Education: College at a Corner

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(See front cover)

A girl on horseback rode into Baton Rouge one day last week, driving nine head of cattle before her. She drove them into the campus of Louisiana State University and turned them over to the authorities. President James Monroe Smith of the University had announced that farm produce would be accepted in lieu of cash for tuition. She was Elena Percy, 17, of West Feliciana Parish. She wanted to be a freshman. She was accepted. . . .

Throughout the land at colleges opening or about to open, similar scenes occurred last week. Boys and girls without money sat down with officials whose earnest wish was somehow to finance the spread of culture in a time of shrunken credit. It was a realistically strained fortnight in a world where strain is usually academic to the adults and exaggerated to the young.

Just above the middle line of New Jersey the elm-lined streets of Princeton lay immemorially somnolent. In the buff colonial parallelepiped that is Nassau Hall, the permanent cogs of Princeton University prepared in time-honored fashion to open the college, not particularly exercised over the fact that higher education in the U. S. faced a trying moment, and that Princeton, one of the traditional leaders of U. S. pedagogy, was at a corner in its course through its second century.

A college is the quotient of its tradition divided into its student body and Princeton's tradition was taking a turn. Dr. John Grier Hibben, the gentle scholar who succeeded strenuously scholarly Woodrow Wilson in 1912, had retired. Into his place, part-time and ad interim, was coming a figure as interesting in the traditional academic scene as is onetime Morgan Partner Thomas Sovereign Gates who took charge of Pennsylvania's big, down-at-heel University two years ago. From its board of trustees Princeton had drafted the lumbering, plainspoken, understanding head of the country's second biggest life insurance company—Prudential Life's Edward Dickinson Duffield of the Class of 1892, descendant of Princeton's first president, Jonathan Dickinson, son of Rev. Thomas Duffield who taught in Princeton for 56 years, brother of Princeton's longtime (1901-30) Treasurer Henry Green Duffield. He would be in Princeton whole Tuesdays and Saturday mornings (inevitably staying over for football games).

"Ed" or "Duff" Duffield was graduated the same year as the late Author Jesse Lynch Williams, the late Georgia Publisher Boudre Phinizy, Alonzo Church, vice-chancellor of New Jersey, Dr. Evan Evans, rich Manhattan physician. Lawyer Theodore Wilson Morris Jr., partner of Democrat John William Davis, and Varnum Lansing ("Wilkie") Collins, Princeton's Secretary. "Duff" was celebrated for an oration called "Scotch Granite," extolling Princeton's early President John Witherspoon. With generous gestures and booming voice, he delivered "Scotch Granite" whenever asked, passing it off many a time as extemporaneous. Because Edward Duffield's large bulk was mounted heavily upon large feet, he was sometimes called "Paddlefoot," 'and sometimes "How Firm a Foundation'' would be played when he entered prayer meeting.