Education: Kudos Jun. 28, 1937

Belgium’s Premier Paul van Zeeland may be in the U. S. for purposes of utmost international importance (TIME, June 14), but the ostensible reason for his trip was to receive this week from Princeton University, in whose graduate school he studied 17 years ago, an honorary LL.D. On the platform the premier will meet again his good and potent friend, U. S. Ambassador-at-Large Norman Hezekiah Davis, there for the same purpose. Recalling two notable Harvard LL.D.’s—the Marquis de Lafayette (1784) and Prince Henry of Prussia (1902)—Princeton’s van Zeeland provided a newsworthy international fillip to the annual intercollegiate kudos season, never more lively than this year at commencements all over the U. S.

To sentimental sociologists, the annual honors awarded by the 1,000 degree-granting U. S. colleges and universities provide a democratic U. S. equivalent of the British Honors List. As this year’s kudos season opened, this notion was derided by Sportswriter John R. Tunis, writing on Honoris Causa in the June Harper’s. Sneered Mr. Tunis: “Degrees are awarded with a canny eye for prestige, publicity, and good hard cash. . . . College trustees measure men by reputation rather than by real achievement. . . . One wonders what the effect would be on those bright young boys in the senior class at Mammoth if they fully understood the significance of the Commencement scene this month, as they watch their alma mater shoveling out honorary degrees to the face-cards of business and professional life.”

Most remarkable fact about the 1937 kudos list was the abdication of the nation’s four perennial kudos champions. Nicholas Murray Butler, who received his 35th honorary degree last winter from Trujillo University in San Domingo, appeared to be satisfied. Nor were there any degrees in prospect last week for the New York Times’s commencement-speaking Editor John Huston Finley (30), Harvard’s President-Emeritus Abbott Lawrence Lowell (28), Herbert Hoover (27). In their stead 1937 had produced many a new public face.

Columnist Dorothy Thompson (whose husband Sinclair Lewis got his first honorary degree last year from his alma mater Yale) this year became an LL.D. of Russell Sage College (Troy, N. Y.), an L.H.D. of University of Syracuse and of St. Lawrence University (Canton, N. Y.). Columnist Thompson was the commencement speaker at all three colleges. Abreast with her for first place on the 1937 kudos list was solemn Critic Van Wyck Brooks, whose Pulitzer Prizewinner, The Flowering of New England, brought him Litt.D.’s from Bowdoin, Columbia and Tufts. Vassar’s Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay got a Litt.D. from Colby, an L.H.D. from New York University. Two LL.D.’s apiece went to Cordell Hull (University of Pennsylvania and Yale), New York’s Special Racket Prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey (Tufts and the University of Michigan), new President Frederick Harold Stinchfield of the American Bar Association (Bowdoin and Bates), retiring President Mary Emma Woolley of Mount Holyoke (Bucknell and Columbia), RFChairman Jesse Holman Jones (Temple and New York University), John Gilbert Winant, onetime chairman of the Social Security Board (Oberlin and Knox). G-Man John Edgar Hoover accepted an Sc.D. from Kalamazoo College and an LL.D. from Westminster College (Fulton, Mo.).

At small Reed College (Portland, Ore.) smart young President Dexter Keezer announced that he would break a 22-year Reed rule against kudos in favor of five men and women who had never received an honorary degree. Among President Keezer’s discoveries were the New York Times’s Labor Reporter Louis Stark (see p. 41), LL.D., Rudolph Forster, senior member of the White House secretariat, LL.D., and Willard W. Beatty, Director of Education of the Office of Indian Affairs, Ed.D.

Another new face was that of Pilot Henry T. (“Dick”) Merrill, whose second two-way transatlantic flight earned him a Doctor of Aeronautical Science at Pennsylvania Military College (Chester). Prettiest new face was that of blonde Mary Lewis, a crack adwoman whose copy (“Buy American Cotton”) for Manhattan’s Best & Co. was so good that she became its vice president at 32. Not a college graduate, Miss Lewis got her L.H.M. from Russell Sage. A modest newcomer was President Roosevelt’s long-time Personal Secretary Marguerite (“Missy”) Le Hand, who was invested with an LL.D. by Roman Catholic Rosary College (River Forest, Ill.) at a special White House presentation while the President looked on. A similar courtesy was extended to ailing Utilitarian Henry Latham Doherty of Cities Service Co., who got an LL.D. from Temple University in his sickroom at Temple Hospital in Philadelphia. Most spectacular conjunction was the LL.D. bestowed on Anna Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt by John Marshall College of Law in Jersey City, N. J. Greatest celebrity beat was scored by little Elmira College (Elmira, N. Y.), which gave its Litt.D.’s to Novelist Carl Carmer (Stars Fell on Alabama), Actress Helen Hayes and (by proxy) Actress Katharine Cornell.

Other kudos awarded or announced:

Alabama College (Montevallo)

Speaker William Brockman Bankhead . . . . . . LL.D.

Mrs. Marie Bankhead Owen (sister) . . . . . . LL.D.

Bates College (Lewiston, Me.)

Japanese Ambassador Hirosi Saito. . . . . .L.H.D.

President Mildred Helen McAfee of Wellesley. . . . . . LL.D.

Bowdoin College (Brunswick, Me.)

Charles Francis Adams . . . . . .LL.D.

Mayor Harold Hitz Burton of Cleveland (’09). . . . . LL.D.

Colgate University (Hamilton, N. Y.)

Board Chairman Winthrop W. Aldrich of the Chase National Bank. . . . . . LL.D.

U. S. Surgeon General Thomas Parran Jr. . . . . .Sc.D.

Physicist Carl David Anderson of California Institute of Technology, 1936 Nobel Prizeman. . . . . . Sc.D.

Columbia University (New York)

Senator Carter Glass . . . . . LL.D.

President Henry Merritt Wriston of Brown. . . . . . Litt.D.

Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital of Philadelphia

Justice Owen Roberts . . . . . . C.L.D.

Lawrence College (Appleton, Wis.)

President Frank William Lovejoy of Eastman Kodak Co. . . . . Sc.D.

Middlebury College (Middlebury, Vt.)

Editor Bernard de Voto of the Saturday Review of Literature . . . . . .Litt.D.

University of Missouri (Columbia)

Chief of Staff Malin Craig. . . . . LL.D.

Montana School of Mines (Butte)

Senator Burton Kendall Wheeler. . . . . . LL.D.

Mount Holyoke College (So. Hadley, Mass.)

Dean Mary Ashby Cheek, President-elect of Rockford College . . . . .LL.D.

Niagara University (Niagara Falls)

Governor Herbert H. Lehman . . . . .LL.D.

New York University (New York City)

James Truslow Adams . . . . . Litt.D.

President Charles Franklin Kettering of General Motors Research Corp. . . . . Sc.D.

Oglethorpe University (Atlanta, Ga.)

Producer John Golden . . . . Pub. Ser.D.

Ohio State University (Columbus)

Willard M. Kiplinger, ’12 (NewsLetters) . . . . . LL.D.

University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia)

President-elect Edmund Ezra Day of Cornell. . . . . . LL.D.

President Martin Clement of the Pennsylvania R. R. . . . . .LL.D.

Philanthropist Samuel Fels (soap). . . . . LL.D.

Headmaster Samuel S. Drury of St. Paul’s School . . . . . . S.T.D.

Princeton University (Princeton, N. J.)

Washington Correspondent Arthur Krock of the New York Times . . . . . .M.A.

Architect Stephen Francis Voorhees, Chairman of the Board of Design of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. . . . . Eng.D.

President Charles Ezra Beury of Temple (’03). . . . . LL.D.

Rutgers University (New Brunswick, N. J.)

Retiring President James Rowland Angell of Yale. . . . . . LL.D.

President Thomas N. McCarter of Public Service Corp. of N. J. . . . . . LL.D.

Seton Hall College (South Orange. N. J.)

Counsel John Francis Neylan of Hearst Publications. . . . . LL.D.

University of Syracuse (Syracuse, N. Y.)

Baritone Richard Bonelli . . . . . .Mus.D.

Union College (Schenectady, N. Y.)

Bernard M. Baruch. . . . . LL.Civ.D.

University of Vermont (Burlington)

Pres. Samuel J. Hungerford of Canadian National Railways . . . . . Mech.Eng.D.

Villanova College (Villanova, Pa.)

Surgeons William James & Charles Horace Mayo . . . . . LL.D.

Washington & Jefferson College (Washington, Pa.)

President Carl R. Gray of the Union Pacific R. R. . . . . . LL.D.

Yale University (New Haven, Conn.)

President Juan Terry Trippe of Pan American Airways, ’20. . . . . M.A.

Chinese Minister of Finance Hsiang-hsi Kung. . . . . LL.D.

Board Chairman Edward Grant Buckland of the New York, New Haven & Hartford R. R., ’89. . . . LL.D.