Education: Hotbed of Liberty

It was an official holiday in the town of Princeton, NJ. Mayor Minot (Mike) Morgan Jr., a Princeton University graduate (’35) himself, had urged all 7,719 townsmen to “lay aside normal tasks” in honor of the university. Flags hung from windows and fluttered from lamp posts. At 9:30, the presidential train from Washington pulled slowly into the station. Harry Truman, who never went to college, had come to get his tenth honorary Doctor of Laws degree and to help celebrate Princeton’s sooth year.

For Princeton, last week’s academic blow-out capped what one guest, the University of California’s President Robert Gordon Sproul, called “a whole year of unremitting celebration.” The fourth oldest college in the U.S. had honored its past by inviting men from all over the world to discuss the World’s future. Throughout the year, hundreds of statesmen and scholars, including Historian Arnold J. Toynbee, Philosopher William E. Hocking, Physicists Karl T. Compton and J. Robert Oppenheimer, Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Biologist J. B. S. Haldane, had come & gone.

Familiar Faces. For nearly 30 minutes last week a procession of black and multicolored robes filed across the “front campus” before famed old Nassau Hall. There, 6,000 spectators, seated in shadows under Princeton’s elms (“An adorable place, is it not?” Woodrow Wilson used to say), cheered whenever they recognized a celebrity. There were, besides Home-Towner Albert Einstein, Selman Abraham Waksman, the discoverer of streptomycin; the

Boston Symphony’s Serge Koussevitzky, who acknowledged applause with little conductorial bows; Chief Justice Frederick M. Vinson; Viscount Alexander of Tunis, the Governor General of Canada, in the red robe of Oxford; U.N. Delegate Warren Austin (getting his third degree in three days) ; Eugene Cardinal Tisserant of the Vatican in his cardinal’s red; Poet T. S. Eliot; and Yale’s President Charles Seymour (who reminded a Princeton ban quet audience that their university had been founded by seven Yalemen and one Harvardman). And among the scholars in their academic robes were the uniformed General Eisenhower and Admirals Leahy and Nimitz. The Marine Band burst into Hail to the Chief. Escorted by Princeton’s President Harold W. Dodds, the President of the U.S. marched to the commencement platform (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS).

One by one, 35 men and one woman (Wellesley’s President Mildred McAfee Horton) stepped forward to receive the hoods of their honorary degrees — orange & black, edged with scarlet for Theology & Divinity, golden yellow for Science, purple for Laws, white for Arts & Letters.

Among them was Bernard Baruch, who has more honorary degrees than he can remember. There were enough past & present White House occupants to make a notable group picture.

Education for Freedom. Before Harry Truman spoke (for universal military training and a college-trained civil service), President Dodds got in a few words about his university: “The theme of our year’s celebration has been education for freedom. Since the administration of President Witherspoon, who in colonial days, against Tory opposition, turned the College of New Jersey into a hotbed of liberty, there has been no serious division here on [this] basic proposition. … In the two decades of his administration, Princeton graduated one future President of the United States, one Vice President, three Justices of the Supreme Court, thirteen Governors, 20 Senators and 23 Members of the House of Representatives. This is the heritage bequeathed to us. . . .”