Education: Keller's Last Class

A barrel-chested, wing-collared young Yale instructor glared sternly at his pupils and in a voice that rang like an anvil began to lecture to his first class. He was William Graham Sumner. "He broke upon us," said a pupil, "like a cold spring in the desert." For 37 years Yale students were stimulated by that cold spring. When Sumner retired in 1909, an equally remarkable teacher took his chair. Last week Sumner's barrel-chested, stern-eyed successor, Professor Albert Galloway Keller, faced his last class.

U.S. education has known no other such team as tough-minded old Professor Sumner, father of modern U.S. social science,...

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