| | 1 | Author: | University of Virginia
Board of Visitors | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | Board of Visitors minutes (1911) November 14, 1911  | | | | Published: | 1911 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia::Board of Visitors | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | At a meeting of the Board of Visitors on above dates
in the office of the President, East Lawn, I have the honor to inform you that
I have accepted a position as research Chemist with the
Kentucky Agricultural Experiment Station, and I herewith
hand you my resignation as Professor of Chemistry, in
the University of Virginia, to take effect at the beginning
of the next collegiate year. I beg to acknowledge with very
profound and sincere regret your communication of the 19th,
inst., tendering your resignation as Professor of Chemistry,
in the University of Virginia. I wish for you in your new
position as research chemist with the Kentucky Agricultural
Experiment Station every opportunity for the advancement of
your chosen field of work. You have served this University,
permit me to say, with ability and distinction during your
brief period of work here. You have made friends of your
colleagues and friends of your pupils, and all of us feel,
no one more than myself, that in losing you we are sustaining
a genuine loss both in the direction of scientific power
and personality. I appreciate the motives that have moved
you to this decision, and while I deeply regret that the
result is your separation from the work here, I can only
wish for you in this new field the abundant measure of
success you have achieved here. The trustees of the Peabody Education
Fund at a meeting held in New York on November 1, (1911)
adopted the following: The University of Virginia will undertake to
maintain a Department of Education upon which not less
than $10,000.00 a year will be expended for maintenance
per annum, provided the Peabody Education Fund will donate
the sum of $40,000.00 to the Rector and Visitors of the
University for the purpose of erecting a suitable building
for the home of this department. The University already
has in hand funds amounting to $7,000.00 a year that could
be used legitimately for this purpose. It would be necessary
for it, in order to carry out this proposition, to increase
this amount by the sum of $3,000.00. This it hopes to
be able to do in the next six months. It is, therefore,
suggested that that amount of time, at least, be allowed
the University of Virginia in which to meet the conditions
of this proposition. I have the honor to inform
you that the Executive Committee of the Foundation
at its meeting on June 8 voted to admit the University
of Virginia to the list of accepted institutions of
the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. I beg to acknowledge with very
great pleasure and satisfaction the receipt of your communication
of June 9th, wherein you inform me that the Executive
Committee of the Foundation at its meeting on June 8th, voted
to admit the University of Virginia to the list of accepted
Institutions of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement
of Teaching. I am gratified at this action of the Foundation,
not solely because it secures against want the old age of
men who have given their lives to an unlucrative but noble
profession, but in a higher sense because such action signalizes
the accomplishment by this University of a great undertaking
which it set out to bring to pass nearly seven years ago.
It now occupies a consistent and logical relation to the system
of secondary education with which it is allied, and it has also
concluded legislation by which it occupies consistent and logical
relation in its graduate school, to the college and higher institutions.
Such action of the Foundation is an added testimony
to the fact that standards of admission established have been
administered with integrity and good sense. I wish to express
to the Foundation assurances of our belief that the Foundation
has helped powerfully in enabling this University, and other
Universities in this country to establish and maintain such
standards as to unify the whole educational process. I too
hope that the relations between the Foundation and the University
may be one of material help and service in all educational development. We are forwarding to you today via Adams Express
thirty notes of $1,000.00 each, made by J. W. Hough and
Abner S. Pope, payable to the Rector and Visitors of the
University of Virginia. All of these notes bear interest
from Jan. 1, 1911 to Jan. 1, 1913, at the rate of three
per cent per annum, and after that date, at the rate of
six per cent per annum. The notes are as follows: I am very anxious to get your
advice and co-Operation in connection with the expenditure
of the income of the Phelps-Stokes Fund of which I am one
of the Trustees. This Fund, which amounts to about a million
dollars, was left by my Aunt, Miss Caroline Phelps Stokes,
with the understanding that the income should be used for
various educational purposes, but more particularly for advancing
the cause of negro education in the South. I have
had several conferences with out mutual friend, Dr. Dillard,
and I wish your specific opinion regarding the plan that we
have had under favorable discussion for creating fellowships,
endowed we will say at $10,000. each, at two or three
representative state universities in the South, such as the
University of Virginia, and the University of Georgia. The
Fellowship to be awarded by the proper university authorities
to graduate students whose time would be devoted to studies
on some phase of the negro problem. The administration of
the Fund, the selection of incumbents, etc., to be entirely
in the hands of the University authorities. I was greatly interested to have your
letter of the 29th, ult., and have been giving the matter
of your suggestion very grave thought. I have felt for
many years that a fundamental thing to do in this tangled
problem is to cause it to be scientifically approached by the
scholarship of the South. The thing to do is to take it out
of the nervous system of our people and their emotions and to
get it set up before them as a great human problem, economic
in nature, scientific in character, to be acted upon as the
result of broad, wise, sympathetic study. The time ought to
come when our best scholars will take pride in making contributions,
however minute, toward the handling of the great
question. I have no doubt that an endowed foundation of the
character suggested by you would be most acceptable to the
authorities of this University. I am a bit troubled about
just the right suggestion to make to you in regard to your
definite proposition for the creating of fellowships endowed at
approximately $10,000, and having for their primary purpose the
securing ultimately of a small group of trained men who shall giv
their life to the study and improvement of the negro conditions.
Let me explain a bit. I established here, at
Tulane University, and at the University of North Carolina
the first Professorship of Economics: Sociological subjects
were not being taught in Southern institutions. Even
Political Science, as a scientific subject, has no independent
status. We now have a very strong department of Economics,
and temporarily, a very able lecturer in Political Science.
Our full Professor of Economics, as you may know, is on the
Tariff Board, and his place is supplied by a veryable
fellow from Wisconsin. We have two full professors in the
Department of Education, and these departments make it a
point to emphasize the sociological aspects of education.
There is, however, no Professor of Sociology. It, of course,
is as yet an undefined and somewhat empiric science, but
there is a tremendous current of interest among our men in
the big questions affecting social betterment, the improvement
of rural life, the imporvement of industrial life, the better
governing of cities, questions of public health and sanitation,
and foremost among them, supreme in its importance, stands,
of course, the negro problem with all of its implications.
The ideal need here is a professorship in that great field,
giving to the negro problem its right place as the chief
subject of scientific study by our analytic minded scholars.
This, of course, means a good deal of money. The next in
order would be, it seems to me, a lectureship demanding much
less money, but devoted almost exclusively to the study of
the negro problem and the social betterment question, to
giving information to the young men, to giving the proper
bent to their minds, to stimulating their interest, to
developing in them right methods of approach to such a subject.
It seems to me such a lectureship logically precedes
the establishment of a fellowship. Out of such lectureship and
its activities would come such interest as to arouse young
men inside or outside of the University to strive for a prize to
be offered by us in the form of a fellowship or scholarship. W
the sum you mentioned, $500.00 a year would be yielded as
income. If $400.00 of this could be given to a man who would
come here and make, say, a dozen lectures and meet men in semina
ways; and then, if $100.00 could be made as a prize for the
best bit of research work in small fields at first-I mean small
as to area-the matter could get itself tried out, though on somewhat
too meager a basis. I hesitate for a moment, though I hate
to seem to hesitate a second in such a matter to establish an
independent Fellowship in such a subject when there is back of
it no clear instruction or stimulation in the great field which
the Fellowship would cover. My fear about it is simply that
the work itself would not get justice. The work would not yield
its best results. You may be sure I want this opportunity here.
Would it be possible to consider the proposition to increase the
sume just a bit so as to make the Lectureship and the Fellowship
co-existent? If such could be done it seems to me a new era
would be brought about in our best institutions in their
attitude toward this matter. Last year one of our professors
gave a course of talks on the negro, based on Weatherford's
book. It was astonishing the interest taken in the matter,
the book being used as a text-book. I heartily wish I could
talk with you about this matter, or with my friend,
Dillard. Instruction in such a matter is not only not
unwise, but most needed and would be welcome. I would
never want to see such a fellowship established here, unless
I saw fruitful results issuing out of it. I do not want it
to become a mere academic thing that in time would lose
its edge and become a mere formal prize. I hope you will
not reach any definite conclusion in the matter until in
some way we can talk it out, for it is a big question and
incapable of just solution by interchange of letters. I have the honor to inform you that at a meeting
of the Trustees of the Phelps-Stokes Fund held at the office
of Anson Phelps Stokes, 100 William St., New York City,
Wednesday, November 15, 1911, the following vote was passed: | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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