HENRY D. WILD '88
It was largely owing to her location that Williams College gained the son who was to become her sixth president. Born at Waterbury, Connecticut, and thus well within the centripetal sweep of Yale, Franklin Carter left New Haven at the close of his sophomore year for reasons of health, and later sought the more favorable climate of the Berkshire Hills. Thus, once a member of the class of 1859 at Yale, he was graduated from Williams in the class of 1862. There came a blending of these affiliations throughout his career. Williams was the first to claim him, as professor of French and Latin till 1868 and then as Massachusetts Professor of Latin until 1872, when Yale drew him to a professorship of German, to relinquish him in 1881 when he succeeded Dr. Chadbourne as president of Williams. For twenty years, the third longest administration in the history of the college, he stood at the head of her interests.
The history of education can show fewer periods more critical or more rapid in change than the last quarter of the nineteenth century in this country. Williams was in her own crisis when Dr. Carter came as president. How he met it, and how he guided the college in a steady movement toward larger things, a mere comparison of the catalogues marking the limits of his administration can tell the younger men of to-day, who enjoy the fruits without knowing the process. Such a comparison would show an increase of sixty per cent. in the number of students and over one hundred per cent. in the number of instructors. This period also saw an increase in real estate, buildings, and improvements of $600,000, and, in addition to this, of $900,000 in invested funds.
But educational realities go deeper than outward prosperity. A college reflects her president's personality in things of mind and of spirit. To business capacity Dr. Carter added distinguished scholarship and the genius of a teacher born. All this was made living effective by single-hearted loyalty to the best interests of the college as he saw them and by devotion to the highest moral and intellectual good of the students. He did not swerve from duty as he understood it to follow an easy popularity. The burdens that he bore and the labors that he accomplished, at personal cost in more ways than one, rested in the last analysis on this substratum of self-denying service.
His work has extended far beyond the college. His grace of expression in both speech and print, the keenness of his wit, his administrative power, and his command of educational resources have been recognized and made available beyond the limits of his presidency and apart from the demands of Williams alone. Honored in many spheres, he has thus brought added honor to the college. The solidarity of his achievements for Williams is revealed more clearly as time proceeds. More and more the alumni are coming to appreciate this as both historical fact and academic heritage. This shall be his reward as he continues, and may it be for long, to live close to the college and to the town that he has served and loved.