Education: At Williamsburg

In the buggy of an old Negro who had picked him up on the road from Jamestown, a young, history-loving sightseer jolted one day 20 years ago into Williamsburg, colonial and Revolutionary capital of Virginia. He found a ramshackle, sleepy town, its past glories all but forgotten, its historic buildings fallen to decay. Last week the same sightseer, now President of the U. S., rolled into Williamsburg by special train. This time he found a trim, spacious 18th Century village, complete with cobbled streets, grassy curbs, antique buildings.

In the interim it had pleased the fancy of John D. Rockefeller Jr. to spend some $12,000,000 on converting the town into a bright, inhabited museum. Down newly-restored Duke of Gloucester Street President Roosevelt rode to the campus of the College of William & Mary, second oldest (1693) in the U. S.* On the stoop of its restored main building, designed by Sir Christopher Wrenn and Completed in 1697,the President sat in cap & gown while Publisher John Stewart Bryan of Richmond took oath as the college’s 19th president.

Proudly the new president called the roll of his college’s famed sons— Thomas Jefferson, Peyton and Edmund Randolph, John Marshall, James Monroe, John Tyler. Graciously he placed his guest in the heroic line. His address finished, President Bryan turned to confer the degree of Doctor of Laws on Franklin D. Roosevelt, “restorer of hope to a desperate people . . . imaginative employerof scholarship as the servant of the State.” After compliments to President Bryan, John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Thomas Jefferson,

President Roosevelt replied: “There is a definite place in American life—an important place—for broad, liberal and nonspecialized education. . . . The noble list of those who have gone out into life from the halls of William & Mary is in greater part distinguished because these graduates came to know and to understand the needs of their nation as a whole.”

A proud and vigorous pioneer was William & Mary in the days when its sons were building a new nation. In 1776 it founded Phi Beta Kappa, first Greek letter fraternity. It was the first U. S. college to create Schools of Law (1779), Modern Languages (1779), Political Economy (1784), History (1803).

A century later the college had lost almost everything but its past. The Civil War stripped it of students, burned its buildings. Starting anew after the war, it struggled along until 1881 before closing its doors once more, this time for seven years. The State lent a hand in its reopening, took it over in 1906. By 1918, when women students were first admitted, the college of Jefferson and Marshall was little more than a third-rate normal school, with 131 students.

Into the decrepit frame the late Julian Alvin Carroll Chandler breathed new life. A onetime superintendent of schools, he made teacher training the college’s chief aim. Ten new buildings sprang up on the campus. Established were branches at Richmond, Newport, Norfolk. President Chandler revived the School of Law, made it part of a new Marshall-Wythe School of Government and Citizenship. Dying last June, he left a lively college of 100 faculty members, 1,200 students.

Tall, slender, patrician-looking President Bryan, 63, can match his college’s ancient traditions, its new vigor. At one of the weekly gatherings in Richmond of his old, proud family, a guest once asked a prim maiden Stewart if she were descendedfrom Scotland’s royal family. “On the contrary,” replied she, “the Kings of Scotland are descended from us.”

Despite his new duties, President Bryan will probably keep his hand in at the Richmond News-Leader, which he has edited & published for 30 years. It has never come close to monopolizing his interests. Long a power in Virginia politics, he is credited with electing his friend Harry Byrd to the governorship. He has been president of American Newspaper Publishers Association and member of its NRA code committee,president of Community Chests & Councils, Inc., rector of University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors. An active churchman, a fluent and witty public speaker, a leader in every benevolent project,he has been voted Richmond’s most useful citizen.

*Oldest: Harvard, 1636.