"It doesn't matter what you study, so long as you hate it!"
With this parting advice to the younger generation, Dr. George Barton Cutten, a Terrible Tempered Mr. Bangs among U.S. educators, last week announced he will retire in August after 20 years as president of Colgate.
Dr. Cutten has always loved discipline and self-denial. (Himself a rugged example to his students, he has never in his life worn an overcoat, at 67 still braves the bitterest weather in his indoor clothes.) Also on occasion he has denounced doctors, philanthropists, relief, Social Security, because they assist in the "suicide of civilization" by coddling the unfit. Of the Declaration of Independence theory that "all men are created equal," Dr. Cutten humphs: "If it were true, there could never be a winner in a foot race."
The son of a Nova Scotia sea captain, George Cutten was a reporter, appletree seller, pipe fitter, football coach and Baptist minister before he became a college president. When he was 18, his uncle locked him in a room and refused to let him out until he would agree to go to college. George finally decided to go to play football. At Acadia College and at Yale he was a star center, worked his way by preaching at nearby churches, He got a divinity degree and Ph.D. in psychology, writing his thesis on The Psychology of Alcoholism, which fortified him for a lifelong avocation as a Prohibitionist.
Arriving at Colgate after twelve years as president of Acadia College, Dr. Cutten found an accumulated deficit of $700,000 and proceeded to make academic history by clearing a surplus for his college every year for 17 successive years. He doubled Colgate's faculty, plant and total assets (now $9,961,054), brought in able young teachers, hired a landscape architect to beautify the campus, made the most of the prestige won for his college by its great football teams. He also introduced in 1928 the famed Colgate Plan, since copied by many other colleges. Similar to the Chicago Plan, it gives freshmen broad survey courses of fields such as physical sciences, philosophy, fine arts, provides all students with preceptors and tutors for individual instruction.
Dr. Cutten believes that college graduates should marry early and have plenty of children. He has three himself. No crony of his faculty or students (says he: "A college president has no friends"), he likes to fish and swap yarns with Yale's Professor Emeritus Billy Phelps. His prime hobby is collecting antique American silver spoons, of which he now has the finest collection in the U.S. At Colgate he often retires to his workshop to hammer spoons himself.