Education: Dean West Resigns

Professor Andrew Fleming West, twinkle-eyed creator and dean of the Princeton Graduate Schoo last week closed his academic work. He will be 75 years old next May and has been in ill health for a long time.

Dean West’s great achievement at Princeton was his founding the graduate school there in 1901. AS he wrote to Princeton trustees: “It was the policy of the university from the start to abandon the idea of a great number of graduate students and to plan the entire work on the basis of quality rather than quantity. … A company of picked graduate students of moderate number and high scholarly promise was what was necessary in order that Princeton should make a really distinguished contribution to the higher teaching and scholarship of our country.”

Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton, wanted the graduate school, which was originally called “Merwick” in the English fashion, to be a component part of the university. Dean West besought the trustees to establish it as an independent institution. Dean West won, so far as the location of the school was concerned. Cleveland Tower stands on an eminence half a mile from Nassau Hall. But the name “Merwick” was dropped and the Princeton Graduate School is subject today to the faculty, trustees and president of Princeton University.

When Woodrow Wilson resigned in 1910 to enter New Jersey politics, many wanted Dean West for president of the university. A strong faction opposed the appointment, and the trustees compromised on John Grier Hibben in 1912.

Dean West’s greater achievement is the persistence of classical teaching in the U. S. When Princeton in 1883 gave him its doctor of philosophy degree, it immediately made him its professor of Latin. A scholar, it was presumed at that time, was a classicist. He knew his humanities and lived by them. A few years, however, and students asked the cash value of Latin and Greek and other “impractical” studies. No humanist, it was argued, ever turned a quick dollar. Professor West cried down the materialists. Classical learning, he contended, was one means if not the only means of “maintaining the gold standard of education.” With funds that believers gave him, he investigated a few years ago the study of the classics in the U. S. to find how they were taught, to analyze them and study their meaning, and to enable schools to teach them better. He found that more than 1,000,000 secondary students were studying Latin, more than the number of all other language students.

To replace him as dean of the Princeton Graduate School, the trustees last week chose Lieut.-Col Augustus Trowbridge, Princeton professor of physics from 1906 to 1924. For the past three years he has been adviser to the International Education Board in appropriating money to develop scientific research in European institutions. Last week he was in Paris.