Kudos

Every year at Commencement time most U. S. colleges give kudos. Last week the following colleges gave the following degrees to, among many others, these:

Colgate University (Hamilton, N. Y.)

Walter Sherman Gifiord, President of American Telephone & Telegraph Co LL.D.

Fletcher Sims Brockman, Y.M.C.A. worker LL.D.

Borden Smith Veeder, physician D.Sc.

College of Mount St. Joseph (Cincinnati, Ohio)

Willa Gather (Death Comes to the Archbishop) Litt.D.

Columbia University

Vincent Massey, Canadian Minister to U. S LL.D.

Carlos Guillermo Davila, Chilean Ambassador to U. S LL.D.

George Arthur Plimpton, publisher (Ginn & Co.) Litt.D.

William Hallock Park, physician (bacteriology, hygiene) D.Sc.

George Emerson Brewer, surgeon D.Sc.

Augustus Trowbridge, physicist D.Sc.

De Pauw University (Greencastle, Ind.)

George Reeves Throop, Chancellor of Washington University (St. Louis) LL.D.

Fordham University

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Governor of New York. LL.D.

Lady Margaret Armstrong, wife of British Consul in New York LL.D.

Lafayette College (Easton, Pa.)

Robert Maynard Hutchins, '30, President-Elect, University of Chicago. LL.D.

Andrew Wilkins Wilson, Jr., founder of Kiskiminetas School LL.D.

Marquette University (Milwaukee, Wis.)

Theodore F. MacManus, Advertising Man LH.D.

William James Mayo, Surgeon SC.D.

Miami University (Oxford, Ohio)

Mark Francis, famed veterinarian, native of Shandon, Ohio LL.D.

Edward Francis, A.M.A. gold medal winner, 1928 discoverer of disease Tularemia, native of Shandon, Ohio LL.D.

New York University

Elihu Root D. Civil Law

Henry Lewis Stimson LL.D.

Robert Andrews Millikan (cosmic rays). D.Sc.

James H. McGraw, publisher D.C.S.

Frank Parker Day, President of Union College Litt.D.

Rutgers University

Morgan Foster Larson, Governor of New Jersey LL.D.

Swarthmore College

Lou Henry Hoover Litt.D.

Syracuse University

Alanson Bigelow Houghton LL.D.

Friederich Wilhelm von Prittwitz und Gaffron, German Ambassador to the U. S. LL.D.

Etlery Sedgwick (Atlantic Monthly) LH.D.

Frederick Stuart Greene, civil engineer E.D.

William Butterworth, manufacturer D. Bus Adm

Tufts College (Medford, Mass.)

Frank Gilman Allen, leather manufacturer, Lieut. Gov. of Massachusetts (1925-28) LL.D.

Herbert Mayhew Lord, onetime Director of the Bureau of the Budget LL.D.

Westminster College (Fulton, Mo.)

Theodore Hazeltine Price (Commerce and Finance) LL.D.

No More Charades

(See front cover)

Colleges and universities give honorary degrees to Eminent Persons for standard reasons:

1) To encourage, or pay for, endowment donations (private institutions).

2) To obtain good Commencement orators (small private institutions).

3) To color and intensify Commencement atmosphere (large private institutions).

4) To honor themselves in honoring (set sentiment of all bestowal speeches). Unmentionable concomitant: Publicity.

5). Political pull (State-supported universities).

6) Genuine, unanimous admiration for the recipient.

Eye the list (see p. 51) of U. S. colleges and universities, and individuals upon whom they this year bestow kudos. The name of one great university is missing. It is missing every year. Cornell University gives no honorary degrees.

Cornell has honored only two men-- the late Andrew Dickson White and David Starr Jordan. An unbaked tradition says that a cause for Cornell's not giving honorary degrees is the outcry that arose--in and out of Cornell but especially in--over Dr. David Starr Jordan's unflinching pacifism during the War. The fact is that Dr. Jordan, Cornell '72, was honored three decades before the War, in 1886, the same year as Andrew Dickson White, who helped Ezra Cornell found Cornell. Their university gave no honorary degrees between 1886 and the Jordan pacifism. Very early in its career Cornell University looked around and observed that giving honorary degrees was for the most part playing charades. Early in its career Cornell vowed: no more charades.

During the June week when the U. S. public is most college-conscious, Cornell stands unique in other respects besides kudos. On its hill at the tip of the biggest of western New York's Finger Lakes, it stands midway geographically, culturally, financially, between the allegedly "effete" private institutions of the East and the allegedly "crude"' State-supported institutions of the Midwest and West. Its students come from both sides of the Alleghenies. It is composed of colleges supported privately and by the State. It is a co-educational "man's college." It began with the soil and evolved an international tradition.

Like most of the State-supported universities, Cornell began with the Morrill Act of 1862, a Federal land-grant law which afforded sites to all States with gumption sufficient to erect their own places of higher education. The youngest member of the New York State Senate in 1864 was Andrew Dickson White, then 32. Among the elder Senators was a man whom Senator White described as "tall, spare and austere; with a kindly eye, saying little and that dryly. He did not appear unamiable but there seemed in him an aloofness; this was Ezra Cornell."

Ezra Cornell was the leading miller and mechanic of a hamlet called Ithaca on Lake Cayuga. He had little book-learning, much patience and a jaw which his six-inch beard could not hide. He was a Quaker. He had made a fortune (for those days) by his own industry and originality.

Frock-coated Ezra Cornell sat calmly while his small-bore colleagues called him "selfish" and much worse in New York's Senate for wanting to give a half-million dollars to build a college on land which the Federal Government would give away. Beside him sat his wife, and young Senator White. The latter was interested in education because he had some. He had attended Hobart College (Geneva, N. Y), been graduated from Yale, studied in Paris and Berlin. He had taught history at Michigan University. He had read and thought about the old English universities. His father had made money building railroads in the West.

Senator Cornell turned one day to Senator White and said: "I am not sure but that it would be a good thing for me to give the half a million to old Harvard College in Massachusetts to educate the descendants of the men who hanged my [Quaker] forefathers."

But "The Cornell Idea" prevailed. The first 412 Cornellians were scrambling around the unhewn Ithaca campus in the autumn of 1868.

Learned, eager Senator White gave $300,000 and undertook to be the first president. He and Ezra Cornell agreed that the starting point of a college in rural New York should be agriculture and that the curriculum should branch out later so that "any person can find instruction in any study." There is an inaccurate tradition that Cornell is chiefly an agricultural college. Founders Cornell & White integrated the State-support idea with their own gifts so that today the New York State College of Agriculture, the State College of Home Economics, and the State College of Veterinary Medicine are part of Cornell University. But only about one-fifth of the total enrolment are students at these colleges, where tuition is free to bona fide residents of the state of New York. The rest are in colleges of Arts & Sciences, Law. Engineering, Medicine, Architecture and a Graduate College.

Another provision upon which Co-founder Cornell insisted--one more cause of opposition in the "burnt-over district"* --was that the university should be a place "where persons of every religious denomination, or of no religious denomination, shall be eligible to attend." First-President White bore bravely into the teeth of booming gales of religion as well as pedantry to bring to Ithaca such outside figures as James Russell Lowell, Louis Agassiz, George William Curtis, Bayard Taylor, Theodore William Dwight, Goldwin Smith, as lecturers.

In 1879, having left his mark indelibly upon Cornell/-, President White went to Germany as U. S. Minister. In a like capacity he went to Russia in 1892. There began a tradition. Cornell's second president, Charles Kendall Adams, administered from 1885 to 1892. Then came Jacob Gould Schurman. In 1899, Dr. Schurman was chief of the first U. S. Commission to the Philippines. In 1912-13 he served as U. S. Minister to Greece and Montenegro. After resigning from Cornell in 1920, he was U. S. Ambassador to China. Now, since 1925, he has been a successor to Co-Founder White at Berlin.

Other international figures to which Cornell can point are:

Mario G. Menocal, '88, onetime (1913-21) President of Cuba. Sao-Ke Alfred Sze, '01, Chinese Ambassador to London.

The resignation of Dr. Schurman in 1920 left a hole for which the U. S. was full of willing pegs, including James Rowland Angell, now (since 1921) President of Yale, at that time Chairman of the National Research Council, recently resigned acting President of the University of Chicago. Great was Ithaca's surprise when the trustees went to the American Red Cross and elected its neat, lively, witty central committee chairman, Livingston Farrand, M. D. Worried investigators discovered that Dr. Farrand had been the Rockefeller Foundation's trusted choice to fight tuberculosis in France during the War; that the Rockefeller Foundation had found him in the presidency of the University of Colorado; that that institution had in turn found him editing the American Journal of Public Health, to which position he had risen from studies at Princeton ('88), College of Physicians & Surgeons ('91), Cambridge, Berlin, and 21 years of teaching at Columbia.

Historian, educator, philosopher, physician--such was the sequence of presidents at the university where Ezra Cornell wanted anyone taught anything. The growing pains of Cornell were severe, but in Dr. Farrand its maturity was achieved. He has, notably, a sense of humor. His 62nd birthday came last week. His thesis has always been "the healthy life," to such a degree that he presumed last autumn to tell his freshmen to get themselves to bed early, like he does (his porch light notwithstanding). Yet he shoves one cigaret (Camel) after another into the corner of a mouth always curved cheerfully. He continues the retentive husband of a lady (whose characteristics had no small amount to do with his presidency) who likes to ride, sing, joke, play the phonograph or radio with the Farrand children (now grown-up), and receive at table wonder-struck undergraduates (dull sticks excepted).

Himself the recipient of 13 honorary degrees, Cornell's present president-- whose brothers Wilson and Max are also pedagogs* passed the most pedagogical week of the U. S. calendar preparing no speeches in presentation of honorary degrees. Such was his and Cornell's position that they could devote full attention to news of Cornell's newest expansion, a Farrand expansion, a scientific expansion.

Cornell's current news is a new, tremendous Institute of Science, to cost nine millions. The general education board has already appropriated $1,500,000 contingent upon a similar fund being obtained by the university. The whole sum is to be raised in thirds. Alumni will be approached. Cornell's great medical centre in Manhattan is Morgan-Rockefeller-Baker financed. The new institute is going to be on Ezra Cornell's Ithacan eminence. That may encourage unprecedented donations from graduates.

* Upper New York was so called because of its susceptibility to sudden religious movements. Mormonism (Joseph Smith, Palmyra, N. Y., 1827) was but one of several sects that up-sprang there.

/-Cornell's colors are not, as commonly supposed, Red & White but Cornellian (Ezra Cornell) and White (A. D. White). Cornell undergraduates named White and worthy of nicknames from their fellows, usually get called "Andy"' after Andrew Dickson White. Example: Elwin Brooks ("Andy") White, Cornell '21, author of bright Page One of The New Yorker. weekly smart chart.

* Dr. Wilson Farrand, eldest, is Headmaster of Newark Academy, clerk and life trustee of Princeton University; Dr. Max Farrand, youngest, is Director of Research at the Henry Huntingdon Library. San Gabriel, Cal.