Chase to N. Y. U.

A resourceful pedagog gets about a good bit. That thought might have occurred, 14 years ago, to a tall, youngish psychology professor whose grey eyes looked out from droopy eyelids at the leisurely charm of the University of North Carolina. Harry Woodburn Chase had been born in 1883 into a family in Groveland, Mass, which was said to have moved only five miles in 300 years. At Dartmouth he had taken his A.B.; at Clark University in Worcester (Mass.) his doctorate. Married to a Midwesterner, he went to North Carolina's Chapel Hill in 1910.

The Hill's 30 Northern professors, meeting occasionally for talk and drink, called themselves the "Damyankee Club." Psychologist Chase was a member. He was also, by 1919, the faculty's chairman, the college's acting dean, the university's acting president. In that year, the story goes, the trustees tired of trying to agree on a new president and turned the matter over to the faculty for a vote. Chief candidates were a Southerner and a Northerner. The Damyankee Club tactfully cast 30 votes for the Southerner. The other 170 professors voted for Harry Woodburn Chase.

North Carolina prospered under Dr. Chase's ten-year presidency and he received many an offer--like that of the presidency of the University of Oregon-- promising better pay than his $10,000 a year at Chapel Hill. He accepted none until 1930, yielding then to the University of Illinois. With his wife, son and daughter he settled in the brick President's House overlooking some 1,556 acres of campus and cornfield. President Chase codified the University rules, gave the faculty more say, the deans less. He relaxed discipline enough to induce his 14,000 young Illini to behave like grownups. Illinois had already undergone expansion by 1930. Shrewd President Chase realized, earlier than many another, that it was time for retrenchment. From the State Legislature the University received $12,000,000 biennially. Although President Chase added a College of Fine & Applied Arts and a School of Physical Education, it was at no extra cost to the budget. He cut many a fiscal corner and last week the University had a cosy $2,500,000 to spare, more than half of which is car-marked for Illinois' medical school buildings in Chicago.

For the third time in his 20-odd busy years of pedagogy, Harry Woodburn Chase--now white-haired though only 49 --made ready to move last week. He had accepted the chancellorship (presidency) of sprawling, polyglot New York University, to succeed Dr. Elmer Ellsworth Brown who is retiring at 71. Dr. Chase once said that his faith was in the State universities. N. Y. U. is privately endowed, receiving nothing from city or State. But it is large--the nation's largest, with 27,905 degree candidates--and its widespread activities are such as to keep Dr. Chase busy and happy.

Chancellor Chase may live in the ugly, Victorian Chancellor's House on the campus proper, on University Heights overlooking the Harlem River. Here, doubtless, he will play badminton, at which he excels, and be accessible and agreeable to all who visit him. He will find his students far different from the corn-fed stalwarts of Illinois, the more so as he goes southward among N. Y. U.'s five scattered major centres. On the Heights there are: fraternity houses and dormitories; a genial campus policeman named John Quigley who was a fast friend of the late Sir Thomas Lipton; the famed Hall of Fame.

N. Y. U. built its Washington Square college in 1835, four years after N. Y. U.'s founding by a council of 169 prominent men whose first president was Jeflersonian Albert Gallatin. Here once dwelt Artist Winslow Homer, Richard Grant White (father of Stanford White who designed most of the N. Y. U. buildings on the Heights) and many another pioneer Greenwich Villager. Today the Washington Square College is N. Y. U.'s third largest division, with more than 6,600 students, even less clean and corn-fed than the students on the Heights.*

What Chancellor-elect Chase plans for N. Y. U. he did not announce last week. He will, perforce, ponder its growth in 101 years, from the time that Samuel Finley Breese Morse there developed the telegraph and Professor John William Draper took the first photograph by sunlight. In 22 years under Chancellor Brown the enrolment grew from 4,175 to nearly 40,000 (including part-time students); the faculty from 282 to 1,800; the schools and colleges from eight to 12, including the important Graduate School of Business Administration. N. Y. U.'s endowment grew in proportion, yet as endowments go it is still paltry--less than $9,000,000. Undoubtedly, when Chancellor Chase looks at N. Y. U.'s books he will plan at once to do something about that endowment.

* But among N. Y. U.'s graduates are Baritone Reinald Werrenrath. Composer Deems Taylor, onetime Governor Charles Seymour Whitman, Elder Statesman Elihu Root.

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