Education: Desire

Two years ago John D. Clark, 46-year-old millionaire, resigned his positions as President of Midwest Refining Co., director of Standard Oil Co. of Indiana, Vice President of Pan-American Petroleum & Transport Co. Instead of retiring he went to Johns Hopkins University to study economics and law. Last week the University of Denver got a unique businessman-professor and Mr. Clark fulfilled a lifelong desire. He joined the Denver faculty to teach economics.

New Presidents

Case. Gathered together for the first time, representatives of the country’s 13 endowed institutions of technology witnessed the induction of Dr. William Elgin Wickenden, third president of Cleveland’s Case School of Applied Science.* Although President Wickenden has been in office since last autumn, Case took the occasion of its semicentennial celebration to inaugurate him with proper pomp.

Civic-minded Clevelanders have long dreamed of a great centre of scientific education. The first step in such a program would be the interchange of instruction between Case and its next-door neighbor Western Reserve, situated near University Circle, where Euclid Avenue, the city’s main stem, turns toward the suburbs.

In the selection of President Wickenden, Case trustees had chosen this kind of an executive: during the War he busied himself with the development of officers’ training schools. In 1918 he returned to the faculty of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Soon after he was employed by the Bell Telephone Company, in which connection for the next ten years, he had charge of the delicate process of making bustling businessmen out of college graduates. Big Business has quite evidently touched brisk, white-haired President Wickenden. Upon his arrival at Case he decided that the school needed a livelier song. Not content with one that Composer Werner Janssen turned out, “he sat down and dashed out another set with more punch.” Asked how he liked Cleveland and his new job, President Wickenden said: “Fine, but why the devil don’t some of you fellows call be Bill?”

Missouri. The storm-swept University of Missouri also acquired a new president last week. The Board of Curators (trustees) decided to extend “a leave of absence” to President Stratton Duluth Brooks. Until the end of the year Dean Walter Williams of the School of Journalism will be acting president, full-fledged president thereafter.† The Board wished it to be thoroughly understood that President Brooks’s removal was not the outcome of last spring’s “sex questionnaire” rumpus (TIME, March 25, 1929).

Stanford’s Axe

Each year at Amherst, Sabrina, a small bronze goddess, appears. She is the symbol of superiority among undergraduates and her possession is bitterly disputed between the odd and even numbered classes. To the winner of the Michigan-Minnesota football game each year goes the coveted “Little Brown Jug.” Illinois and Ohio State wage their annual game for a turtle called “Illlibuck.” Columbia sophomores customarily attempt to acquire living mementos—the Freshman class officers; their efforts in the past have resulted in public riots in Manhattan’s crowded Columbus Circle, chases in fleets of taxicabs, bewildered freshmen spending enforced weekends in the suburbs. Yale’s talisman is her Fence, stolen last autumn by Harvardmen (TIME, Dec. 2). Last week came news of Leland Stanford’s axe.

First displayed by peg-trousered underclassmen at the Stanford-California game of 1898, the token was paraded under California noses accompanied loudly by the contemporary byword: “Give ’em the axe!” A group of muscular Californians, incensed, wrested the axe from Stanford, bore it away to Berkeley where, for the past 31 years, it has remained. The annual California axe rally has been a thorn in Stanford’s suntanned side.

Last week, as the axe was being taken in an armored car to the annual ceremony, three young men posing as newshawks tossed a tear gas bomb into the procession, rushed the axe guards, made off with all but a small fragment of the precious implement during the mêlée. All of California’s roadsters and all of her men scoured the roads leading out of Berkeley. But the sly Stanfordmen eluded them, got the axe home, hid it away. Next year Stanford’s axe, unless a counter-raid is successful, will once more be brandished in California’s face.

*The other twelve endowed technical schools: Armour Institute of Technology, California Institute of Technology, Carnegie Institute of Technology, Clarkson Memorial College of Technology, Drexel Institute, Lewis Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Rose Polytechnic Institute, Stevens Institute of Technology, Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

†Also from a journalism deanship to a presidency went President Matthew Lyle Spencer of the University of Washington in 1927.