If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. — Henry David Thoreau
If you’ve spent your life in the northeast quarter of the United States, February has limited charms with which to entrance you, unless your team has somehow stumbled through the circus of NFL playoffs and into the Super Bowl. So the presence of the Lives Lived & Lost edition of Your Favorite Periodical is actually quite an appropriate fit, not only to help wrap up the preceding year and complement the “weather,” but to reinforce the powerful message of the University’s Service of Remembrance on Alumni Day.
In discussing other historical morsels recently we’ve coincidentally ventured in and around the Service through its origins, its setting and its participants. This doesn’t presuppose any particular view of the afterlife, which is even treated rather lightly in the immense iconography of the University Chapel. The crucial concept is, whatever that afterlife may entail in each case, there’s just one way for us each to get there. And it progresses through the wreath of carnations at the head of the aisle at the Service.
One peculiar way to view any period of history is to pick two points in time, to see what the cultural or behavioral changes have been in between them, then to try to define those events and/or people that have driven those changes in the interim. Going through this exercise for the United States over the last 10 years, for example, would result in a tragicomedy suitable for winning Pulitzers by the dozen for the next century or so. So we won’t do that here, you betcha.
Both our recent discussions of the peculiar Princeton presidency of Francis Landey Patton from 1888-1902, and the seemingly unrelated conflagration that destroyed the Marquand Chapel in 1920, have gotten that old thought bubble going, to consider the dramatic changes Princeton underwent around the turn of the 20th century. This involved far more than the festive renaming to Princeton University in 1896 and the formalization of the Graduate School in 1901; it essentially reworked every concrete element of the University’s operations, and changed the focus of the institution from inward self-analysis (or to be brutal, self-absorption) to outward reach into the world beyond, beginning to examine the great question: Why are we here, anyhow?
Let’s focus on two points to bracket this change for further consideration; there’s nothing magical about them. In fact you might choose others, but we need to start somewhere. The beginning is the Board of Trustees’ firing of Patton and election of Woodrow Wilson 1879 as president in the same 1902 meeting (for which they had to change their own rules). The completion is the election in June 1933 of Harold Dodds *1914 as president to succeed the recently retired John Grier Hibben 1882 *1893, whose tragic death was memorialized at the same meeting. In that span of 31 years, Princeton — led by only two presidents — did remain a highly recognizable institution, but in every substantive way became a completely different actor in American life.
The laissez-faire example of Patton primed the pump for this, in a way. The trustees belatedly renamed the place a University (James McCosh had set the table); Patton did nothing particular. They handed all the graduate students over to Andrew Fleming West 1874; Patton did nothing particular. He had gotten his lackluster son a tenured professorship, so they let Wilson abolish his department just to get rid of him. To say they wanted (or were begging for) change is obvious.
Wilson immediately gathered and empowered talented administrative minds — Henry Burchard Fine 1880, Luther Pfahler Eisenhart 1900, William Magie 1879, Cyrus Brackett — and began to introduce a semblance of an organization chart. There were for the first time departments, a refreshing change from nothing much: designated players to answer educational questions and craft knowledgeable answers. This was prelude to the firestorm-like 1905 introduction of 50 new young scholar-teachers to a staff of barely 100; calling them “preceptors” and coordinating their influx with the soon-beloved preceptorials was something of a cover for conducting a revolution from the bottom of the faculty ranks, changing not only the classroom paradigm but quickly the quality of the students caught in the onslaught. The preceptors would go on to be a prime influence in teaching and scholarship for 40 years. New prime academic space began to appear — Palmer Lab and Guyot for the ascendent sciences, and McCosh, explicitly designed for the precepts central to the new course of study.
Wilson challenged the primacy of the clubs, and in unsuccessfully doing so raised the nagging issues of undergrad living space and student dining to an unignorable level. But gradually, his increasingly shrill battle with West over the location of the proposed Graduate College took over the landscape — literally — and this conflict distracted from the important idea that the residential graduate space was in itself just as revolutionary as the precept. Wilson’s terse exit in 1910 to New Jersey and global glory (for those who regard those as separable) left piles of projects and aspirations unfinished.
It took the trustees 15 months to recover and to figure out a way through the two now-pitched camps of Wilson and West supporters, during which Ralph Adams Cram’s Grad College took shape beyond the golf course while just about everything else moldered. John Grier Hibben 1882 *1893 was the decision, a professor of philosophy, psychology, and the Bible who was also an ordained minister, the last to become president. From the West camp but convinced that the only possible success lay in healing wounds, he at least got the factions talking while adding dorms to boost community and the real game-changer, Madison Hall, whose dining/social quality for underclassmen filled a huge vacuum.
Two dramatic external events drove his next changes — World War I allowed Hibben to stand up as activist in support of the very successful war effort on campus, although 155 Princetonians perished in the conflagration. (Here he also made his first significant public error, banning pacifist Norman Thomas 1905; he corrected that later.) Then, in the aftermath of the first Reunions memorial service in 1919, the Dickinson fire that destroyed the Marquand Chapel created the opportunity for the University Chapel, a place where the full student body — or the growing alumni body at Reunions — could assemble in a sacred consideration of their purpose. So beginning in 1928, the Service of Remembrance became a primary role of the great space; Hibben had also created Alumni Day in coordination with the Graduate Council in 1915, and the Service moved there from the overburdened Reunions calendar in 1970.
Professor Eisenhart’s effort over decades to fulfill the promise of Wilson’s departmental and teaching reforms came to fruition in the Four Course Plan in 1924, with each undergraduate now essentially doing “honors” work. This filtered out many of the sluggards missed earlier by the precepts and drove up use of academic facilities by orders of magnitude. (Another two mistakes by Hibben: not immediately replacing the inundated Pyne Library; and settling for a new selective admission office that refused Black people and marginalized Jews.) The resulting senior thesis became as much a hallmark — and badge of honor — as any element of Princeton beside “Old Nassau.” While the Graduate School expanded and West was carefully reined in by the trustees under Hibben, the faculty also was strengthened by the new Committee of Three (which continues in a modified form today) ensuring quality and consistency in appointments. Three new schools were begun: Engineering, Architecture, and Public and International Affairs, the first of its kind anywhere and love child of the diehard Wilsonians still carrying his banner following his 1924 death.
As a group of dorms and classroom buildings opened in the late 1920s to accommodate the expanded size and operations, the trustees made perhaps their most fateful decision since they hired Wilson and then Hibben: They essentially turned their finance committee over to Dean Mathey 1912, a young go-getter who liquidated their stock portfolio prior to the 1929 crash, then enabled them to make money on investments every year but one through the Depression.
Perhaps the most amazing educational developments over the 30 years took place under Fine and Oswald Veblen in mathematics, and Magie in physics as they assembled in Palmer Lab world class teachers in Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, Albert Einstein, and as important, in 1930 the Institute for Advanced Study itself, which moved next door and firmly established Princeton as the world center of theoretical math and physics. And so it was that Princeton University, which had no math department in 1902, opened the spiffy new Fine Hall (according to the Faculty Song, “a palace just for math where you can even take a bath”) in 1932 as the best on Earth. Of course over that time, the students, faculty, program of instruction, administration, government relations, trustees, and sites involved were unrecognizable. The campus alone had more than doubled in size.
Hibben retired after 20 years in 1932; ironically, the president who had enraged the students by banning cars from campus in 1927 (after five student deaths) was killed with his wife in a car accident in May 1933. The Reunions Service of Remembrance in his Chapel that June was 14 years following his sermon at its first predecessor; the alumni meeting the same day was an homage to him and his wife Jenny. Dodds, his successor, took office the day following Commencement; until then, he had been the first dean of the School of Public and International Affairs, a vision of Wilson and achievement of Hibben unimagined anywhere in 1902.
Dei sub numine viget.
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