Education: Hopkins Centenary

“The ideal college,” said President James Abram Garfield, “is one with Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other.”

In 1881 President Garfield was shot while on his way to Williamstown, Mass. for a Williams College reunion. Last week shady little Williamstown was jammed with some 700 Williams men, including his son, Williams’ President-Emeritus

Harry Augustus Garfield, Massachusetts’ onetime Governor Joseph Buell Ely and New York Times’ s Editor Rollo Ogden.

Their reunion was marked by no tragedy.

Nevertheless, like President Garfield they honored Mark Hopkins, who just 100 years before had become Williams’ most famed and most beloved President.*

Of the thousands who sat in Mark Hopkins’ classes only a scant 250 lived to journey to Williamstown for his Centenary. Those oldsters remembered him as a great, gaunt, Lincolnesque figure striding under the Williamstown elms in frock coat and top hat, carrying agold-headed cane. Or they recalled his classes in moral philosophy, when he wrote their names on slips of paper, stuffed them in a pill box and drew them out, one by one, for the order of recitation. Few could remember much more. Reflected Williams’ President Tyler Dennett last week: “In stitutions have many of the attributes of persons, but one quality they lack — mem ory. A college has life far beyond the limit of man. . . .”

Mark Hopkins was a big, serious-minded farm boy when he went to Willams from nearby Stockbridge in 1822. After graduation he tried his hand at tutoring before entering the Berkshire Medical College in Pittsfield. Starting out as a physician in New York, he slept in his Greenwich Village office on a $25 sofabed which he described in letters home as a “really genteel article of furniture.” Year later he was eager to accept a call back to Williams to teach moral philosophy and rhetoric. With anatomy and physiology classes as well, he decided that he must have a manikin for classroom demonstrations. He bought the manikin himself for $600, worked off the debt by packing it behind him in his sleigh, circulating over the Massachusetts countryside— to deliver public lectures on human anatomy.

By the time Williams elected him President at 34 Mark Hopkins was beginning to get a reputation as a homely, eloquent defender of orthodox religious principles. His brother Albert, developing Williams into one of the first U. S. scientific centres, meanwhile designed and helped quarry the stone for the College Observatory completed in 1838. President Mark and “Prof Al,” formidable in person and habitually ready to thrash Williamstown roisterers, were fruitful educationalcomplements. Last week Harvard’s Philosopher William Ernest Hocking declared at a Centenary symposium that Mark had done much to “counterbalance the materialistic tendency of science.” At the same time Chemist Charles Albert Browne of the U. S. Department of Agriculture claimed for “Prof Al” that “the enthusiasm for science at Williams College was greater during the Hopkins administration . . . than in the half century following.” Despite a salary which constantly pinched his wife and eight children,President Mark turned down many a lucrative pastorate, declined the chancellorship of New York University and the presidency of the University of Michigan to stay on at Williams. On $1,100 a year he was the dinner crony of Webster and Emerson, of half a dozen successive Governors of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In his later years his lectures on The Law of Love made him the darling of fashionable Boston. Although he resigned to rest in 1872, he kept up his teaching and his climbing in the Berkshires until the day he died in 1887, aged 85.

While Williams convoked to venerate one Hopkins, President Dennett paid quiet tribute to another. When his mother told him that he was distantly related to the great Mark Hopkins, the late Samuel Hopkins determined to go to Williams College. With his parents impoverished by the Civil War and uprooted from Alabama to Connecticut, Samuel Hopkins went to no college at all. In Manhattan he prospered as a cottonbroker, made more money than a lonely, austere bachelor could spend. One day in 1917 he called the treasurer of Williams to his dark office, calmly handed him $500,000 worth of bonds.

With the years Williams got many another gift from Samuel Hopkins. This week President Dennett announced those gifts for the first time, revealed that to late they totaled $2,900,000, that when Hopkins died in June he had made his residuary legatee. Samuel Hopkins’ benefactions must be used for the improvement of teaching “and for no other purpose.” With them Williams plans to increase its teaching staff, make faculty promotions, finance a faculty pension plan.

**No kin to Williams’ Mark Hopkins was California Capitalist Mark Hopkins (1813-78) who helped build Southern Pacific R. R. and for whom San Francisco’s Mark Hopkins Hotel is named. No relative to either was founder Johns Hopkins of Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University.Also unrelated are President Ernest Martin Hopkins of Dartmouth, President Louis Bertram Hopkins of Wabash.