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President Thornwell Jacobs has striven earnestly and unceasingly to put Atlanta's Oglethorpe University on the map ever since he revived it in 1915 from the ashes of an older college destroyed by the Civil War (TIME, August 6). Last week he got its name and his picture in many a U. S. newspaper by scoring a novel, pre-season beat in the annual kudos competition. When Atlantans met to dedicate a $100,000 gift of 400 acres and lake from Oglethorpe's prime benefactor, William Randolph Hearst, President Jacobs crowed that Oglethorpe was about to become the first men's college ever to devote its commencement exclusively to women. Next night, before an actual audience of 7,500 and a potential one of several millions represented by a battery of press cameras and a Hearst Metrotone newsreel outfit, twelve distinguished women marched out to kneel before President, deans, trustees (an old Oglethorpe custom) and receive their hoods & degrees. They were: Vice President Helen Rogers Reid of the New York Herald Tribune (LL.D.), Representative-at-Large Caroline Goodwin O'Day of New York (LL.D.), Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Josephine Aspinwall Roche (Doctor of Commercial Science), Astronomer Annie Jump Cannon of Harvard (Sc.D.), Dean Clara Mildred Thompson of Vassar (LL.D.), Anatomist Florence Rena Sabin (Sc.D.) and Mrs. George Gould, Mrs. Sidney Lanier Jr., State Archivist Ruth Blair of Georgia, Founder Martha McChesney Berry of Georgia's Berry Schools and Aviatrix Amelia Earhart, all of whom received red, white & blue hoods with the Jacobs-invented degree of Doctor of Public Service. To receive a Doctorate of Letters, Pulitzer Prizewoman Caroline Miller (Lamb in His Bosom) knelt before William Randolph Hearst Jr., acting as proxy for his trustee father.
At Liberty, Mo. last week William Jewell College (enrolment: 321) welcomed back a famed former student. He left it a quarter-century ago after an inconspicuous campus career in which he had earned his way by organ-playing, had been too poor to pay a $50 fraternity initiation fee. He returned in triumph. The local chapter of Phi Gamma Delta belatedly initiated him into the brotherhood of the late Calvin Coolidge. He delivered the commencement address. Finally, William Jewell bestowed on him its degree of Doctor of Laws. Everyone knew, that his real name was Marion Sayle Taylor, but throughout these ceremonies he was consistently referred to by the name under which his sexy heart-to-hearts have won him vast radio fame: THE VOICE OF EXPERIENCE.
Last week Colorado State School of Mines and Drake University respectively made Citizen Herbert Hoover a Doctor of Engineering and Doctor of Laws. Other kudos, given up to this week:
College of Charleston (Charleston, S. C.)
Bernard Marines Baruch ....................................................LL.D.
Ambassador Robert Worth Bingham. ................................LL.D.
President-Elect Isaiah Bowman of
Johns Hopkins University ..................................................LL.D.
President John Stewart Bryan of the
College of William and Mary ...............................................LL.D.
U. S. Senator James Francis Byrnes of
South Carolina ......................................................................LL.D.
President James Bryant Conant of