University of Virginia Library

X. Scholastic Convictions of the New President

From the previous statement of facts, it is obvious
that the new president had enjoyed an exceptional experience,
—whether in extent or variety,—in preparation
for the office which, in 1904, he was called upon to fill
at the University of Virginia. To sum up: he had been
educated at one of the oldest and most respected seats
of learning in the South; as a public school-teacher, a
public school superintendent, a conductor of institutes,
and a professor in a normal and industrial college, he
had had an opportunity to weigh the power of the public

school system as an instrument for improving the condition
of the people at large; as President of the University
of North Carolina, he had been in a position to decide
what was the right policy which a State university should
pursue, if it was to fulfill its duty to the community as a
whole; as President of Tulane University, he had been
able to study the special influences for good in many
directions which a great institution of culture, resting
upon private endowment, could create and spread abroad.
By virtue of these combined experiences, rising from the
lowest to the highest rung of the scholastic ladder, the
new executive head of the University of Virginia,—
gifted originally by nature with the necessary basic qualities,
—had learned to administer large affairs with good
judgment; to take the lead of faculties and students with
tactful skill; and in his representative capacity, to appear
before the world in an attitude of grace and dignity.
And to crown these advantages, he had, as a member
of the great educational boards, which had scattered,
with liberal hand, their benefactions throughout the
South, come to know, with thoroughness, the conditions
which prevailed in all parts of that region; the difficulties
which had to be surmounted by its people; and the spirit
in which the solution of their problems had to be
approached by themselves and by their alien friends.

The educational convictions of a Southerner who has
enjoyed such comprehensive opportunities as these to
understand the needs of his own section, are always important;
but they assume a special significance, in their
relation to the University of Virginia, when they are
the convictions of a man who occupies the office of its
presidency, with the possession of very great personal
power in every province of its administration.

The impression which had prevailed in that institution

previous to 1865, and for many years afterwards,
was that the only functions of a university were to breed
or nourish gentlemen and to produce scholars,—the
first function preponderating in value over the second.
The most consistent motto which the University of Virginia
could, in those times, have adopted was to be found
in the familiar stanza of Thackeray beginning "Who
misses, or who wins the prize,"[3] supplemented by other
lines proclaiming the power of knowledge. The old argument
was that, if the instincts of the gentleman and the
scholar could be brought to flower in the student, the impulses
of a useful citizen would inevitably accompany the
development. If the student was chivalrous in feeling,
unselfish in motive, and gentle in conduct, a lover of good
literature, and the possessor of a cultivated intellect, it
was confidently anticipated that he would later on perform
with fidelity his duty to himself, to his family, to
his neighborhood, to his State, to his country.

The University of Virginia made no pretension to
serving the community directly, but it did claim that it
served the community indirectly by tacitly and persistently
inculcating in the individual student the importance
of setting an upright and stimulating example, and by so
training him in mind and morals, within its precincts, that
he did set that example in after-life. It reached out to
every citizen, high or low, only through its graduates.
It did not assert that it was a lighthouse in itself, but
it did endeavor to convert each graduate into a guiding
torch for his own community. Every community was
an aggregation of individuals. Develop the individual
under the arcade, in the dormitory, and in the class-room,
and he in turn, would, with the cooperation of his former
fellow-students, develop the community. It has

been reserved for a later age to declare that there was an
aristocratic bent in this attitude. If the usefulness of
a tree is to be judged by its fruit, then those in sympathy
with that spirit have only to point to the types of men
who left the halls of the University at the time that this
spirit was in the full flush of its vitality.

As we have seen, the economic changes set in motion
in the Southern States by the fall of the Confederacy
had come to be plainly perceptible by 1904. One of the
most conspicuous results of these changes, as we have
already mentioned, was the rise of the community spirit.
The existence of this new spirit had been clearly discerned
by the authorities of the University of Virginia
long before that year; and they had endeavored to adapt
the administration of the institution to it without destroying
that original policy upon which we have just been
dwelling. They had altered the curriculum of the old
degree of master of arts simply because this degree, as
it then was, tended to disassociate the University from
the current life of the State, by narrowing its capacity
for practical usefulness, and by restricting its principal
function to serving as a nursery for specialists and technical
scholars. They had been successful in creating a
genuine relation between the University and the teachers
by free tuition and the summer institutes; and between the
public school pupils and the University undergraduate
courses by the establishment of scholarships. The long
agitation for the erection of the Presidency had a part of
its origin in this desire to get in closer touch with the
new community spirit, which called so imperatively for
the spirit of efficiency while insisting upon the spirit of
democracy. Before the new office was introduced, it was
perceived that the University of Virginia could not
disregard the requirements of the new era if it was to

survive,—it must reorganize its administration; it must
recoordinate its studies; it must alter its outlook, if it was
to retain the place which it had so long held with so much
distinction.

How far was the man who was elected President in
sympathy with this new community spirit, which all
thoughtful alumni of the University, however wedded to
the past and its splendid traditions of individualism, knew
had to be reckoned with and obeyed? His repeated
utterances, recorded through a long series of years, leave
no room for doubt as to what he looked upon as the
true function of the universities of the modern South;
and as to what he considered to be their proper relation
with all the phases of the waxing industrial democracy
of that far-spreading region.

"Education," he said in his inaugural address at Tulane,
"exists to make men. The public schools constitute
one step in that process, the secondary schools, another,
colleges still another. If we let the grass grow
between us and the doors of the public school, that neglect
will spell ruin to us. The University must keep
its eyes on the people." Again, in an address before
the National Educational Association, delivered not long
afterwards, he said, "Our universities must interest
themselves in the things which interest the people, no
matter how homely or prosaic,—the negro's cabin, the
factory child, the village library, the prices current, the
home, the field, the shop." "The University," he remarked
in his inaugural address in 1905, "is an agent
of society as completely public as the State capitol. Its
glory is service to society. Its strength is sustenance by
society. We who administer, govern, teach, are the servants
of the people. The university must reach out into
every hamlet, and touch hopefully every citizen, so that

the home, the village, the field, the shop, may see the
university for what it is: an intellectual lighthouse, not
alone for the few who trim its wicks and fill its lamps,
but for all the uncharted craft adrift upon the sea."

"No cry for guidance, in its complex development,"
he declared in an article printed in the South Atlantic
Quarterly in 1906, "should come up out of an American
State which is not met with an immediate answer by its
State university. Its duty is not alone to provide
teachers, lawyers, doctors, and clean-hearted and clear-minded
men,—it is that, of course,—but to provide as
well experts in every phase of expansion in a complex
time: in engineering, in commerce, in agriculture, in the
domestic arts, in public health, in public transportation
and public welfare generally." In a letter to the alumni
during the session of 1909–10, he wrote, "The University
should see beyond its walls the needs of an advancing
civilization, and have both impulse and power to
carry help to a free society, ever reaching out to higher
levels. If they need to know how better to till the soil,
—out of which all wealth must come,—and to carry
forward an orderly economic life; if their thought is
upon the health and physical well-being of community
life; if they desire to build their schools and local institutions
with wisdom and farsightedness; if they have
need of the knowledge which will enable them to put
beauty and dignity and spiritual value into their homes
and lives,—their university should not fail them in these
just desires, but should be an ever present stimulus to
their aspirations, and a tower of strength in elevating
the standards of living, As the servants of the commonwealth,
the scholars and teachers of the university are at
the call of the people."

"The ultimate mission of the State University in

America," he wrote in 1912, "will be to supply the
brains, not only to the fortunate few who can repair to
its walls, but to all the people, who constitute the life of
the State." And in an address delivered during the
session of 1911–12, he said that "the supreme duty of
this generation in educational progress was to rise
above institutional exclusiveness, and behold primary
schools, colleges, technical schools, professional schools,
and university, working together as one great
beneficial agency, feeding, stimulating, guiding, and understanding,
and supplementing each other."

"The university," said he in an address at Chapel
Hill, in 1915, "may justly take its place as that coordinate
branch of democratic government out of which may
be drawn a body of experts and social-minded men, ever
ready to undertake, to analyze, and understand, and
sympathize, with the State in the making; who can organize
the education of its children, foster economic organization
in its moral life, and vitalize and socialize the
isolation of its country life; who can improve its agriculture
and animal husbandry, and aid in organizing its
public revenues and give direction to its thought."
"More and more," he affirmed in a report to the Board
of Visitors, in the course of the same year, "the
university is seeking to emphasize the duty of the
university to care for the State. The old idea was for
the State to care for the university." And in the Alumni
News for 1915, he declared that "the primary duty of
a university was undoubtedly to discover truth, to set
standards, and to train men within its walls. Its secondary
duty was to carry its knowledge to the whole life of
the State and region which it serves. The first prepares
for leadership; the second guarantees wise and sympathetic
citizenship."

"No university," he remarked on another occasion,
"will long endure which is not in fairly close touch with
the community to whose needs it must minister. The
university's chief task is first to teach its own students
faithfully and well, not primarily for their sakes as individuals,
but as a means of State and national enrichment.
It must mould the sources of public opinion by
supplying technical evidence, just standards, and varied
scholarship, to the State's peculiar problems of business,
health, education, religion, and agriculture. University
and State must work together in a partnership of mutual
obligation. The university must be given a chance to
realize its ideals and demonstrate its energy, and the
State must then demand of it inspiration and guidance."
And again he affirmed that a university "is a great
cooperative public corporation in harmony with the
growth of modern activities, uniting on almost equal
terms with the State in contribution to the material,
social, and moral welfare of all the people without, as
well as within, its walls. Universities have drawn closer
to the people, not to popularize themselves cheaply, but
to enrich and strengthen the lives of the people. The
people are asking of every institution whether it be
serviceable or no, and demanding that its efficiency express
itself in service to the people as a whole."

"If a State is wise and farseeing," he remarked as
late as 1917, "it will demand of such accumulations of
human energy and scientific material a service to the
whole commonwealth which will cause a deeper intelligence
to filter throughout the State; and which will
bring creative helpfulness to communities as well as to
individuals. Those who govern the State, whenever
they undertake large matters based on scientific needs
affecting the public good, should immediately ask themselves:

what sciences can be got, to promote their ends,
from their institutions of higher learning; and these
should be commandeered (to use a military term) to
help the State rather than be put in the position of thrusting
themselves into the service of the people, whom they
were brought into existence to serve."

The preceding quotations from the addresses of
President Alderman, which might be greatly multiplied,
disclose the convictions which he has always held as to
the proper functions of a modern seat of learning. We
have seen what ideals entered into the administration of
the University of Virginia before the influences of the
present conditions in the South had begun fully to reveal
themselves. The additional ideals of the same institution,
as created by these new conditions, and stimulated
by the policy of its executive, in harmony with the
trend of the age, are that the University is not simply a
more or less secluded nursery for the production of
scholars and gentlemen, but that it is also a great workshop
to which the whole community can turn for practical
instruction and leadership; that it is a lighthouse, which
casts penetrating rays along the whole coast of the
State's multitudinous and complicated interests, for the
profit of every citizen.

The most radical exemplar of this general conception
of what a university should do for the community is,
of course, the University of Wisconsin, which has been
described as a bureau of experts attached to the State
government for the benefit of the State,—a general information
office, ready to supply all persons with scientific
and technical knowledge for use in their daily life.
It possesses numerous fully equipped laboratories for
research, and a circle of professors thoroughly trained
to employ these laboratories to the utmost advantage.

In consequence, that institution can rightly boast that,
annually, it has added many millions of dollars to the
incomes of the people of its commonwealth.

We will anticipate our account of the different schools
during the Ninth Period, 1904–1919, by pointing out
briefly, at this stage, the community directions which
the new university spirit has, under President Alderman's
general guidance, so far taken. First, there has been
established a geological department, which is investigating,
with ever increasing thoroughness, the geological
formations and mineral deposits of the State.
Second, there has been founded a department of forestry,
designed both to utilize and to preserve the State's resources
in this important province. Third, there has
been erected a large and well-equipped addition to the
hospital for ministering to the sick, and for researches
in the field of public health. Fourth, a school of education
has been created to strengthen the general aims of
the public school system; and to this a department has
now been added for the training of teachers, and for
the improvement of university instruction in all its
branches. Fifth, university extension has been adopted,
with the view of carrying university information
and nurture to every hearth. Sixth, the Summer School
of Methods has been perfected; and, seventh, a School
of Finance and Commerce has been established, with a
large endowment to support it.

Professors of the University of Virginia have served
with ability on different Public Commissions, such as the
Educational, the State Geological, the State Tax, the
State Highway, the Federal Tariff, and also on the State
Board of Education and the numerous State cooperative
leagues. In addition, the institution has taken, through
its School of Secondary Education, an important part in

improving the sanitary condition of the public schools;
and through its school of hygiene, it has increased the
value of the public health inspection. Furthermore,
it has entered the religious life of the State by the zealous
and efficient labors of its Young Men's Christian Association;
it has encouraged the work of the State Archaeological
Society; it has assisted the debating societies of
the high schools; and by every means in its power, has
fostered and encouraged the various bodies organized
for civic betterment.