Rally ’Round the Cannon: Mind the Gap

Winning takes talent, to repeat takes character. — John Wooden

Halfway through the monumental eight hours of HBO’s John Adams, wherein David McCullough takes a stab at surpassing his own epic biography and Paul Giamatti takes a stab at outglowering George C. Scott in Patton, comes the moment of the very first U.S. presidential inauguration at Federal Hall in New York. In the midst of the significant hubbub, it dawns on those in the party (Adams has been elected vice president) that nobody knows how to address Gen. George Washington in this new role, and various cringeworthy suggestions are made and discarded while David Morse, who cleverly has decided to play the general as a guileless, kindly person overflowing with good sense, watches the verbal wreckage (“Excellency,” “Lordship,” you know the drill) with growing exasperation and disbelief. When “Mr. President” is stumbled upon, it’s instantly clear that this is the way to go. Washington’s eyes reflect profound relief, and the feeling persists that even the earnest Americans who created this unprecedented experiment in democratic republicanism had only a vague realization of the profound steps they had taken. The idea is clear: The presidency is supposed to entail a normal citizen doing the top job because in the Constitution it says somebody’s gotta do it. There are folks in all three branches of government, up through the present day, who might wish to take note. 

Presidencies of all sorts in this country are inevitably colored by such history and symbology, college presidencies not only included but perhaps even intensely colored. The recent turmoil among Ivy presidents offers a glimpse of both the skills for which they are chosen and other skills which may be as important but have become obscured along the way, whether in the hiring process, the management development of candidates in current academia, or even the self-selection of those willing to put up with the various impediments of college administration. While it’s not our job here to dissect the current state of those particular presidencies, there are, as usual, some valuable lessons to be learned from prior adventures in presidency that might be valuably applied to the present day, and hopefully tomorrow.

For starters, Princeton has had a remarkable run of capable and, by any practical measure, successful presidencies. From the beginning of the 20th century, admired and accomplished members of the faculty — all but one alumni, and all but one with a campus track record of more than 15 years — have stepped up to carry the “university” torch lit by the peripatetic Scot Rev. James McCosh following the Civil War from 1868-88, then given substance beginning by his student Woodrow Wilson 1879 from 1902-10. In a remarkably consistent way, the ensuing 122 years have advanced Princeton’s reputation in the global marketplace, a period lengthy enough to infer this was not due solely to clever gargoyles or a hard-to-forget color palette. You might suspect that John Wooden’s reflection on character (see above) has been in play. Indeed, you might guess that to be a major consideration among the trustees who, now and again, need to choose a new president to forge ahead in that tradition, accomplishing the change that is the lifeblood of a university in a way that transforms uncertainty and inertia into vibrant growth. 

The Rev. James McCosh

John White Alexander, American, 1856–1915, James McCosh (1811–1894), President (1868–88), 1886; Oil on canvas 89.2 x 123 cm (35 1/8 x 48 7/16 in.) frame: 124.5 x 157.5 cm (49 x 62 in.), Princeton University, gift of alumni

So today we’ll look at the last time that didn’t work. The quants out there (you know who you are) may have noticed a 14-year gap in the brief narrative above, between McCosh’s explosive rethinking and Wilson’s strategic restructuring. It was really more a chasm than a gap. It was the next-to-last gasp of the Presbyterian hierarchy that had sown the seeds of its own destruction by bringing McCosh, a big, popular name player, across from Europe and assuming (although he was both), he would be more a minister and less a serious European academic in administering the college. This turned out to be a colossal mistake, and 10 years into his tenure, McCosh was standing toe-to-toe with president Charles Eliot of Harvard and publicly arguing the virtues of academic strategy and adolescent psychology, with nary a pater noster in sight.

As dramatically effective as McCosh was, we might forget the fact he was the trustees’ second choice in 1868. The first, as we saw earlier, was the Rev. William Henry Green, a superb teacher at the Princeton Theological Seminary who was related to rich board member John C. Green. The trustees’ fascination with the conservative seminary’s qualities was curious given its adventures 50 years prior with president Ashbel Green 1783, who almost killed his own college via neglect while he supported the new religious school. But the clerics who still made up the board majority didn’t see it that way, and ended up stumbling into the salvation of McCosh, virtually by dumb luck. 

So following 20 years of growth, optimism, and ascendence under McCosh, the trustees in 1888 would have learned, right? Nope. There was, it seems, a conservative ordained theologian professorializing at the conservative seminary who was a great after-dinner speaker and humorist, and so had gotten a spot teaching ethics at the college as well (he had a fondness for multiple income streams). His principal claim to fame was having prosecuted and lost the heresy trial of one of the brilliant liberal Presbyterian theologians in Chicago. (Meanwhile, McCosh, you recall, was a supporter of Darwin). The prosecutor’s name was Francis Landey Patton, he habitually wore his minister’s cassock with all the trimmings, and he had rarely run anything more complex than the budget of a Brooklyn church. The trustees, still mired in their sectarianism, offered him the presidency. Having either fewer scruples or less wisdom than his analog, the Rev. Green, Patton accepted.

The students loved him. His easy ethics course was dependably the most popular on campus. He was a big booster of the football team. The clubs thrived. He was active with the Philadelphian Society, the major student Christian group. The lads could wander by his office in Prospect and pour out their “problems,” for which he was unfailingly sympathetic. One reason for that was he had no staff to impede them (1,000 students and faculty) — he finally hired an assistant/secretary after seven years in the job. He did preside over significant faculty hiring, including Wilson, Henry Burchard Fine 1880, and Andrew Fleming West 1874 from among McCosh’s alumni, but saw them principally at building dedications and receptions. The alumni thought he was great, willing to travel around the country and drum up enthusiasm, always with a smile and a story. But his involvement with substance was ephemeral. He implemented McCosh’s academic elective changes his first year, then impeded any further change; he refused to structure the faculty as it doubled in size, leading to endless academic overlap and confusion. As the board raised the money and built the new campus, he showed up and spoke movingly at the dedication. 

Trustee Moses Taylor Pyne 1877 and Professor West essentially designed the entire Sesquicentennial celebration and pushed through the simultaneous name change to Princeton University that McCosh years before had sought. There were dozens of students taking graduate courses on campus, but Patton ignored calls for an organized graduate school (West’s baby) or law school (Wilson’s). Eventually, the trustees and faculty couldn’t stand the ennui, and in 1900 the Graduate School was formally created, with West as the dean, appointed by and reporting to the trustees, not Patton. In case this beginning of the end wasn’t clear, the three senior faculty who had been reporting academic matters to the trustees — Wilson, Fine, and physicist Cyrus Fogg Brackett — were in frustration named an official committee, reporting to trustees Grover Cleveland and Simon McPherson 1874, the headmaster of Lawrenceville, and President Patton was left with no direct academic input to the board, as nuts as that may sound. He would have left then and there, but it took a while to negotiate a severance package that would make him whole for both his professor and president’s salaries for what he assumed should have been his 20-year tenure akin to McCosh’s (remember the multiple income streams?). When they finally got his signature, the trustees were so frustrated they dumped him and elected Wilson at the same 1902 meeting, although they had to suspend their own rules to do it. 

Wilson’s ensuing eight years were a whirlwind of change and planning to turn Princeton into an academic power, with departmental standards, preceptors and postgraduate courses to challenge the students, and residential plans to challenge the clubs. He overplayed his hand and left in a blaze of glory in 1910, but the corporate ascendence we noted above had already begun, and continues today.

Of course, when the students of the 1890s later built a new dorm for the University, they named it for Patton, their buddy. And after his ouster, he promptly walked across the street to become the first “president” of the Princeton Seminary, where his courses remained beloved, his reverend’s getup was a hit, and no one cared much who reported to whom. He and all the income streams retired in 1913 back to his home in Bermuda and he is comfortably buried there, neither in the Princeton presidents’ plot nor the seminary presidents’ plot of Princeton Cemetery. The symbolism and practical wisdom from his era flows down the page and onto the floor in its peculiarity and good-natured haze. Our modern trustees may not consciously study his record anymore, but their search committee would certainly recognize him if they met him, then hopefully chuckle and run the other way.