Dennett to Williams

Had the planets been properly placed above small Spencer, Wis. on the night of June 13, 1883 they would have pointed auspiciously, for one born under them, to the second week in May 1934. So born was Tyler Dennett, son of Spencer's Baptist pastor. On the first day of last week Tyler Dennett was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of John Hay (TIME, May 14). On the sixth day he was named loth president of Williams College.

Williams' retiring President Harry Augustus Garfield, son of the 20th U. S. President, was teaching politics at Princeton when news of his Williams appointment reached him in 1908. Tyler Dennett was also teaching politics at Princeton when news of his Williams appointment reached him last week.

Entering Williams in 1901, after a freshman year at Bates, Tyler Dennett became art editor of Gulielmensian (yearbook), editor of the Literary Monthly, a football regular. Once, for his part in a student riot, he was suspended for six weeks. In 1904 he left Williams with a diploma, four college prizes which he went out for because he needed the money, and not nearly enough education. Four years at Union Theological Seminary and several more at Johns Hopkins to get a Ph. D. in U. S. diplomatic his tory helped to fill his brain with proper learning. Thereupon he successively preached, free-lanced for magazines, helped edit World Outlook, publicized a Methodist Centenary drive, boomed an Inter-Church World Movement, lectured on history at Johns Hopkins, wrote three books (The Democratic Movement in Asia, Americans in Eastern Asia, Roosevelt and the Russo-Japanese War.} That brought him up to 1924. when Secretary Hughes called him to Washington to be the State Department's editor and Division of Publications chief. After five years he became the Department's historical adviser, serving until 1931 when Princeton got him for its new School of Public and International Affairs.

Princeton men respect and like Tyler Dennett, find his lectures good fun. He is tall, thickset, blue-eyed, and his close-cropped hair is beginning to grey around the temples. A quick smile keeps extra wrinkles in his wrinkled, ruddy face. He has to wear glasses when he motors or reads, takes them off for lectures. When he is not writing diplomatic history he likes to paint, fish, photograph, putter around the house. No carpenter or plumber is ever needed by the Dennett household. Father of four, he got his two eldest sons to help him put up the family garage.

President-elect Dennett has kept in touch with his alma mater, but even if he were going back to the campus for the first time since graduation he would soon feel at home. The same stately elms still march across the close-clipped green. Some new buildings have been added to the architectural hodgepodge. There are new fraternities; Tyler Dennett's own local AZA has become national Phi Gamma Delta. But he will find many a familiar face in the faculty. Three years ago a census revealed that one-sixth of Williams' professors had taught there more than a quarter-century.

The world knows Williams as a small (700), old (1793) stronghold of quiet good breeding and classic learning. People who like to personify institutions sometimes think of it as a rich old gentleman in an Ascot tie who reads Pliny for pleasure. Last fortnight President Garfield arose in chapel to tongue-spank students for their rebellion (by campus poll) against compulsory chapel and compulsory Latin. Their protests against chapel, said he, were indirect and anonymous, would be disregarded. The Latin requirement was none of their business.

But there are signs that Old Gentleman Williams will shortly put on a four-in-hand and begin reading Sinclair Lewis (whom President Garfield boasts he has never read). Only last fortnight Williams made a major concession to the times by lowering its Latin entrance requirement from four to two years. And President-elect Dennett, whose eldest son George is at Harvard because of Williams' stiff Latin requirement, has his own ideas about running a college. Two years ago he asked his Princeton students to submit written criticisms of his lectures. "After all," says he, "the students are the customers."

Last week in Princeton he opened his Hay biography, read a newshawk the following passage: "Hay was unfitted to cope, as his parents and grandparents had done, with the unshorn prairies; unfitted by the gifts and tastes which subsequently made his success elsewhere. The year at home was critical. Again we may pay our respects to the patient and sympathetic family which, even if it did not wholly understand the boy, nevertheless carried him through. Some would have said they were spoiling him, but they might have done so many unwise things which they did not do."

"That," said Tyler Dennett, "is my theory of the best way to educate youth."

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