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Mr. Angell's very successful social personality, which has done much to smooth his long academic route and manifests itself at once in the friendly twinkle of his eye, emerged shortly after the Chinese interlude. At the University of Michigan, "Jim" Angell learned to strike a discreet mean between the propriety expected of the president's son, the humanity expected of a normal undergraduate. He became a Phi Beta Kappa and a Delta Kappa Epsilon almost simultaneously. He shortstopped for the baseball team and won the University and State tennis championships. He played a clarinet in the University band and fell in love with (and later married) Student Marion Isabel Watrous of Des Moines, Iowa. By the time President McKinley borrowed Michigan's president to be his Minister to Turkey, Son James Rowland was already an up-&-coming psychologist at Chicago, starting the career that was to lead him to one of the half-dozen great academic seats of the nation.
Money— The task of a university president is largely one of husbandry. The faculty supervises the breeding of strong academic stock. Rich friends and alumni see that stock is materially nourished. The president, however, must exercise constant broad vigilance lest the flock's young and the flock's runts be driven from the trough and starve. Surveying James Rowland Angell's 15 years in the President's office in Woodbridge Hall, the most acquisitive Yale alumnus cannot quibble at the tremendous wealth that has fallen to Yale. Since taking office. President Angell has doubled ($3,098,000 to $6,900,000) the amount annually expended for maintenance and instruction. He has trebled ($35,000,000 to $100,000,000) the value of the University's plant. He has quadrupled ($25,000,000 to $95,000,000) its endowment. Nevertheless, by the uniformity rather than the magnitude of their growth do Yale College and the Yale graduate schools testify to the spectacular pedagogical husbandry of President Angell.
Men. The man under whom Yale has undergone its greatest material changes takes no special credit for them, modestly insists that he was simply sitting in Woodbridge Hall when the money rolled in. It is rather by the men who have surrounded him and their strictly educative works during this exciting period that James Rowland Angell would like to be judged.
Many an important pedagogical name has arisen at Yale during his regime: Economist Edgar Stephenson Furniss, hard-driving Dean of Yale's Graduate School; Economist James Harvey Rogers; Lawyer Walton Hamilton; Historian Michael Ivanovich Rostovtzeff; Geologist Charles Hyde Warren.
But it is a tribute to President Angell's co-operative ability that most of the prominent men in the New Yale are legacies from the Hadley administration. President Angell's moneyman is canny, thin-lipped George Parmly Day, one-time Manhattan stockbroker, Treasurer of the University since 1910. He founded the University Press, sponsored the Yale Review and in 1927 set an all-time record for academic high finance by striking 22,000 graduates for $20,993,000.