University of Virginia Library

IX. Antecedents of the New President

In appraising the work of an executive head, whether
of a nation or of a university, it is essential that we
should know something about the influences which have
qualified him to perform successfully the duties of the
position that he occupies. This is especially imperative
in the case of the president of an institution of learning,
which, like the University of Virginia in 1904–05, had
passed at one leap from the divided administrative
system approved by Jefferson to a system in which the
power was, in no small part, concentrated in the hands
of a single individual. We shall, in a later chapter,
describe the scope of the very liberal functions, which
by the action of the Board of Visitors, were attached
to the newly created office. Suffice it to say here that
these functions gave the first President so much authority
that a study of the circumstances of his previous
life becomes necessary if we are to obtain a correct
impression of the history of the University while under
his supervision.

The opinions which an executive has expressed form
an important key to an understanding of his general
policy if his power has been commensurate with his
responsibilities. It is true, that, no matter how great
this power may be, a college president is compelled to
be considerate of the views of his board of trustees, and,
in a less degree, also, of those of his faculty; but if
he is a man of vigorous character and clear convictions,
—and without these traits it is hardly likely that he

would have been elected to his office,—he is certain to
stamp the seal of his personality upon the contemporary
tendencies of the institution which he superintends. We
shall touch only on those aspects of the new President's
previous career which appear to us to bear most directly
upon the history of his administration, so far as it has
yet progressed.

In a suggestive address by a distinguished Carolinian
teacher, delivered prior to the Presidency, before the
General Alumni Association of the University of Virginia,
he, with that candor which is always permissible
in a friend, although not always relished in proportion
to its disinterested sincerity, pointed out what he considered
to be the three worst deficiencies of the alma
mater of the men to whom he was then speaking. These
deficiencies, he said, were an absence of the democratic
spirit; a lack of organization; and an aloofness from
the masses of people. This statement, as a whole, was
exaggerated, but admitting its correctness in some
details, what had there been in the career of the new
President which offered a fair assurance that he would
be able to furnish the remedy?

In the first place, he was a native of North Carolina.
Of all the commonwealths of the South, even during
the existence of slavery, that State possessed the most
democratic framework of society. The prevalence of
a general social equality was more perceptible in it than
in any Southern State of equal population. It possessed
no city of importance, like Richmond, Charleston,
Savannah, or New Orleans, to set the social pace; nor
was there sufficient inequality in material fortune among
its inhabitants to produce such a distinct stratification
as was to be seen, for instance, in South Carolina and
Virginia. Its society, as a whole, was one of great

simplicity; and while marked by a wholesome and sturdy
virtue of its own, was only able here and there to pretend
to a share of the distinction which could be rightly
claimed for the social life of its two most famous neighbors.
There were many names in the history of the
liberty-loving people of North Carolina' which were
celebrated for talent and public service, but there were
not so many which enjoyed a general prestige for social
reasons only.

It was altogether logical that the soil of a State,
which even the presence of the slave could not make
aristocratic throughout by encouraging everywhere a
sharp division into classes, should have been nourishing
to the public school long before it had taken root elsewhere
in the South. Education at the public expense
had been pushed further in North Carolina, previous to
1860, than in any other of the Southern communities.
And why? Because that commonwealth possessed a
social organization, which, in its democratic spirit, resembled
the social organizations of the North and West,
—regions that had always supported a public school
system. In 1854, ninety-five thousand of the children of
this State,—one-half of the population whose years
ranged between five and twenty,—were enrolled in local
schools that depended upon the public purse alone for
their maintenance. By 1861, the number of pupils in
these schools had increased to one hundred and fifty
thousand; nor did this juvenile host shrink in size in the
course of the war.

As early as 1839, it had been enacted by the General
Assembly of North Carolina, that, for every twenty
dollars obtained by local taxation for education, forty
should be appropriated for the same purpose out of the
State Literary Fund. Calvin H. Wiley was elected

State Superintendent of Public Instruction in 1852; and
he continued to fill the post until 1865, when he was
thrown out by an alien administration. In consequence
of the dissipation of the school fund, in the Reconstruction
era, through the failure of banks and official robberies,
and in consequence also of the reduction in every
branch of taxation after the restoration of good government,
the work of the public schools was more limited in
scope, and less effective in quality, in 1880, than it had
been in 1860, two decades earlier; but the attitude of the
community towards the system had undergone no real
change.

President Alderman was born too late to have any
personal knowledge of the conditions which prevailed
in his native State before the abolition of slavery; but
he grew up in an atmosphere in which the old community
spirit had been confirmed, and the old democratic
spirit intensified, by the universal impoverishment which
followed the war. The public school system remained,
though temporarily clipped in wing. The great tradition
handed down by Calvin H. Wiley had not lost its hold
upon the imagination of that stout-hearted people, elevated,
not degraded, invigorated, not enfeebled, by all
the sacrifices which they had made for their cause.

The spirit which that people had cherished long before
the war, now, under the pressure of new conditions,
began to spread all over the Southern States. The
lofty example set by Lee at Lexington, and the unwearied
labors of Ruffner, and Sears, and Curry, and their disciples
in less conspicuous spheres, gradually created the
conviction throughout that region that it was only
through a general system of public instruction that its
complete regeneration in every province of activity
could be brought about. In this atmosphere of unselfish

service, there appeared a new type of publicist never
before known in the South,—the educational statesman,
the man who weighed the importance of education, not
from a pedagogic point of view alone, but principally
from the broader point of view of practical and constructive
citizenship. Talents, which formerly would
have been directed to the defence of the institution of
slavery, or to assaults upon the tariff, were now nobly
content to limit their exercise to the advocacy of the
public school.

The most persuasive, eloquent, and zealous spokesman
of the new principle was Curry, a man who deserves
to have more statues erected to his memory than any
statesman associated with the history of the Southern
States in recent times. What was the aim of this man
in the prosecution of his invaluable work? "It was,"
said a distinguished disciple, "to democratize the point
of view of an aristocratic society; to revolutionize its
impulses and aspirations; to stimulate the habit of community
effort for public ends; to enrich the concept of
civic virtue; to exemplify the ideal of social service to
young men; and to set the public school in its proper
correlation to all other educational agencies in front
of the public mind as the chief concern of constructive
statesmanship."

The example set by Curry before all eyes, and the
principles which he advocated, with the passion of a
great preacher and the wisdom of a practical statesman,
inflamed the imaginations and appealed to the sense of
action of many promising young men, who soon came
to think with him that here was to be found the most
effective means of rebuilding the South materially and
of restoring its former political influence. Among
these young men was Edwin A. Alderman. "The first

vote that I ever cast," said he in a public address in
1902, "was for the public school; the first dollar that
I ever earned was in the public school; and no honor
has ever come into my life, no joy has entered my soul,
comparable to the annexing of my life, twenty years
ago, to this high service."

During his studentship at Chapel Hill, he had displayed
the special abilities which, under the former
order, would have fitted him for a successful political
career, and under the new, for the less brilliant honors
of the profession of law or theology; but instead of
following the gleam which led straight to political, legal,
or ecclesiastical distinction, he turned away to devote his
powers, native and acquired, to the more prosaic and
much less lucrative calling of a teacher. Thus he started
upon a career which carried him step by step from the
superintendency of the public schools of Goldsboro, in
his native State, to the Presidency of the University
of Virginia. In travelling the highway of that long
interval, he was to pass a succession of milestones which
were to indicate the stages of his progress in his profession,
—the chair of History in the State Normal and
Industrial College at Greensboro, the chair of History
and Philosophy of Education at Chapel Hill, the Presidency
of the University of North Carolina, and the
Presidency of Tulane University, in New Orleans.

It was in 1883 that young Alderman heard for the
first time an address by Dr. Curry. The impression of
that occasion confirmed him in the view, which he, as
an earnest teacher in the public schools, already took
of the moral aspects of his vocation. "A thriving
North Carolina town," he says, "was proposing to tax
itself for adequate school facilities. This was not then
an everyday occurrence in North Carolina. Curry stood

before them and plead with passion and power for the
children of the community. I remember how he seized
a little child impulsively, and with dramatic instinct,
placed his hand upon his curly head and pictured to the
touched and silent throng the meaning of a little child to
human society. It was the first time I had heard a man
of such power spend himself so passionately in such a
cause. I had seen and heard men speak in that way
about personal religion, and heaven, and hell, and struggles
and wrongs long past, but never before about
children. It seemed to me, and all young men who
heard him, that here was a vital thing to work for,—
here, indeed, a cause to which a man might nobly attach
himself, feeling sure that, though he himself might fail,
the cause would go proudly marching on."

In 1889, when President Alderman was only twenty-eight
years old, and when barely seven had passed since
his departure from college, there occurred an episode in
his life which was colored with something of the ardor
that burns in the breast of the true crusader. He and
Charles Duncan McIver, that sturdy offspring of the
transplanted stock of the Highland glens, were appointed
conductors of institutes for their native State. These
two young men, who were especially picked out because
of their experience, ability, zeal, and energy, were instructed
to visit every part of that highly diversified
region, in order to demonstrate to its people, in a general
way, (1) the need and duty of the commonwealth
to give an education to every child, whatever his class
or color, within her borders; and (2) the positive right
which each of those children possessed to receive an
education at public expense. It was planned that an
institute should be held in every county. Through the
institute, the mass of inhabitants were to learn precisely

what the public school system meant; why it was set up;
how its standards could be raised; how its usefulness in
every way could be improved. In their turn, the
teachers working under this system were to be taught
the best methods of pedagogy; the true aims for members
of their profession; how each separate school should
be organized; and how the pupils should be housed and
their health protected.

In his sympathetic sketch of his associate, President
Alderman says, "I recall commencement night at Chapel
Hill in the year 1889. We were to start out on a new
and untried experiment in North Carolina and the South,
—a deliberate effort by new campaign methods to create
and mould public opinion on the question of popular
education, involving taxation for the benefit of others.
I remember that we talked about our plans and purposes
and difficulties until the cocks began to crow. We
talked on until the sun rose. I am inclined to think it
about the best night I have ever spent, for an intelligent
and unselfish idea held our youth under its spell, and
bound us for life to a service which was not the service
of self."

Having apportioned the territory of the State between
them, they then, with words of mutual encouragement,
separated, like two young missionaries to whom
had been assigned respectively a spiritual task in a different
region; and during three years, without a single
halt in the prosecution of their adventure, each, in his
own set of counties, carried forward aloft the new banner
of civic salvation through popular education. The
ground traversed by young Alderman spread from the
sea to the mountains. In one stage of his crusade, he
was only able to advance from point to point by the use

of a boat, while behind him spread away to Hatteras,
looming on the horizon, the glittering surface of the
Sounds. In another stage, he passed along in sight of
the highest peaks of the Appalachians, wreathed in the
clouds of morning or afternoon. In the eastern counties,
shut off by salt water from railways, and possessing
few roads, a deadly lethargy seemed, at that time, to
have palled the minds of the illiterate and ignorant but
kind-hearted and good-natured inhabitants. No effective
means of mental improvement were then in reach of
those isolated men, women, and children.

The young conductor lingered a week in each county
employing every moment of his time in conferring with
school teachers and trustees, and addressing the people at
large. Like a Methodist minister riding his circuit, he
spoke to his audiences in granaries, in churches, in town-halls,
in ware-houses. Each occasion, in its social aspects,
recalled something of the spirit of the camp-meeting
and the country fair. The rush of yelping dogs to
the door when aroused by some sound without, and the
wailing of sick babies or sleepy children in the laps of
mothers seated on the benches, broke the patness of many
amusing anecdotes, and the flow of many eloquent periods,
from the lips of the man on the platform. But in
spite of these crude interruptions, he continued to talk
to them in a strain of familiar conversation, which, notwithstanding
the by-play of humor to ease the attention,
never lost sight of the main thesis; namely, that the free
school was the ark of the covenant, and that each community
must consent to support it by the taxation of its
own citizens. In the course of his entire tour, he conducted
thirty institutes; travelled nearly twenty-seven
hundred miles by rail and five hundred by carriage; and

addressed thirteen hundred and thirty-five teachers, thus
reaching indirectly from seventy-five thousand to one
hundred thousand children.

By his association with city schools as teacher and
superintendent, and by his incumbency of an important
chair in the State normal and industrial college, Professor
Alderman had come to comprehend the educational
wants of the large or urban communities; and by his
swing around the circle of the Carolina counties, he had
been able to get an equally clear insight into the needs
of the small or rural communities. There was no man
of his age in the South whose practical knowledge of the
public school system, founded upon actual observation
at the closest quarters, was superior in fullness or sympathy
to his own. His convictions were summed up in
his own utterance: "Every child has the same right to
be educated as he has to be free; and the one right is
as sacred as the other."

The next step forward was his appointment to the
professorship of History and Philosophy of Education,
in the University of North Carolina; and the next,
his election to the Presidency of that old and honored
seat of learning. This was a State institution, and
the capstone of the public school system of the commonwealth.
He soon perceived that the spirit of its students
had drifted from the aspirations which had been
popular during his own undergraduate years; at that
time, the most talented looked forward to law, pedagogy,
or politics, as the pursuit surest to furnish an opportunity
to gratify their ambition; now all the solid financial
enchantments of an industrial democracy had begun
to whisper to them from the walls of the lecture-rooms.

The new President, in his inaugural address, struck a
chord upon which he was to continue to lay an emphatic

finger throughout his subsequent career. "What sort
of a university are we going to make here?" he asked.
"Shall it be a good, honest, disciplinary college, seeking
no new truth, dealing with letters, and records, and traditions,
and arts? Or shall it become a great modern
force, doing that also, but alert to all social needs, from
the problems of suffrage to the problems of the transfusion
of electrical forces? There can be no limit set
to the ideal of a State university. It must be a source
of power to all below it, or fail miserably. Everything
may be justly brought in it necessary to citizenship,
livelihood, and character, in the twentieth century. After
isolation, we are entering into membership in the modern
world. Not only is there needed the directing brain
and the cunning hand, the factory and the blast furnace,
but also the man who has the right public spirit, and the
force to make himself felt; the thinking man who sees
that civic unity and community effort must replace raw
individualism, and the disunion and rage of section, party,
and sect. This is the mighty social engine to create that
benign force."

In the course of his official oversight of this famous
university, President Alderman obtained as accurate
a knowledge of the working of a great State seat of
learning as he had already acquired of the working of
the humblest primary, and the most advanced secondary,
school. Here too he was in a position to exhibit administrative
capacity in a large way. By the influence
of his policy, the faculty and students were welded into
a harmonious unity; the number of matriculates enrolled
increased; the volume of income rose; new buildings
were added to the original group; and a higher appreciation
of the value of the institution was spread abroad
through the commonwealth.

From Chapel Hill, he was translated to Tulane University,
a seat of learning in which were combined the
characteristics of a State organization and a private
foundation. The original college had merged its entity
into a new institution created by the endowments of
four individuals, the chief of whom was Paul Tulane,—
in whose honor, it had been named the "Tulane University
of Louisiana." It was really a union of colleges,
—the college of arts and sciences, the college of technology,
the Sophie Newcomb Memorial Woman's College,
and the schools of pedagogy, law, and medicine.
President Alderman's administration here was marked
by the same success which had given distinction to his
administration at Chapel Hill. As a member of the
Southern Educational Board, he had an additional opportunity
of studying and weighing all the varied influences
which were either retarding or advancing the welfare
of the Southern States in every department of their vital
interests. In cooperation with McIver, he had directed
the educational activities of that Board; and after
McIver's death, he had become the chairman of its campaigns
and its principal agent. In 1906, he was chosen
a member of the General Education Board.