"Chance" Out

The most stay-at-home Justice of the U. S. Supreme Court, 75-year-old Bachelor James Clark McReynolds, last week stirred from his Washington apartment to attend an alumni banquet at his alma mater, Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. What brought Alumnus McReynolds (Class of '82) and 500 other alumni back to Vanderbilt was a long-awaited, long-dreaded piece of news. At 77, their Chancellor James Hampton Kirkland, the Grand Old Man of Southern Education, was going to retire.

As tall, bald, stringy . as ever, the "Chance" seemed to many an alumnus no older. To Justice McReynolds he spryly observed: "I should be very glad if I could get on the same platform with you and run for President and Vice President. I have a suspicion that such a combination would be successful." But his voice cracked as he recited to his guests:

My boat is moored upon the strand, My face is to the sea. I hold the tiller in my hand And wait the tide that calls for me.

Next day the news overshadowed everything else at Vanderbilt's commencement exercises, even an address by the Bank of England's eminent Economist Sir Josiah Stamp, for not only had James Hampton Kirkland been the "Chance" longer than almost anyone could remember but his 44 years at Vanderbilt had spanned one of the most successful university presidencies in the U. S.

When James Hampton Kirkland of Spartanburg, S. C., eight years out of the University of Leipzig, took over Vanderbilt in 1893, it was chiefly because the bickering Methodist Episcopal bishops who ran it could agree on none but a dark horse candidate. Twenty years earlier Bishop Holland McTeyeire had extracted from his wife's cousin-in-law, "Commodore'' Cornelius Vanderbilt, a $500,000 endowment. An unexpectedly dark horse, Chancellor Kirkland insisted on appointing his own Board of Trust to manage it. When the Church refused to relinquish control, Chancellor Kirkland broke its grip in Tennessee's supreme court. Soon Vanderbilt's were the first Southern classrooms to hear about Evolution and modern geology. Armed with several millions more from the Vanderbilts and the General Education Board, Chancellor Kirkland replenished his faculty, secured in 1919 the General Education Board's then record single outlay ($4,000,000) to build a Medical School.

Chancellor Kirkland has always put Vanderbilt first (current endowment: $28,000,000). But more than any other Southern educator he helped to prime the flow of Northern money that has enriched such schools at Tulane, Atlanta and Tuskegee. And the voice of Southern education is the Association of Colleges & Secondary Schools of Southern States which he founded in 1895 to step up admission requirements, arrange transfers, regulate athletic competition.

Chancellor-Emeritus Kirkland, the Board of Trust announced, would leave Vanderbilt in the capable hands of Graduate Dean Oliver Cromwell Carmichael, who was brought to Vanderbilt two years ago from the presidency of Alabama College to effect Chancellor Kirkland's plans for whittling Vanderbilt's four-year course into two divisions (TIME, May 27, 1935). Chancellor-Elect Carmichael was Alabama's sixth Rhodes Scholar (1917). After the War, when he served as a relief worker and was arrested as a spy in Belgium, India, and once in Childersburg, Ala., he settled down to teach French in Alabama schools. He went to Alabama College as assistant to the president in 1922, succeeded his superior four years later. At 45 he is a husky, reticent man devoted to his sons Oliver Cromwell Jr., 17, and Fred Henry, 14, with whom he plays checkers, attends football games, golfs in the low 80s. He will move into his new job July 1.

The "Chance" moved last year from his rambling house on the Vanderbilt campus to a new home in Nashville's grassy Belle Meade, where besides keeping a close eye on Successor Carmichael he can devote more time to raising his black irises, known by his name to most U. S. horticulturists. The "Chance" also likes fishing, shooting ducks at his camp in Magnetawan, Ont., discussing anything under the sun with his wife Mary, listening to prize fight broadcasts with his son-in-law, Professor Benjamin Meritt of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. Kirkland crotchets include a dislike of bond salesmen and newspapermen, refusal to improve his ill-fitting false teeth, a fondness for maxims like: "I don't have time to make up anyone's mind for him."

Two days later, Vanderbilt lost another landmark as courtly little Poet John Crowe Ransom (Grace After Meat), co-author of the famed agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand and a pillar of Vanderbilt's English department for 23 years, took a job at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. When his fellow poet and agrarian, Alumnus Allen Tate, wrote an open letter of protest to Chancellor Kirkland, Poet Ransom explained that small, hustling Kenyon had offered him, besides more time for writing, $5,000 a year and a house as against Vanderbilt's $3,600.

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