(See front cover)
As one more commencement time came to the colleges and universities of the land last week, one of the grand old men of U. S. pedagogy lay dying of cerebral arteriosclerosis, diabetes, and heart disease, in a sickroom close by the campus of the university which he began building 40 years ago to be one of the country's greatest—Stanford of California.
Long an invalid, retired in 1916 from his 22-year presidency and three-year chancellorship, 80-year-old Dr. David Starr Jordan, chancellor emeritus, had no active part in Stanford's latter-day development. Yet when the Stanford trustees meet this week, they and Stanford's Grand Old Man will all know that the important business before the meeting, a major milestone in Stanford's history, not only rests upon the foundations of Stanford as Dr. Jordan built it but derives from a conception of Stanford's destiny which Dr. Jordan long ago passed on to his successors for execution.
The immediate question before the trustees is whether Stanford's absentee president, Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur. U. S. Secretary of the Interior, may continue to stay away during the remainder of President Herbert Hoover's term without forfeiting his Palo Alto position. The answer to that question will determine when Stanford will do the thing so long ago proposed by Dr. Jordan, planned and already begun by Dr. Wilbur: Abolish freshman and sophomore years, become a graduate-grade university like Johns Hopkins, now unique in the U. S.
Should Secretary Wilbur return to Palo Alto when his leave of absence expires next September, this plan may be completed within three years. Otherwise it is likely to remain in abeyance until he returns, as stipulated by the trustees when he left. Meanwhile, Stanford buzzes secretly but excitedly, torn by fierce controversy. The tall, once robust chancellor hears on his death bed the names of the chief protagonists—Herbert Hoover, Secretary Wilbur, Acting President Robert Eckles Swain—all of them his students once. If he was sorry not to live to see them make Stanford what he had dreamed it, he had other great memories to fall back on. His life at Stanford was only one of three lives that he had lived.
Children of California. Native of Gainesville, N. Y., Cornell graduate (1872), robustious baseball player (he broke his nose at it), studious teacher of Zoology, David Starr Jordan became president in 1885 of Indiana University at Bloomington, Ind. Aged 34, he was then Youngest U. S. College President. He began at once to reorganize his inland, politically controlled institution, to cajole dollars from lackadaisical Indiana legislators. He put in practice a then radical notion: to mold education to the student rather than to force the student into a tight educational jacket.