Monday, Apr. 03, 1939
Midwest M. I. T.
Canny old Walter Dill Scott, having raised almost $40,000,000 in 19 years as Northwestern University's president, recently announced that he would go into well-earned retirement next June. Last week the final year of this phenomenal money-raiser was made memorable when, to his surprise, a man whom he scarcely knew dropped into the university's lap one of its biggest single gifts,* $6,735,000. The gift is to establish a Midwest institute of technology comparable to the East's M. I. T., the West's Caltech.
The self-effacing tycoon who sprang this surprise was Walter Patton Murphy, a 66-year-old bachelor. A onetime railroad brakeman and fireman who became rich by inventing and manufacturing corrugated steel freight-car ends, Mr. Murphy heads three corporations (including Standard Railway Equipment Co.), owns the fabulous estate of the late William V. Kelley in Lake Bluff near Chicago, a cattle ranch in California, and a $1,000,000 square-rigged yacht. He is a good friend of James Roosevelt. Mr. Murphy is not so well known as his estate or his yacht, and the university had to look up the brief notice of him in Who's Who in order to identify him.
Five years ago, perturbed because engineers could not get jobs when they got their degrees, Mr. Murphy began a study of U. S. universities to see what could be done about founding a school that would give young engineers a better chance to find work. He was helped by General Motors' Research Director Charles Kettering and University of Cincinnati's Dean Herman Schneider, originator of a "cooperative" plan of engineering study.
Northwestern's new institute will be conducted on this cooperative plan, whereby students spend equal periods studying in the school and working in industry, take five years to complete the course, will be virtually assured of a job when they finish. Offering civil, mechanical, electrical and chemical engineering courses, the institute will open in September 1940, eventually accommodate 800 students.
Most of Mr. Murphy's $6,735,000 will be used for a building. Walter Dill Scott was so excited about the gift that he promptly decided to clear a site on the Evanston campus, facing the lake, for his new institute. To make way, the $1,000,000 stone and steel Patten gymnasium, 302 by 132 feet and three stories high, will be cut into three pieces, moved on skids to a site four blocks away.
* Bigger ones: Bequests of $7,000,000 from Roger Deering's estate in 1936, $8,000,000 from Milton H. Wilson's in 1929.
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