("quacktitioner," "pluviculture," "sciosophy" meaning organized ignorance); his abhorrence of liquor, tobacco, ignorance, arrogance, vulgarity (he said some people should write a "V" before their names); a fine old Tolstoyan sitting in the sun with his blackthorn stick and shepherd dog.

Stanford Today. Under the driving, organizing genius of Wilbur, Hoover & friends, Stanford has traveled far. With an endowment of some $43,500.000 of which about $12.000,000 represents the physical plant, it is no longer quasi-public but predominantly a rich man's college. Its students (3,938 enrolled this year) have since 1921 been obliged to pay a stiff tuition fee: from $85 to $130 per quarter, depending upon the school in which they are enrolled. Though it is their custom to affect corduroy trousers, lumberjack shirts and other unassuming gear, more than half own automobiles. Some fly their own planes: Stanford's airport, operated by the Daniel Guggenheim Aeronautic Laboratory, is one of the few college-owned fields in the U. S. and it is taxed to its capacity on big-game days. Nearby is the stadium which seats 90,000 people. The vast Stanford campus includes one of the finest Pacific Coast golf courses, two lakes, a polo field as well as two great gymnasiums and many a smaller playing field and game court. Dotted with eucalyptus trees, handsomely landscaped, it encloses a central group of rambling Spanish-Romanesque buildings. Most of the male students live in dormitories. Though there are many fraternities (with houses of their own) the dormitory groups, which have intramural eating clubs and cliques, are more influential in campus affairs. Besides the girls' dormitory there are many sorority houses. Since the number of young ladies is limited by Senator Stanford's will to 500, a boy who "dates" a co-ed is known as one who "crashes the 500."

Trustees Meeting. Potent Californians are the trustees who meet this week to decide the question which has heated up many a Stanford alumnus: Shall Dr. Wilbur continue to administer the university from Washington, or shall complete control be given to Acting President Robert Eckles Swain? Among the trustees are: Banker Leland Whitman Cutler, of Bacon, Cutler & Cooke in San Francisco; Sugar Merchant Wallace McKinney Alexander, past president of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce; Board Chairman Frank Bartow Anderson of the Bank of California; Publisher Harry Chandler of the Los Angeles Times; Judges John Thomas Nourse Jr. and Marcus Cauffman Sloss; President Paul Shoup of Southern Pacific Railway. Absent will be Trustee Herbert Hoover.

This week Secretary Wilbur begins a tour of college commencements, four addresses in a fortnight. Last fortnight he was in Manhattan at the meeting of the Council on Radio in Education (TIME, June 1). As Secretary of the Interior and head of the U. S. Department of Education he is a very busy man. The anti-Hoover, anti-Wilbur faction of Stanford's alumni feel that their university suffers while Dr. Swain is theoretically in charge, but actually working under remote control.

Last October the trustees extended Dr. Wilbur's leave of absence for a year but they withdrew his salary--$22.000 annually. Last fortnight when the meeting of trustees was called, the San Francisco Examiner reported that an emissary from President Hoover had come with the request that Dr. Wilbur's leave be extended again. This was ''understood to be a virtual ultimatum." Said the Examiner: "There is dissension among the Stanford trustees, it became known. . . . But, it was said, a majority of the board will accede to the request. . . ."

Significance. The same alumni who are saying come-back-now-or-get-out to President Wilbur, oppose the Jordan-Wilbur plan for changing the college. They contend that Stanford's prestige will be lowered if it is turned into an institution for selected graduate students only. They say a man gives his allegiance not to a graduate school such as Johns Hopkins or Heidelberg but to the college of his early years. Stanford may lose financial, even sentimental support from its alumni. Also they say, its athletic teams will gradually lose their national eminence (see p. 28).

Proponents of the plan point out that, since teaching is a university's prime function, intellectual prestige is more desirable than athletic. It is argued that not the A. B. degree, obtainable almost by mail nowadays, but its successors should be emphasized; California has many a junior college: let these take care of the first two years; let Stanford lavish its resources upon making finer products for an increasingly exacting world. In the words of Grand Old Man Jordan: ''A university should be a place for research and independent thinking, and for this reason alone the abolition of the lower division is inevitable. The lower division was created because the high schools, at the time Stanford was founded, did not give sufficient training. Now they do so. ...

"The whole of your life must be spent in your own company and only the educated man is good company for himself. What a college education is worth depends entirely upon the man who has it. There is no use loading a $10,000 education on a 50-c- boy."

* Other famed Stanford Alumni: President Jackson Eli Reynolds of First National Bank of City of New York; Wickersham Commissioner Judge Kenneth Mackintosh; General Counsel Robert Willis Campbell of Illinois Steel Co.; onetime Editor Charles Kellog Field of Sunset Magazine; Author Wallace Irwin (Letters of a Japanese Schoolboy) ex-1900, and his brother Will, biographer of President Hoover; Board Chairman Henry Suzzallo of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; Senators Charles Linza McNary of Oregon; Carl Trumbull Hayden of Arizona, ex-1900; President Almon Edward Roth of Rotary International; Writer Robert Luther Duffus of the New York Times; Vice President Paul Downing of Pacific Gas & Electric Co.; Editor Bruce Bliven of The New Republic; District Attorney Charles Marron Fickert who helped send Thomas J. Mooney and Warren K. Billings to jail.

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