(See front cover)
Golden mace aloft, Yale University's Provost Charles Seymour this week marched, between bristling rows of the Connecticut militia, through the leafy streets of New Haven to Yale's round-faced, granite Woolsey Hall. Behind him, in robes of green, brown and scarlet, gravely filed Yale's faculty, bound for the 235th annual commencement exercises of the University. To the families and friends of the graduates in their sombre caps & gowns, the occasion marked some 600 important personal milestones in some 600 young lives.
To the faculty, the exercises were scarcely less momentous. Since the Class of 1936 was the first to experience the full three years of the College Plan, it could be regarded as the first fruit of the New Yale. To the great and potent body of Yale alumni and to the world of U. S. Education, the New Haven ceremonies had an even wider significance. Having supervised a period of expansion the like of which he could not have dreamed of when he took office a decade and a half ago, James Rowland Angell, father of the New Yale, was beginning the penultimate year of his epic administration.
Unknowns— In 1921 Yale turned out with brass bands and welcoming streamers to greet its new President James Rowland Angell. It was a meeting of two unknown quantities. Of the two, Yale was by far the more perplexing. A hectic period of social and spiritual campus unrest, later identified as the Jazz Age, had just begun. And in the teeth of it, the nation's Second School had just undergone a sweeping reorganization at the hands of a committee of faculty and trustees headed by Publisher Henry Johnson Fisher of McCall's and the University's Secretary Anson Phelps Stokes. The reorganization plan unified by departments all instruction given in the hitherto strictly autonomous College, Sheffield Scientific School and graduate schools. It set up a Provost to conduct the faculty's business with the Administration, established a single board of admissions and a common freshman year, with a separate freshman faculty, for "Sheff" and "Ac." Simple and sensible though these reforms seemed to outsiders, they cut deep into Yale's vital fabric of traditions, left a mass of supersensitive and unsutured ganglions. At that point, Yale's Grand Old Man, Arthur Twining Hadley, resigned the Presidency, thus leaving Yale not only suffering from postoperative shock, but without an attendant.
When the Corporation announced that Yale's next President would be James Rowland Angell, Michigan '90, a large body of alumni, who felt that no one could cherish Good Old Yale but a Good Old Yaleman, were stricken with grief and shame. Few had the perspicacity to divine that now if ever was the time Yale needed the unemotional guidance of a man who, like a foreigner in the Orient, would not be judged too severely for short-cutting an unwieldy mass of custom and precedent. An Angell might march boldly in where an alumnus President would timidly fear to tread.