Education: At Colby

Modest in size is Colby College (Waterville, Maine) with 600 students and some 3,000 alumni. Colbyites young and old were nonetheless proud and thrilled last week as they gathered on the campus at Waterville, in alumni meetings in eight cities from Maine to California, in homes where they could listen to a broadcast of their alma mater’s annual football rally, Colby Night. They hoped Colby would beat the University of Maine next day (it lost, 19 to 7). But Colby Night celebrated a greater event: the first sizable gift to a campaign to rare $3,000.000. The gift, $250,000 (contingent upon raising the balance within three years), came from an unusual source: a professor.

Officially designated “Grand Old Man of Maine” by Governor William Tudor Gardiner, Dr. Julian Daniel Taylor is at 85 “dean of U. S. college professors.” Rugged, venerable, he has taught Latin at Colby for 63 years. Though retired as professor emeritus, he still conducts a senior Latin course. Unanimously, Colby alumni elected him last summer to the board of trustees. Less rich than Harvard’s President Abbott Lawrence Lowell or Groton’s late William Amory Gardner, who left Groton $500,000, Harvard $100,000, he is comfortably off. Married in 1892 to Mary Keely Boutelle of Waterville, he is vice president of Ticonic National Bank in which her family owned stock; he inherited property and securities at her death. Dr. Taylor is frankly proud of his financial shrewdness, attributes it to study of the classics. Colby believes the $250,000 represents a large part of his capital. Modest, he has stipulated that no building be named for him.

Colby’s hoped-for $3,000,000 is to be spent for a new campus, a new group of buildings. Though comparatively rare, it is not unprecedented for a college to up & move. In its early days, Yale was successively located at Killingworth and Saybrook, Conn.; Brown, in Warren and Providence, R. I. Dartmouth jumped from Connecticut to New Hampshire. Columbia has thrice moved northward in Manhattan. Colby has lived for 113 years on the banks of the Kennebec, long enough to feel nervous about pulling stakes. Here studied many a famed educator: Dean Shailer Mathews of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago; many a college professor; 38 U. S. college presidents (among them, oldtime presidents of Vassar, Michigan, Rochester, Centre, Colgate, Cincinnati; and Colby’s present President Franklin Winslow Johnson). But noisy railroads and smelly pulp mills have lately encroached upon the old campus. Cramped for space, Colby has been unable to extend its facilities. A survey by a State commission ranked Colby’s physical equipment far below that of Bowdoin, Bates and the University of Maine, pointed out that to improve it would require an expenditure equal to that of moving. Also, Maine must accommodate 1,000 more college students than it has room for at present. Were Colby not moving, the State would have to handle the future increase as best it could.

While Colby pondered the matter, an offer came of a site in Augusta, on the estate of William Howard Ganett, retired publisher of Comfort.*Colby declined. Its loyalty to Waterville was rewarded: Citizens donated 600 acres on Mayflower Hill in the outskirts. There, when the $3,000,000 is raised, a new Colby will rise, on a cruciform campus with redbrick, white-columned Georgian buildings.

Tongues at Table

One way for a college freshman to relieve the generally depressing tedium of dining hall meals is to throw butter. More genteel, more instructive is a practice lately instituted in the freshman dining hall of the Harvard Union. Students of French and German, it became known last week, may sit at tables where the menu is printed and the conversation carried on in French and German, with professors present to keep the conversation alive. English is barred. Exquisite touch: the waitresses speak French and German. So successful have the linguistic tables become that it is planned for other students of other languages at polyglot Harvard.

$35,000 Debate

Chiefly because it has never been done before, a debate will take place early next month by radio, between Harvard and Oxford Universities. First debate between the two since 1925, it will be carried on by two Oxford men in London, two Harvard men in Manhattan, will be transmitted by short-wave and rebroadcast in each country. Subject to be heard, static permitting: “Resolved, that in the interests of world prosperity the War debts be cancelled.” Time allotted: one hour. Announcements last week pointed out that the cost, nearly $35,000, will be borne by National Broadcasting Co., with British Broadcasting Corp. cooperating.

*Not to be confused with Chain-Publisher Frank Ernest Gannett of Rochester, N. Y.