Education: Eddy To Hobart

Small Hobart College (enrollment: 334) at Geneva, N. Y. is famed for its all-time record of 27 straight football defeats (1928-31), as the purported birthplace of the drinking song Solomon Levi* as a modestly endowed, progressive liberal arts institution with more graduates in Who’s Who than any school of its size. Founded by an Episcopal bishop in 1822, Hobart has had 14 presidents, all Episcopal clergymen. Its “coordinate” college for women, William Smith, has shared the last three. Last week these educational twins formally installed a new president, neither clergyman nor alumnus but a Dartmouth English professor named William Alfred Eddy.

On hand on Hobart’s rolling Geneva campus were students, alumni, educators, to hear Hobart’s 18th President solemnly inducted by Princeton’s 15th President Harold Willis Dodds, like him the son of a Presbyterian minister. Still in oratorical trim after welcoming Princeton’s freshmen two days before, President Dodds took the occasion to declare: “The people love liberty . . . but they put ham and cabbage first, If they can’t get them under democracy, they will trans fer their affections and their spiritual val ues to other systems. The blunt fact is that our democracy must cleanse itself . . . if it is to fit itself to be an efficient instrument of social control.” That, as it turned out, was just what practical President Eddy proposed to do.

Said he: “It gives me pleasure to announce, on behalf of the Trustees and Faculty, the inauguration of a continuous four-year course in responsible citizenship as a requirement for the bachelor’s degree. . . . We shall require, in each of the first three years, a course in the political, economic, or social structure of American society . . leading up to the study in senior year of the problems of American government and the means of social control. . . .

“The theory that a liberal education will make a citizen responsible is attractive, but untrue. The truth is that a student is infected by the enthusiasms of his campus. . . . We arouse interest in science, not on the football field, but in the laboratory, and we may now attempt the same direct approach to social responsibility.”

William Alfred Eddy has spent 19 of his 40 years abroad. Born at Saida (Sidon), Syria, he sailed to the U. S. to attend the College of Wooster (Ohio) and Princeton, sailed back to France with the A.E.F. to be wounded at Belleau Wood and receive the Distinguished Service Cross. With a Ph.D. from Princeton he went to Egypt in 1923, headed the English department of the American University at Cairo for five years before he was called to Dartmouth. While at Cairo he introduced basketball to Egyptian youngsters, wrote the first book of basketball rules in Arabic, started a 16-team Nile Valley League which is flourishing today. Blond, squarejawed, and piously Episcopalian, Dr. Eddy is married, has two boys, two girls, can beat any of them at chess.

* Written in the ’80s, according to legend, by Undergraduate Edwin K. Buttolph, who took the name Levi from his pious schoolmaster father, Solomon from Father Buttolph’s partner in the Cleveland Female Seminary.