Rochester Debut

Into the University of Rochester's Eastman Theatre last week filed 41 college presidents, delegates from 160 educational institutions, several thousand alumni, parents, students. To the stage marched such dignitaries as Yale's President James Rowland Angell, Princeton's President Harold Willis Dodds, Amherst's President Stanley King, Brown's President Clarence Augustus Barbour, Swarthmore's President Frank Aydelotte, Hobart's President Murray Bartlett, Radcliffe's President Ada Louise Comstock. To the stage also marched Alan Chester Valentine, a modest, square-built young man who has the look of a football player, no doctor's degree, a record of only seven years as an educator. Two hours later, after prayers, music by the Rochester Civic Orchestra, presentation of insignia by the Board of Trustees' Chairman Joseph Tilden Ailing, Alan Valentine became president of small but richly endowed University of Rochester, which the late George Eastman (Kodaks) showered with gifts totaling $55,500,000.

Day before, Alan Valentine, who was once a fullback at Swarthmore, an Olympic team coach in 1928, more recently Master of Yale's Pierson College, told 3,000 alumni and students that "it is the obligation of universities to see that all their graduates think of college in terms of intellectual maturity received there," that he hoped "the Horary and the laboratory would rival the gymnasium and fraternity house." At his inaugural, surrounded by some of the most distinguished educators in the land, onetime Fullback Valentine announced: "When the clamor of sports journalists and locker room critics effects its policies, a university has sold its birthright. This University shall yield to no such distortion. . . . Universities are great in terms of the intellectual quality of their graduates. . . ."

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