200 Years of Penn

In the old Quadrangle of the University of Pennsylvania one morning last week rang the cheerful clatter of an ancient hand bell that once summoned scholars to class. That homely sound opened the celebration of the 200th birthday of a homely old university. To the shirt-sleeved sons of Penn seated in camp-meeting chairs on the Quadrangle grass, it spoke of Founder Ben Franklin, of Philadelphia, cradle of U. S. freedom, of old-fashioned sanity. But the ancient bell merely interrupted, did not dispel the hush of uncertainty and gloom that hung over Penn's Bicentennial.

Gathered to glean what encouragement they could for civilization and the life of the mind were 140 college presidents, 500 scholars from many lands. But empty were seats reserved for British scholars. And when Jacques Maritain, famed Catholic philosopher of the France Ben Franklin loved, rose as the first speaker in Penn's conference of scholars, he spoke not as a representative of a sister republic but as a refugee.

As if to celebrate while there was still time, Pennsylvania had anticipated its actual 200th anniversary by 15 years. It claims birth in 1740, when a charity school and "house of public worship" opened at Fourth and Arch Streets to provide a pulpit for George Whitefield, famed Anglican revivalist preacher. But not until 1749 did Ben Franklin get Philadelphians to establish an academy in the Whitefield Chapel, not until 1755 did it actually become a college.

Older than the U. S., a year older as a university (1779) than Harvard, Pennsylvania played a big part in the founding of the Republic. Congress met in its old College Hall in 1778, 21 Penn men were members of the Continental Congress; ten signed the Declaration of Independence. Later Penn declined. By 1807 the university had only 17 students. Says Professor Edward Potts Cheyney, Penn's official historian: "While New England Congregationalists frequented Yale, and Unitarians Harvard, and Presbyterians of the middle States came trooping to Princeton and Dickinson, Baptists to Brown, Anglicans to Columbia or William & Mary, Pennsylvania in the proud isolation of her freedom, from religious bias found virtue, as usual, its own somewhat cold reward." But in 1828 a Yale graduate, the Rev.

William H. De Lancey, became Penn's provost, started its renaissance.

Today U. of Pa. has 16,000 students, is world-famed for its Wharton School of Finance and Commerce (first university business school in the U. S.), its Medical School (also the first), its School of Dentistry, its Philadelphia lawyers. Through its 200 years the university has remained an image of Founder Ben Franklin--practical, thrifty, conservative, business-minded, enterprising in science.

Last week Pennsylvania looked like a Ben Franklin confronting a world changed beyond his understanding. Absent from its Bicentennial were the surge and confidence of Harvard's Tercentenary four years ago, at which, to President emeritus A. Lawrence Lowell's cry: "All those who believe that the world will still be in existence 2,000 years hence, and that the universities will still be here, say AYE," Harvard men shouted a thunderous "AYE."

Penn began its week with discussions by eminent scholars of medicine, science, the arts, the humanities, religion, social sciences. As if appalled by the modern world, the scholars took refuge in the past, recalled the glories of Greek, Roman, Mycenaean and Byzantine civilizations, of the Middle Ages. From the perspective of 1940, Harvard's Latin Professor Edward Kennard Rand declared, "At least nobody in the Middle Ages proposed, as has today been proposed and terrifically exemplified, a new philosophy of life, a realism most unmedieval, in which pride has been replaced by humility as the most deadly of the seven deadly sins."

Observing gloomily that "it took over six centuries to tame the barbarians that took possession of the Roman Empire," Columbia University's Historian Carlton J. H. Hayes wondered how long it would take to tame "the barbarians that are now infesting Europe." In the eyes of Princeton's Dr. Charles Rufus Morey, Marquand professor of art and archeology, the deluge had already arrived. Said he: "Never in the history of civilized art has humanity cut so poor a figure. Whatever is base, whatever is open to derision, whatever is ugly in human existence, is made a major theme not only by the most significant fiction of our time but by its art as well."

Here and there rose a less gloomy voice --that of Bryn Mawr's Archeologist Rhys Carpenter, who said that the "golden age" of Greece was tarnished and that even the Parthenon had ragged edges; of University of Paris' Professor Charles Cestre, who sent a paper praising modern U. S. poetry; of Dr. Hu Shih, Chinese Ambassador to the U. S., who, observing that President Roosevelt could not even carry his own Dutchess County, declared that the U. S. was in no danger of dictatorship.

Then up rose Herbert Hoover, ex-President of the U. S., and proceeded to plunge the gathering again into gloom. Mr. Hoover undertook to picture the post-war world to come. He predicted that dictators would control 60% of the world's people and 40% of its trade, warned that if the U. S. entered the war it, too, would become a dictatorship. He bade the U. S. prepare to do business with the dictators. Said he: "The idea of the free States combining against the totalitarian nations in trade is just nonsense. The world has to live, and moreover the interests of the free States are too divergent to consummate any such combination." For U. S. economic defense, he proposed classic remedies: more research in pure and applied science, more industrial efficiency, more labor-saving devices.

To the Bicentennial delegates, all this added up to one conclusion: the sole hope of civilization was the maintenance of its free universities. On that, Pennsylvania had discouraging news. Three years ago it started a drive, to culminate at the Bicentennial, for $12,500,000, to extend its research, strengthen its teaching, build new buildings. Despite the efforts of Thomas Sovereign Gates, onetime Morgan partner who has served the university as president since 1930 without pay, of Philadelphia Banker Joseph Wayne Jr., drive chairman, of Thomas I. Parkinson, president of Equitable Life, and of John Price Jones, high-powered professional fund raiser, the drive last week fell far short of its goal. Total raised: $5,035,000. Borne out were recent warnings by President Robert Maynard Hutchins of University of Chicago that U. S. universities faced a decline in gifts. Taking what comfort it could from the fact that 18,000 donors had contributed to its fund, Pennsylvania inscribed their names on an honor roll, placed it, together with other mementos, in a stainless steel box to be opened at the university's 300th anniversary.

By Friday, having outlasted the scholars, Pennsylvania alumni and students began to perk up. Strolling in Spruce Street in the sultry sunshine, they snickered at the university's ubiquitous silk-hatted trustees, snapped up Willkie buttons from Willkiettes who handed them out in front of Houston Hall, Bicentennial headquarters. Soon a university publicity man hustled out, shooed the Willkiettes away. Conscious of his duties as a host, earnest President Gates meant to permit no discourtesy to the guest of the day: the President of the U. S. He had made short work of a testy complaint by old Mining Magnate William Guggenheim against the "special prominence" to be given Franklin Roosevelt at his alma mater's celebration. Headliner of Harvard's Tercentenary, President Roosevelt was also to be headliner of Penn's Bicentennial.

Into Convention Hall for exercises at which the President was to get an honorary degree, seventh U. S. President to be so honored by Penn,* marched some 15,000 Pennsylvanians, biggest crowd of the Bicentennial week. There was a momentary disturbance at the door when a shirt-sleeved man walked in with a shoe box. Half a dozen police pounced on him, gingerly opened his box, found that it was full of Roosevelt buttons.

Sitting stiffly behind the President on the stage during his speech, Penn's faculty kept its dignity, applauded only politely.

Not so Penn's undergraduates and their families. They delighted Franklin Roosevelt by singing The Red and Blue for him, standing up and waving their programs, cheered him even when he denounced rule by "a few elite" and quoted Harvard's late President Charles Eliot: "If the ballot were to be confined to the holders of college degrees, the nation would go on the rocks in a very few years."

* Washington, Garfield, Taft, Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Herbert Hoover, who got a second honorary degree from Penn last week.

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