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To Yale in 1921, however, James Rowland Angell was, as in a measure he still remains, an unknown indeed. Faculty scientists heard that he had been a psychologist, pupil of John Dewey at Michigan, student of William James and Josiah Royce at Harvard, one of the first of the bright young men who went to Germany to explore what was, at the century's turn, an exciting new field of learning. Administrative officers of the University knew that President-elect Angell had long since given up pure scholarship to become faculty dean and acting president of the University of Chicago, chairman of the Na tional Research Council after the War, then President of Carnegie Corporation. Only those grown very old in the service of Yale and Education were aware that James Rowland Angell was the grandson of one college president, Brown's Alexis Caswell (1868-72), and the son of an even more celebrated journalist, diplomat and pedagog, Dr. James Burrill Angell, for 38 years President of the University of Michigan.
Breeze— "Mr. James Rowland Angell," said the Harvard Alumni Review of sister Yale's new President, ''comes like a breeze from somewhere outside New England." This was only technically true. For although James Rowland Angell matured on the campus of Chicago and was raised on the campus of Michigan, he was born on the campus of Vermont when his father, having edited the Providence, R. I. Journal during the Civil War and taught a spell at Brown, briefly took over the sickly State University at Burlington. James Rowland Angell does not like to have it forgotten that he is descended from nine generations of Rhode Islanders and he en joys recalling that since the old Angell farm lies at the bottom of Providence's reservoir, the citizens to this day drink water filtered through his ancestors' bones. But the Harvard Alumni Review made no mistake in its simile. Like a breeze, Angell had in his 53 years moved freely far & wide. His horizon had always been broader than the campus at Burlington, Ann Arbor or Chicago. It has consistently remained broader than the campus at New Haven.
Significantly, President Angell recalls more vividly than any other period of his life the year, when he was 11, spent with his parents in Peiping. President Hayes had made his father Minister to China. The sights and sounds of the legation compound, the stillness of the Orient under snow, the pony the British Minister gave him, the hard-packed clay roads in summer, the incredible remoteness of the place and the kindliness and decorum of the Chinese are memories which return to President Angell with infinitely more clarity than the last meeting of the Yale Corporation.