Education: Haverford’s 100th

On an oak-shaded hillside near Haverford College campus, in the heart of Philadelphia’s “Main Line” district, a large white tent was set up last week. Into it shuffled an academic procession of delegates from 112 institutions, ranked by seniority all the way from Oxford and Cambridge down through Juniata College (founded 1876) to Reed College (founded 1911). The delegates, among them 50-odd college presidents, had come to help Haverford celebrate its 100th birthday.

Haverford’s first class was composed of 21 young Quakers studying classics and higher mathematics under the sponsorship of the orthodox branch of the Society of

Friends. In much the same tradition, 31 years later, nearby Swarthmore College was founded by the Hicksite branch of the Quakers. Both colleges have remained small, progressive, Quakerish in independence but non-parochial. Less than half of Haverford’s 44 professors and less than 17% of its 300 students are Quakers. In 1931 the Haverford charter was amended to admit non-Quakers to the Board of Managers. But Haverford still conducts Fifth-Day Meetings on Thursdays and last week’s celebration included a quiet Sunday Friends’ Meeting.

An English gardener who landscaped Haverford’s trim campus So years ago introduced cricket, still the favorite spring sport. Haverford calls freshmen “Rhinies” (as does Lawrenceville School). An annual custom is dressing in odd costumes for the last Ethics lecture of the year by Professor Rufus Matthew Jones, Haverford’s most respected and oldest active teacher, ‘Quaker theologian and member of the Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry. The costume custom was nearly abandoned when a student appeared on a Kiddie Kar in long woolen underwear as Lady Godiva. Among Haverford’s younger teachers are Leslie Hotson who solved the mystery of Christopher Marlowe’s death; Snake

Expert Emmett Dunn; William Edward Lunt who helped Woodrow Wilson revise the map of Europe; English Teacher William Reitzel (Wright) who wrote Progress of a Plough boy and Man Wants But Little. Among Haverford alumni: ”Tune Detective” Sigmund Spaeth; Authors Christopher Morley and Logan Pearsall Smith; oldtime Basso David Bispham; Artist Maxtield Parrish; onetime Vice President Walter Morris Hart of the University of California; Commissioner of Education Jose Padin of Puerto Rico: President Thomas Sovereign Gates of the University of Pennsylvania (Haverford ex-’93); Professor Henry Joel Cadbury of Bryn Mawr and Dr. Cecil Kent Drinker of Harvard Medical School. The last two and Author Morley were given honorary Litt. D. degrees at last week’s celebration.

Haverford like Swarthmore has long emphasized honors work. Under a new system inaugurated this autumn, conferences and tutorial work are to be substituted for lectures, especially in the two upper classes. With the enrolment limited to 300 and an average of only seven students under each professor, Haverford honors will be available to all. The new plan was lavishly saluted during the centenary celebrations last week, notably by Dr. William Wistar Comfort, president of Haverford since 1917, a genial, highbrowed classicist and cricket-player whom the students call “Uncle Billy” and whose precept has been: “Improve the breed of college men by a selective process.”

Haverford detects an improvement in its breed by the fact that for the past four years Haverford has beaten 131 competitors in the annual Intercollegiate Intelligence Tests of the American Council on Education. Last week Dr. Comfort delivered in Haverford’s tent an earnest, soothing address of the sort without which no academic convocation is complete. Calling Haverford’s new plan not a new goal but a new technique, he said U. S. education needs no revamping: “What the country needs is … a moral quickening … a stiffer backbone.”