"Almus Pater"

When slight, precocious, 16-year-old Freshman "Murray" Butler got his first glimpse of Columbia in 1878, it was a college with 227 students and a little cluster of buildings on one city block. Last week, when 83-year-old Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler handed in his resignation as president of Columbia, the university could boast 30,000 resident students, assets worth $231,561,407, a reputation as one of the biggest and finest universities in the world.

Columbians have long referred to Dr. Butler as "Almus Pater." The luster of world acclaim he received through his ubiquitous personal activities he passed on to his school. He has been decorated by 15 foreign nations and honored with degrees from 37 universities. H. G. Wells once called him "the champion international visitor and retriever of foreign orders and degrees." President for 20 years of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, he won half a 1931 Nobel Prize. Friend Theodore Roosevelt dubbed him Nicholas Miraculous (after St. Nicholas Thaumaturgis, the "Miracle Maker"). Butler himself, never a diffident man, wrote some of his 3,500-odd publications under the pen name "Cosmos."

Columbia waxed great, not because of President Butler's single-mindedness but in spite of his versatility. A voracious appetite for responsibility was his shining virtue and his chief vice. While it nurtured Columbia, it distracted Butler into politics, lured him into a maze of inconsistencies that may have kept him from achieving his fondest ambition: the Presidency of the U.S.

"Pick Nick." A New Jersey merchant's son who did his childhood prattling in Greek, Murray Butler wasted no time. Graduating from high school at 13, he entered Columbia three years later, soon became its biggest undergraduate "bun-yanker" (honor-grabber). At 20 he graduated as top man in his class, at 21 acquired his M.A., at 22 his Ph.D. He promptly became a Columbia teacher and founded Teachers College in his spare time.

At 27, he drew up a college-into-uni-versity expansion plan that was carried out almost to the last detail. The next year he became Columbia's youngest full professor of philosophy. At 39. to nobody's surprise, he was Columbia's president. Administrative details detracted from the quality--though never from the quantity--of his scholarly output: his excellent annual reports during those early years include much of his best writing.

A Republican by family tradition, Dr. Butler was a party man from the time he went as a delegate to the 1888 Republican National Convention. In 1912 he became the G.O.P. vice-presidential candj-date and went down to defeat with Taft. In 1920 he made a bold bid for the Presidential nomination with the slogan: "Pick Nick for a Pic-Nic in November." He got only 69 votes.

Bad Bets. After that, Dr. Butler was

through with active politicking. But he

still had influence. He was one of the

nation's first and most outstanding antiprohibitionists and a large segment of voters kept their eyes on him. As a politician, he had an unhappy faculty for backing the loser: the Kaiser until World War I, Harding until the oil scandals, the early Mussolini who made the trains run on time. Despite his good words for academic freedom, students and teachers often denounced his conservative leanings. Since World War II began, Dr. Butler has been comparatively silent on extracurricular matters. In the house at 60 Morningside Drive which Columbia has built around him, and around which he has built Columbia, Dr. Butler made no public comment about his resignation, effective October i. But he once told admirers that, if they opened him, they would find "Columbia" written on his heart.

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