Among the first U. S. preparatory schools to divide its students into houses like those of Britain's public schools was Lawrenceville (New Jersey) which launched a "House Plan" in 1883 under its famed headmaster, James Cameron MacKenzie. So successful were the intimate residential houses that Lawrenceville sprouted from a small academy into one of the nation's most popular boarding schools, now educates some 550 boys from all over the U. S. Its atmosphere is sporty, informal, distinct from the inbred smallness of such schools as Groton and from the democratic bigness of Exeter and Andover. Last week at its 126th commencement, Lawrenceville heard good news. Capitalist Edward Stephen Harkness, ardent apostle of the House Plan who had given $26,000,000 to install it at Harvard and his alma mater Yale, had decided to make the House Plan's early home a laboratory for his second educational enthusiasm, the Conference Plan. Next year Lawrenceville, armed with a blank check signed Edward S. Harkness, will abandon classroom instruction, set an enlarged faculty to conversing helpfully with its students across polished conference tables.
Not the first but the most conscientious angel of U. S. education, shy, grey-haired, lean-faced Edward Stephen Harkness has given to schools and colleges almost half of the $100,000,000 which he has taken an earnest lifetime to distribute. Son and heir of Rockefeller Partner Stephen Harkness, he paid the nation's sixth highest income tax in 1926, that year inherited the estate of his mother, whose taxes ranked eighth, has since nursed both legacies dutifully. Determined to make philanthropy a life work, he installed himself in a homelike office on Manhattan's Madison Avenue. There a modest staff of five secretaries, nine clerks, under the stewardship of precise Malcolm Pratt Aldrich, Mr. Harkness' lawyer and Yale's 1922 football captain, suffice for the job of managing and distributing one of the nation's great fortunes. After routine begging letters have been weeded out, Mr. Harkness reads all his mail, has it shipped around after him whenever he leaves New York.
Unlike such elaborate public patrons as the Carnegies, Rockefellers and Rosenwalds, Edward S. Harkness has set up no foundation, never attaches his name to his benefactions.* When in 1930 he established a $10,000,000 fund to aid British charities he called it the "Pilgrim Trust." Best of all he likes to scatter his largesse in out-of-the-way places. He has given $500,000 to California's Save-the-Red-woods League, $2,500 to Mrs. Stanley Baldwin to buy anesthetics for maternity hospitals. He once persuaded Great Britain to run a smelly motor highway around Grantchester because that village had been the home of Poet Rupert Brooke. He has built two hospitals, Columbia University's $7,500,000 Medical Centre and a $600,000 dispensary for the employes of his family's Southern Pacific Railroad. Like many another philanthropist, he is often accused of giving to circumvent income taxes. Not from proud Edward S. Harkness but from his friends comes the obvious rejoinder that he gives away more of his income than the 15% on which the law allows gift exemptions.