Yaleman for Yale

Threading their way solemnly through a line of divinity students picketing for the reappointment of pinko Associate Professor Jerome Davis,* the members of the Corporation of Yale University one morning last week assembled in their quarters in old Woodbridge Hall. It was their regular February meeting, but all through New Haven had gone the whisper that at last Yale was choosing a successor to 67-year-old President James Rowland Angell who will retire in June. As the Corporation seated themselves, the University's Provost, handsome Charles Seymour, was absent. He rarely misses a Corporation meeting, but at that moment he was in his office in Berkeley College. The meeting was brief. Connecticut's roly-poly Governor Wilbur Lucius ("Uncle Toby") Cross scuttled out, taking with him famed Presbyterian Henry Sloane Coffin, to announce to his friend Charles Seymour that he had been elected the 15th president of Yale. "The news," said suave Mr. Seymour, "was a pleasant surprise." No great surprise to Yalemen, the news crowned two of the brightest careers in U. S. education. Brisk, witty James Rowland Angell has in 15 years transformed the nation's second university spiritually and materially. Quadrupling its endowment (from $25,000,000 to $95,000,000), spending the fortune of Lawyer John W. Sterling (Class of '64) on acres of gleaming new buildings, helping Capitalist Edward Stephen Harkness to house Yale's some 2,500 undergraduates in nine new Colleges, President Angell has meanwhile skillfully husbanded Yale's manpower, pushed its graduate schools of Law and Medicine into the first rank. James Rowland Angell, a University of Michigan graduate who reached Yale from the Carnegie Corporation, was the first modern Yale president not an alumnus, but Yalemen were unanimously ready to vote that no Yaleman could have done better.

Yaleman Charles Seymour is 52. Ruddy, well tailored, fond of rough tweed jackets and pipes, he does not suggest a distinguished historian (The Diplomatic Background of the War, 1870-1914; The Intimate Papers of Colonel House; American Neutrality, 1914-1917). He does suggest Yale. Son of Yale's longtime Greek Professor Thomas Day Seymour, he is descended from two Yale presidents and has been Yale royalty from his youth. That did not keep him from taking a B. A. degree at Cambridge before he entered Yale's Class of 1908. He managed the freshman and varsity crews, belonged to Skull and Bones and a good fraternity (Alpha Delta Phi), became a history instructor three years after graduation. He was a full professor by 1919, when Woodrow Wilson drafted him for the Paris Peace Conference. He headed the U. S. Commission's Austro-Hungarian division and returned to Yale full of glory. When the University's Grand Old Man, Arthur Twining Hadley, resigned in 1921, Charles Seymour was boomed for the presidency. But he was then only 36 and in those days no Hutchins, Frank or Conant had arisen to dispel the prejudice against presidential youth.

President Angell, however, has had no steadier right hand than Charles Seymour. In 1927 he became University Provost, chief link between Yale's faculty and administration. The first Yale bigwig to encourage the College plan, he helped supervise the building of the colleges, became master of one of them (Berkeley), was until this year chairman of the Council of Masters. His wife (Gladys Watkins of Scranton, Pa.), his 24-year-old son Charles Jr. (Yale 1935 ), now studying art in Paris, and his daughters Elizabeth and Sarah, helped him to entertain Berkeley's boys.

Until last week most of his spare time went into digging through the vast library of War documents bequeathed to Yale (through him) by Col. House. In lighter moments he adds to his famed collection of first editions of Romancer E. Phillips Oppenheim.

Said delighted Col. House last week of his friend's appointment: "During these days when second-rate men are being placed in great public positions, it is refreshing to have such an outstanding, national institution as Yale choose Dr. Seymour to administer its affairs."

*Sample placard: "What manner of men are these who try to throttle Ph.D.'s."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.