Engineer at Illinois

Corn is not the only thing that grows fast and big on the sunbaked, rain-drenched prairies of Illinois. A single tree was all that broke the flat monotony of a stretch of prairie between Urbana and West Urbana (now Champaign) in 1867 when citizens planted a State university there. In 67 years their seed has blossomed into the nation's seventh largest university. The 1,500-acre waste of prairie is green and landscaped, thick with great buildings. The new president whom trustees picked last week will administer a faculty & student body numbering 15,000 and a plant which, including Colleges of Pharmacy, Dentistry and Medicine in Chicago, is worth some $27,000,000. Growing with the University, Urbana and Champaign have joined indistinguishably around it. With few industries, the town lives mostly off the gown. Many a retired farmer & wife have moved in to run rooming & boarding houses and, with the University's College of Agriculture and its adjacent cornfields, give the town a pleasantly rural flavor. But Illinois is by no means a bumpkin college. Down from Chicago, 130 mi. to the north, come more than one-third of Urbana-Champaign's 8,500 students, bringing big city airs and manners for all the rest to ape. Young men who can afford it dress like customers' men and young women look fresh from Michigan Boulevard. Dancing and "dates" are far & away their favorite pastimes, followed by swimming, fencing, hockey. A Yaleman or Wellesley woman would feel strange in Urbana-Champaign for a while, but a student from Ann Arbor, Madison or Berkeley would be at home almost at once. Each would need to learn only a few names. Illinois' favorite soft-lighted booths for pairing off between classes, are at Hanley's and Prehn's. Favorite snacks are rich fudge squares called "Lukers," washed down by Coca-Cola. Beer is too expensive and sale of hard liquor near the campus is forbidden by State law. But almost any Illini can tell the stranger where to get a pint of "corn." And the young philosophy and romance which burgeon in a luxurious Student Union, in 124 dormitories, fraternity & sorority houses and in Fords parked amid the cornfields would be familiar as the alphabet.

Out from the University of Illinois have gone some 100,000 graduates, mostly to become solid citizens, a few to win renown. Most widely famed is Footballer Harold ("Red"') Grange. But Sculptor Lorado Taft is an alumnus, and so are Litterateurs Carl and Mark Van Doren, Motormaker Ray Austin Graham, Sanitary Engineer Arthur Newell Talbot, onetime (1928-32) U. S. Senator Otis Ferguson Glenn, Massachusetts Institute of Technology's onetime (1923-31) President Samuel Wesley Stratton. The late great Stuart Pratt Sherman taught English at Illinois for 17 years.

To Urbana-Champaign in 1913, as assistant professor of heating & ventilation, went a long-faced, long-legged young man named Arthur Cutts Willard. Born in Washington in 1878, son of a Treasury official, he had studied for two years in Washington's School of Pharmacy before setting off to M. I. T. for a course in chemical engineering. Teaching for a while in California and Washington, he was a practicing engineer when University of Illinois called him to its faculty.

Small-town life suited Arthur Willard's tastes, which ran to biographies, rummy and the cinema. Summers he escaped to a low, rambling house in Farmington, Maine. His students found him hard- driving but fair and human, and he acquired a minor fame by his classroom ability to break a piece of chalk in half and throw one piece back in the chalk-box from any angle or distance. Some of his faculty colleagues looked askance as advancing years failed to change the tilt of his hat, tone down his clothes or sober his general air. But on the whole they found him an exceedingly modest and agreeable fellow. In 1917 Arthur Willard became a full professor, in 1920 head of the mechanical engineering department. He was also making himself a first-rank expert in heating & ventilation. The nation called for his advice at its Army camps during the War, at its Chemical Warfare Service in 1926, its Public Health Service in 1927. He helped solve the ventilating problems which made possible the Holland Vehicular Tunnel between Manhattan and Jersey City. When the engineering college's deanship fell vacant last year Arthur Willard after much persuasion consented to serve as acting dean, for one year only. Also last year President Harry Woodburn Chase decided to accept the chancellorship of New York University and his job, too, was filled for one year, by Graduate School Dean Arthur Hill Daniels. One afternoon last week, amid a rumble of charges and denials that politics would influence its decision, University of Illinois' Board of Trustees met at Chicago's Blackstone Hotel to choose a new president. Out of 89 names they had sifted all but two--Dean Willard and Sveinbjorn Johnson, the University's legal counsel and professor of law. Late in the afternoon the trustees emerged to announce that their choice was Arthur Cutts Willard, who had taken so little part in politics that they did not even know whether he was a Democrat or a Republican. This time Arthur Willard needed no persuasion to abandon heating & ventilation. Solemnly he promised Illinois taxpayers that the University, which costs them about $6,000,000 a year, would be under his administration a model of economy and service. Said he: "We are going to have a new order of things in this country. Somebody may know what it will be--I don't. But I know this much--the universities are going to have to do a better job of turning out men and women who can take care of themselves. The average college graduate . . . has been prepared for everything but life."

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