Education: Cubberley’s Gift

Slim, grey-mustached Ellwood Patterson (“Dad”) Cubberley, dean emeritus of Stanford University’s School of Education, is dean of historians of U. S. education. He wrote or edited the famed 100 Riverside Textbooks in Education and besides wrote 18 others. His best seller, Public School Administration, sold some 100,000 copies. Professors who write widely-used texts make a lucrative business of writing textbooks, but last year 70-year-old Ellwood Cubberley did an unprecedented thing with his textbook profits. He gave Stanford’s School of Education a new $535,000 building.

In his 35 years as head of this school, Dr. Cubberley turned out 2,555 educators, including twelve college presidents, and won for it a “distinguished” rating. Twenty-five years ago he and his wife decided to build a home for his school, which was in crowded quarters on the old Stanford quadrangle. He quietly laid aside all his textbook profits,drew plans for his building. For 15 years he said nothing to his colleagues about his plans. Then one day in 1928 he walked into the office of Stanford’s President Ray Lyman Wilbur, laid $5,000 in securities on his desk as the first payment toward a fund for erecting the building. Each year for the next four years he added $5,000.

Concluding that he could not accumulate the $500,000 his building would cost solely from textbooks. Professor Cubberley decided to increase his fund in the stockmarket. Truth is at times as strange as the cinema. He studied market trends, invested in carefully selected securities so wisely that in 1933 he was able to give President Wilbur securities then worth $367,000. Still short of his goal, Dr. Cubberley asked the University to hold his investments until earnings raised the total to $500,000.

He did not expect to see the building started during his lifetime, but his investments were so sound that a year ago the fund went over $500,000 and ground for the building was broken.

Last week Professor Cubberley & wife happily saw their building dedicated. Dr. Cubberley made no speech, refused to let the building be named for him. Said he: “After all, since I wrote and sold my books partly because of my capacity as professor here, we feel the University is entitled to the profits.” Taking charge of the new building is Dr. Cubberley’s own choice as his successor, 38-year-old Dean Grayson Neikirk Kefauver, who has already made Stanford’s School of Education a famed centre of progressive education.

“Dad” Cubberley lives comfortably on his pension and savings from his salary, next door to a well-known Stanford alumnus who also retired from his job in 1933, Herbert Clark Hoover.