American Men of Mind

by Burton Egbert Stevenson

ELIOT

Graduating from Harvard in 1853, at the age of nineteen, he devoted his attention principally to chemistry, and, after some years of teaching, and of study in Europe, was, in 1865, appointed professor of chemistry in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The same year, a revolution occurred in the government of Harvard, which was transferred from the state legislature to the graduates of the college. The effect of the change was greatly to strengthen the interest of the alumni in the management of the university, and to prepare the way for extensive and thorough reforms. Considerable time was spent in searching for the right man for president and finally, in 1869, Prof. Eliot was chosen.

That the right man had been found was evident from the first. "King Log has made room for King Stork," wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes, then professor of anatomy and physiology at Harvard, to John Motley. "Mr. Eliot makes the corporation meet twice a month instead of once. He comes to the meeting of every faculty, ours among the rest, and keeps us up to eleven and twelve o'clock at night discussing new arrangements. I cannot help being amused at some of the scenes we have in our medical faculty—this cool, grave young man proposing in the calmest way to turn everything topsy turvy, taking the reins into his hands and driving as if he were the first man that ever sat on the box.

"'How is it, I should like to ask,' said one of our members, the other day, 'that this faculty has gone on for eighty years managing its own affairs and doing it well, and now within three or four months it is proposed to change all our modes of carrying on the school? It seems very extraordinary, and I should like to know how it happens.'

"'I can answer Dr. ——'s question very easily,' said the bland, grave young man. 'There is a new president.'

"The tranquil assurance of this answer had an effect such as I hardly ever knew produced by the most eloquent sentences I ever heard uttered."

The bland young man's innovations did not seem to do much harm to Harvard, for under his administration, her financial resources have been multiplied by ten, as has the number of her teachers, while the number of her students has been multiplied by five. Dr. Eliot has grown into the real head of the educational system of this country; his influence has wrought vast changes in every department of teaching, from the kindergarten to the university. It was his idea that common school education and college education ought to be flexible, ought to be made to fit the needs of the pupil. The result has been the broad development of the elective system—broader than Josiah Quincy ever dreamed of. The same system has changed the whole aspect of the teaching profession, resulting in the demand for a competent training in some specialty for every teacher.

Dr. Eliot, who is in a sense the first living citizen of America, has not attained that position merely by success in his profession. He has devoted time and thought to the great problems of our government, and has taken an active part in many public movements—the race question, the relations of capital and labor, the movement for universal arbitration. He has been honored by France, by Italy, and by Japan, and resigned from his great office, in 1909, at the age of seventy-five, with mental and physical powers in splendid condition, not to retire from active life, but to devote himself even more wholly to the service of his countrymen. In this age of commercial domination, a career such as Dr. Eliot's is more than usually inspiring.

In the history of the administration of Yale university, the most striking personalities are the two Timothy Dwights and Noah Porter. The first Timothy Dwight, born in 1752, and graduating from Yale at the age of seventeen, began to teach, and at the outbreak of the Revolution, enlisted as Chaplain in Parson's brigade of the Connecticut line. It was at this time he wrote a number of stirring patriotic songs, one of which, "Columbia," still lives. At the close of the war, he continued preaching and also opened an academy, at which women were admitted to the same courses with men, and which soon acquired considerable reputation. In 1795, he was called to the presidency of Yale, a position which he held until his death. His administration marked the beginning of a new era in the history of the college. At his accession, the college had about one hundred students, and the instructors consisted of the president, one professor and three tutors. He established permanent professorships and chose such men to fill them as Jeremiah Day, Benjamin Silliman, and James Kingsley. The result of this policy was a steady growth in the number of students, until, at his death, they had increased to over three hundred.

Noah Porter, who came to the presidency in 1871, had been graduated from the college forty years before, during which time he had studied theology, held a number of important charges, was called to the chair of moral philosophy at Yale, and finally elevated to the presidency. His work was most important, one feature of it being the introduction of elective studies, though he insisted also upon a required course, as opposed to the Harvard system. Some of the University's finest buildings were erected during his administration, and at its close the student body numbered nearly eleven hundred.