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This week Secretary Wilbur begins a tour of college commencements, four addresses in a fortnight. Last fortnight he was in Manhattan at the meeting of the Council on Radio in Education (TIME, June 1). As Secretary of the Interior and head of the U. S. Department of Education he is a very busy man. The anti-Hoover, anti-Wilbur faction of Stanford's alumni feel that their university suffers while Dr. Swain is theoretically in charge, but actually working under remote control.
Last October the trustees extended Dr. Wilbur's leave of absence for a year but they withdrew his salary—$22.000 annually. Last fortnight when the meeting of trustees was called, the San Francisco Examiner reported that an emissary from President Hoover had come with the request that Dr. Wilbur's leave be extended again. This was ''understood to be a virtual ultimatum." Said the Examiner: "There is dissension among the Stanford trustees, it became known. . . . But, it was said, a majority of the board will accede to the request. . . ."
Significance. The same alumni who are saying come-back-now-or-get-out to President Wilbur, oppose the Jordan-Wilbur plan for changing the college. They contend that Stanford's prestige will be lowered if it is turned into an institution for selected graduate students only. They say a man gives his allegiance not to a graduate school such as Johns Hopkins or Heidelberg but to the college of his early years. Stanford may lose financial, even sentimental support from its alumni. Also they say, its athletic teams will gradually lose their national eminence (see p. 28).
Proponents of the plan point out that, since teaching is a university's prime function, intellectual prestige is more desirable than athletic. It is argued that not the A. B. degree, obtainable almost by mail nowadays, but its successors should be emphasized; California has many a junior college: let these take care of the first two years; let Stanford lavish its resources upon making finer products for an increasingly exacting world. In the words of Grand Old Man Jordan: ''A university should be a place for research and independent thinking, and for this reason alone the abolition of the lower division is inevitable. The lower division was created because the high schools, at the time Stanford was founded, did not give sufficient training. Now they do so. ...
"The whole of your life must be spent in your own company and only the educated man is good company for himself. What a college education is worth depends entirely upon the man who has it. There is no use loading a $10,000 education on a 50¢ boy."