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When President Angell went to Yale, the institution was a university largely by courtesy. The Medical School was almost literally a shack. Pathologist Milton Charles ("Nitzy") Winternitz became Dean of the Medical School in 1920. Encouraged by the new President, financed by Rockefeller and University money, he boosted the school in a decade to one of the nation's finest.
Launched by Dean Winternitz in 1923 was the graduate School of Nursing, first and most famed in the U. S.
One of Yale's most celebrated pre-War graduates was aware of the Law School only because one of its students was on his water polo team. Under Deans Thomas Walter Swan (1916-27) and Robert Maynard Hutchins (1927-30), the Yale Law School enjoyed its Angellic renaissance. Then Milton Winternitz and Robert Hutchins collaborated on the Institute of Human Relations, dedicated ambitiously to the general study of human behavior, a unique co-operative research centre that unites the best of Yale's postgraduate brains.
Under Dean Everett Victor Meeks, the School of Fine Arts began winning the Prix de Rome with an almost monotonous regularity.
To President Angell, this is the growth he calls "dramatic." It is not without significance that Yale College, the undergraduate school, got its turn at the trough last. One reason is that the College itself, largely home-ruled, resisted change. Another is that James Angell is not deeply impressed by Yale College either as a parcel of ancient traditions or as a seat of learning. Even now his eye wanders when visitors babble about the almost flagrant picturesqueness of the acres of neo-Gothic and neo-Colonial stone and brick with which some $60,000,000 of Edward Stephen Harkness' and the late John William Sterling's money has entirely redecorated the city of New Haven. If anyone typifies the elegance of the nine undergraduate colleges' 28 squash courts, the urbanity of their comfortable common rooms, the easy-going new grace they bring to undergraduate life, it is Provost Charles Seymour, a highly civilized man who edited Colonel Edward M. House's papers, is the master of swank Berkely and looks like suave Cinemactor Frank Morgan. Even so lively an enthusiast for the College Plan as Provost Seymour admits that so far the changes have been residential rather than tutorial. But President Angell definitely believes that the Yale class of 1936 is four or five years further toward informed maturity than his Michigan class of 1890, though he concedes that the phenomenon of youthful gravity is national, attributable largely to the cares of the depression.
President. An indication of the loneliness of his office rather than any want of humanity on his part is the fact that President Angell will next year reach retirement age (68) without having acquired a nickname at Yale. Many an undergraduate does not recognize him as he plays on the University golf course. At his Hillhouse Street home he smokes, drinks and entertains sparingly. His second wife, once Mrs. Katharine Cramer Woodman of Ardmore, Pa., came to the campus in 1932, already outshines her husband as a New Haven character. Last year a merry undergraduate sat down to chat with her at a fraternity dance, inadvertently dozed off. Into his hatband she inserted her card, slyly inscribed: ''Sorry to find you out."