Education: Solemn Presidents

Inducted with ceremonies quaint and traditional, three new presidents of three old eastern U. S. colleges last week spoke solemnly of what they saw beyond their academic walls.

Seymour. In Battell Chapel in New Haven, Conn., 1,000 guests intoned the 65th Psalm, sung in the first Yale College building in 1718. To tall Yaleman Charles Seymour, 52, Yale’s Wilbur Lucius Cross, Governor of Connecticut, presented the symbols of office—the mace, the keys, the record book, the charter and the great seal of the university—in sonorous Latin pronounced him the 15th president of Yale. In Latin, President Seymour replied. This 200-year-old ritual completed, Historian Seymour mounted the pulpit, warned that “Yale must be vigilantly self-critical . . . must beware of the peril of isolation,” pledged “absolute intellectual freedom,” exhorted Yalemen: “The duty of protecting freedom of thought and speech is the more compelling in these days when the liberal spirit in the world at large is in deadly peril. Every student at Yale should be impressed with the conviction that only through the spread of the liberal attitude in life can the nation find protection from an obscurantist reaction on the one hand or a blind revolution on the other.”

Day. In Bailey Hall in Ithaca, N. Y., Sociologist Edmund Ezra Day, 53, was installed as fifth president of Cornell University, proceeded to denounce “armed, aggressive and arrogant” force abroad, to issue this defiance: “When men in power conclude that ideas should come from authority and not from thought, men of reason must give battle.”

Baxter. In Chapin Hall, Williamstown, Mass., where 23 years before he had delivered a student’s valedictory, Dr. James Phinney Baxter III, became at 44 the tenth president of Williams College. Historian Baxter: “We are witnessing the collapse of the world’s system of collective security. . . . Our own country . . . has placed on the statute books a new system of neutrality which in the opinion of many careful students is more likely to involve us in war than our old system.”