(5 of 6)
The final measure of a college president is not so much what he does as what he thinks and how he says it. In President Angell, Yale and the U.S. academic world have a highly articulate moral spokesman. Last November at the inauguration of his protege Alan Valentine as President of the University of Rochester, he delivered himself of a passionate statement of his idea of a university:
"The university is dedicated to the discovery, protection and dissemination of truth. As such, it has been subject to attack time immemorial from every agency that fears new truth, or that arrogates to itself the exclusive possession of particular areas of truth. In one generation this attack has come from organized religion, in another from vested business interests, and in yet another from political forces that cannot, or will not, brook the light of disinterested investigation and discussion."
President Angell does not have to look far into the past to find that the liberal institution of private education is one of the first targets of dictatorship or collectivism. As he sees it, the current threat to private education in the U. S. is punitive taxation of the rich. And who soaks the rich, soaks Yale and him. Particularly is President Angell disturbed at the cessation of the steady flow of small legacies on which in the past Yale could annually rely to balance its budget. President Angell knows that nowadays testators, foreseeing high inheritance taxes on their estates, have adopted the practice of earmarking for the Government what they originally intended to leave their university. All such evidence of the invasion of the State into the realm of private learning, President Angell views with grave alarm.
When James Burrill Angell went to Michigan in 1871, his most heart-breaking task was to try to persuade the State Government to take an interest, if only financial, in its university. So radically has the tide changed that his son's chief crusade is to keep the State as far away from Yale as possible. In his 1934 annual report he best stated his current concern by declaring:
"A complete reorganization of education in the U. S., with a shift in its objectives and a complete change of its center of gravity, may, as some persons believe, be highly desirable; but to bring this about by indirection and more or less unintentionally as a result of a panic-stricken effort to mitigate through injudicious taxation the effects of a transient economic crisis, or as the result of a merely emotional assault upon the results of thrift and industry, would be a sorry product of our democratic society, and one ruinous to some of the highest values that have been built up in our century and a half of national life."