Old Blue

"I wouldn't be more surprised," cried one down-to-earth Yale professor, "by an undefeated football team." The professor was not alone last week. All over New Haven, from the classrooms to Mory's, students, teachers and Whiffenpoofs were hashing over the announcement that Yale's President Charles Seymour was going to retire.

At 64, Historian Seymour had four years to go before the mandatory Yale retirement age of 68 took effect, but he had decided that the university needed a "fresh leadership of the most vigorous sort." He wanted to give Yale plenty of time to find it. He would not actually leave, he said, until July 1950.

Bonnie Prince. It was twelve years since Charley Seymour, in sonorous Latin, had accepted the keys, records, charter and great seal of the university, in the climax of a long Eli career. His great-great-grandfather Thomas Clap (from 1740 to 1766) and his great-uncle Jeremiah Day (from 1817 to 1846) were Yale presidents before him, and his father had taught the classics there. Seymour himself (Yale '08) joined the faculty in 1911 as an instructor in history.

To Yalemen over the years he was known as "Bonnie Prince Charley"--a debonair and engaging scholar, with a flair for energetic lecturing (he virtually acted out the battle scenes). In his first years on the Yale faculty, his Diplomatic Background of the War (1916) did more than any other book to explain to literate Americans what the European war then raging was all about. It so impressed Woodrow Wilson that the President invited him to Paris in 1919 as a member of the U.S. peace delegation. After that, Seymour settled on the campus--first as professor, then as provost, finally as president.

His reign as president was not a glamourous one. Though he did build Silliman College and raise the Yale endowment another $16 million, he made internal matters his main concern. He placed the major disciplines--the sciences, social sciences, humanities, fine arts and medicine --under divisional (not merely departmental) directors, reorganized the Sheffield Scientific School, strengthened Yale's Institute of International Studies, and to the horror of many a student, introduced a required reading program for summer vacations.

Truth & Consequences. In his public addresses, President Seymour, against the current of popular materialistic thought, asserted the moral basis of freedom. His words were wise rather than provocative or demagogic. Thus he never became a "headline character." But among Elis he was both admired and loved. In campus gatherings he liked to sing The Sword of Bunker Hill, waving a blade in accompaniment. He still collected first editions of A. Conan Doyle and E. Phillips Oppenheim, and liked to invite students around for beer and talk on a Sunday evening.

Now, though he feels that his work is "well-nigh completed," Seymour still worries a good deal about the future of such institutions, as Yale. His chief concern is the same as it was twelve years ago--"absolute intellectual freedom . . . The Yale atmosphere must be so completely impregnated with the sense of freedom that our students going from here will serve naturally and universally as its apostles . . . We seek the truth and will endure the consequences."

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