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So meticulous was his will that he specified even the balconies and kinds of doors which Girard College should have. Because he wished "to keep the tender minds of orphans . . . free from the excitements which clashing doctrines and sectarian controversies are so apt to produce," he enjoined that no ecclesiastic might teach at the college.
By Pennsylvania law an orphan is a fatherless child. By the terms of the Girard will, Philadelphia male orphans have precedence in entering the college, may be followed, in order, by orphans from Pennsylvania, New York, New Orleans. But so many orphans has Pennsylvania that no New York City or New Orleans boy has yet been able to attend Girard. There are now 1,667 boys in Girard. When each is graduated he will leave Girard with a practical education, three new suits, six shirts, six pairs of socks, one hat, three pairs of shoes, two neckties, four suits of underwear, two suits of pajamas, one raincoat, one overcoat, one suitcase, one trunk.
Chief Vollmer's Department
In Berkeley, Calif., where towers the great University of California, certain residents have sometimes said: "Crime is on the decrease. Well, here's to crime." Such frivolous toasts would not be proposed in August Vollmer's presence, but it is to him that should go credit for Berkeley's low percentage of crime. August Vollmer is Berkeley's Chief of Police. He has never been to college. Nevertheless, he was appointed, last week, Professor of Police Administration at the University of Chicago to which Yale's Law School Dean Robert Maynard Hutchins, 30, has just been elected President (TIME, May 6).
In Berkeley, people wondered if crime would now begin to increase. At the University of Chicago, "the entire resources of the University, not only in social sciences, but in the natural and physical sciences as well, including physics, chemistry, medicine, psychiatry and anthropology," waited to assist Chief Vollmer, whose new duties begin October i.
Professor Vollmer's department will study police administration in the U. S.
and Europe, formulate standards of police practice. His courses will be correlated to existing courses in psychology, criminology. Vollmer graduates who become policemen will be courteous, gentle, intelligent.— Vollmer graduates who become chiefs of police will be scientific. They will allow no punching in the basements of precinct headquarters, they will frown on "third degrees." Instead of third degrees they will use Professor Vollmer's famed "lying machine"—a combined stethoscope and sphygmanometer which records by the quivering of a malicious needle the pulse-acceleration, the delicate increase of blood pressure, usually attending an unpracticed lie.
Although less famed in the East than New York's Police Commissioner Grover Aloysius Whalen, Chief Vollmer in the West is considered "the greatest U. S.