Yale-Builder

Yale's late William Lyon Phelps had only one reservation about his friend President Angell. "There should be some dullness in every college president," Phelps once remarked. "Knowing Angell intimately, I have never been able to detect even a shadow of it in him."

Other Yalemen would have agreed. When James Rowland Angell, amidst blaring bands and welcoming streamers, arrived in New Haven in 1921, he was the first non-Eli since 1766 to have been elected president of Yale -- and Yale was never the same thereafter. For 16 years --through the roaring '20s, the big depression and the first days of the New Deal --Angell kept things stirring and growing. He built 37 new buildings on campus, nearly quadrupled Yale's endowment (from $25 million to $95 million).

Tallest but One. He set up Yale's school of engineering, its department of drama, its Institute of Human Relations, and its observatory at Johannesburg, South Africa. To the horror of many of his trustees, he insisted on opening the first graduate school of nursing in the U.S. He was proud of the fact that he had built the tallest structure in New Haven (the 253-ft. Harkness Tower), professed to be bitterly disappointed when a gas company built a tank seven feet higher on the other side of town.

It was the age of the New Yale, when a second-rate law school and a third-rate medical school ("Starved and cold-shouldered," roared Angell) rose to take their places among the finest in the U.S., and when the school of the fine arts won so many Prix de Rome that the prize got to be known as the Prix de Yale. Angell cut across department barriers to give undergraduates an integrated curriculum. Under him, Yale began its system of residential colleges, started its university press and the Yale Review.

The grandson of a college president (Alexis Caswell of Brown) and the son of another (James Burrill Angell of the University of Michigan), James Angell had spent his whole life on campuses. He had been a pupil of John Dewey at Michigan, a student of William James at Harvard, finally joined the faculty of the University of Chicago. He became one of the top psychologists in the U.S., known in the academic world as the "creator of psychologists."

Hell with Angells. He was a chipper, bouncy little man, more distinguished than handsome ("Apparently Yale doesn't choose its presidents for pulchritude," he said). Though he was famed for his wit and brilliance, few Yale undergraduates could have claimed to know him well. In his Woodbridge Hall office ("The only hell with Angells in it," students called it), the president had had little time for student callers. He seldom entertained, and in all those 16 years he never acquired a nickname.

It was after his retirement in 1937 that Yalemen got to know him better, for President Emeritus Angell seldom missed a chance to return to campus. He was an honored guest at all Yale functions, made speeches with a wit that seemed to mellow with age. Last month, though incurably ill with cancer, he made one of his speeches at the 25th anniversary of his nursing school ("I have only one criticism ... of [nurses]. When they use a needle to stick you, they always choose a blunt needle"). That was the last time Yale ever heard him. Last week, at 79, James Rowland Angell died.

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