Temple's Thanks

EDUCATION

In the Gothic shadow cast across Philadelphia by the ancient and excellent University of Pennsylvania, Temple University has spent ten years clamoring for public recognition. Cheap (tuition: $200) and teeming (enrollment: 10,106), Temple is comparable to City College of New York.

Temple began as a theological class in the study of the Rev. Russell Herman Conwell. Later it was a workers' night school in the basement of Dr. Conwell's Grace Baptist Church. Finally it began expanding all over Philadelphia. Fiercely democratic, it kept its fees low, welcomed students regardless of their preparation or occupation. Among the creations of Founder Conwell, Temple never attained the fame of the inspirational lecture "Acres of Diamonds" which Dr. Conwell delivered more than 6,000 times before his death in 1925.

Putting Temple on the educational map has been the work of Dr. Conwell's successor, tall, bronzed Charles Ezra Beury (pronounced "Beery"). Like his neighbor. Dr. Thomas Sovereign Gates of the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Beury was a banker before he became a college president. A son of the rich, coal-operating Beurys for whom Beury, W. Va., is named, Charles Ezra Beury graduated from Princeton in 1903. When he received a law degree from Harvard three years later it was in absentia because that day he was marrying the Lutheran pastor's daughter in his native Shamokin, Pa. His stock joke: "I became a bachelor and a benedict on the same day."

A career as lawyer and banker brought him to Temple's board of trustees where Dr. Conwell spotted him as a likely successor. After his election Dr. Beury tried for a while to be both president of Temple University and board chairman of Bank of Philadelphia & Trust Co. In 1930 the bank was merged with Bankers Trust Co. of Philadelphia and Dr. Beury stepped out of the chairmanship. Few months later, Bankers Trust went down with a resounding crash.

With Temple, President Beury had done better. Raising $6,000,000, he built a twelve-story classroom building, a student centre, a new plant for the school of medicine. He acquired a school of chiropody. In 1932 he signed up Glen Scobey ("Pop") Warner to coach football in a new stadium whose 40,000 seats have since been faithfully filled.

Temple's benefactors have included Publisher Cyrus H. K. Curtis, his son-in-law Edward Bok, and Mr. & Mrs. George F. Tyler, who gave the $1,000,000 School of Fine Arts now headed by Sculptor Boris Blai. In 1929 Thomas D. Sullivan, president of Philadelphia's Terminal Warehouse Co. and brother of Pundit Mark Sullivan, left $278,000 towards a library. In 1934, with private benefactions dried up, President Beury turned to the PWA for $550,000 to complete the building.

Last week Temple's library was done and Dr. Beury rendered thanks to the Administration by draping around the neck of Franklin D. Roosevelt a black-&-purple hood, symbolic of the rare honorary degree of Doctor of Jurisprudence.* At the ceremony Philadelphia's Mayor S. Davis Wilson, in tan felt hat and grey coat, was the only dignitary without a topper. Said President Roosevelt: "No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned. The truth is found when men are free to pursue it. Genuine education is present only when the springs from which knowledge comes are pure." Mrs. Roosevelt stayed to help dedicate the library.

*Dr. Beury had first proferred a Doctorate of Laws. Dr. Roosevelt, many times an L.L.D. asked him instead for the Doctorate of Jurisprudence, his first.

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