Appreciations of the Man Who Built Up
Out of a Fresh-Water College the
Great University of Chicago.
The proposed monument to the late President William Rainey Harper of the University of Chicago is to take the form of a library building. Thus will be fittingly suggested the practical trend of his life, in which scholarship was joined with utilitarianism. So businesslike were this educator's methods in building up a great university upon the foundation of a provincial college that he was severely criticized for the seeming incongruity between his aims and the means he used. And yet, as the New York Evening Post has said:
Whatever may be thought of his policies, his personality now appears in a fine and heroic light. No one can consider the admirable fortitude and self-forgetting equanimity he displayed in his long and hopeless fight against pain and death, without perceiving that here was a heroic soul, to which epithets borrowed from trade had no proper application.
As his administration proceeded along the golden way laid by Mr. Rockefeller, it became evident that President Harper faced all problems as new problems, and that his optimism admitted no difficulties. When it was discovered that the University of Chicago lacked college life and spirit, college life and spirit were straightway improvised, or at least encouraged, by the appointment of a famous athlete to the faculty, and later by the building of dormitories. No detail of university life escaped him. If he lacked some of the finer sympathies and perceptions that go to make the ideal university president, he was a figure instinct with vital energy, ingenious and resourceful in all matters—in its qualities and defects thoroughly American and of our time. The present, in which he lived by preference, will give him an almost unbounded admiration; sober judgment based upon the past will gradually smooth the inequalities of his work.
President Harper was a man who did things. It is doubtful whether he himself placed the highest importance upon his executive work; it is not unlikely that he would prefer to be remembered as a Hebrew scholar and the author of abstruse commentaries. But a man is not always himself the best judge of the relative values of his own work. Professor Albert Bushnell Hart, writing in the Boston Transcript, thus estimates President Harper's career:
To sum up, the great characteristic of President Harper was his unflagging and generous belief that things could be done. In his thirteen years of service he saw Chicago University rise to a place in the first rank of the world's institutions of learning. It never seemed to occur to him that a thing must be abandoned or even postponed because it was difficult. When he felt that the time had come for a law school, he created it. He found the Blaine School of Training for Teachers in existence, and absorbed it. Nothing seemed beyond his powers, yet he always had time for the visitor and the guest, kept up his teaching to the last, and was one of the chief citizens of Chicago and of Illinois. Who can doubt that President Harper's intensity of love and service for the university of which he was really the founder and always the principal force shortened his days, and yet who could wish to leave a more enduring monument than his life-work?
The presidents of several colleges have spoken of him as follows:
President Woodrow Wilson, of Princeton University: "President Harper's death deprives the country of one of the most extraordinary and attractive figures, and the last months of his life have added a touch of heroism through which he won the warm admiration of the whole country. His loss is very serious indeed."
President Schurman, of Cornell University: "President Harper was preeminent as an educational administrator, and was the greatest college president of the last fifteen years. The University of Chicago will remain for all time as a monument to his memory."
President Hadley, of Yale: "President Harper was a brilliant instructor, skilful organizer, and a man of rare business ability."