The history of Colby College, Part 29

Author: Colby College
Publication date: 1963
Publisher: Waterville, Colby College Press
Number of Pages: 716

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When the Trustees selected as their new president the Professor of Theology at Crozer Theological Seminary, they were turning to a man whom they already knew and who already knew the College. At the age of 27, he had come to Waterville in 1860 to take the pastorate of the church which Jeremiah Chaplin, Colby's first president, had organized in 1818. There he had proved to be a good preacher and a tactful administrator. With remarkable skill he had weath- ered the storm of theological controversy caused by the return to Waterville of the former Baptist pastor and Colby president, David Sheldon, to organize the Waterville Unitarian Church. Taking the Civil War very much to heart, Pepper had asked his church for leave to spend several months as a chaplain with the Army of the Potomac. The College Trustees remembered all those achievements, and they noted how much the man had grown during his years as a professor at Crozer.

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HISTORY OF COLBY COLLEGE

The new president bore proudly the name of Colby's first missionary, George Dana Boardman, member of the first graduating class in 1822 and associate in Burma of the famous Adoniram Judson. George Pepper was born in Ware, Massachusetts, on February 5, 1833. His ancestry traced back to the beginning of the Bay Colony. His mother's father had been with Washington at Valley Forge and was a descendant of the banished Anne Hutchinson. At Williston Seminary Pepper prepared for college and in the fall of 1853 entered Amherst, from which he received his bachelor's degree in 1857. Like Waterville College, Amherst was then young and poor; but though it lacked endowment and equip- ment it had devoted faculty members. Those men gave young Pepper a liberal education, instilling in him a sense of values and of the meaning of life. They taught him that truth is the ultimate goal, and one must be loyal in his search for it at all times. Most of all, they taught him that material things are less im- portant than ideas and ideals.

From Amherst, George Pepper went to the Baptist theological school at Newton, and he had not quite finished his course there when the call came to the pastorate of the Waterville Baptist Church. He accepted the call, but insisted he could not take the position until after his Newton graduation. He came to Waterville in September, but dashed off to Bolton, Massachusetts, in November, to marry Annie Grassie, the sister of his college classmate. It was in Waterville that Mr. and Mrs. Pepper began housekeeping, and it was there in 1910 that they celebrated their golden wedding.

George Pepper belonged to a denomination which, in the middle of the nineteenth century, was fired with evangelical zeal. It was not rare for a traveler to be accosted by some clergyman or layman, utter stranger to him, with the question, "Brother, are you saved?" George Pepper had little sympathy with that approach. He had a keen sense of personal dignity and personal rights. He once said, "I do not make a practice of forcing personally religious conversa- tion upon those whom I meet. If opportunity presents, I avail myself of it. But medicine loathed does no good. I can do better to get acquainted with the per- son himself. There is a just horror in most minds of the manifestations of official, perfunctory love."1

Within a few months after the end of the Civil War, in 1865, Dr. Pepper left Waterville to accept the chair of Church History at Newton, and in 1867 moved to the professorship of Systematic Theology at Crozer. There, fifteen years later, the Trustees of Colby University found him ready to lead their col- lege on to greater usefulness and wider reputation.

Dr. Pepper was inaugurated President of Colby University at the Com- mencement exercises in June, 1882. He had definite ideas about what a college faculty should be.

The teachers form a faculty of education and instruction, not simply to cram words and sentences into hollow skulls, as dentists hammer gold into our hollow teeth. If they are truly a faculty, they must have the faculty --- the desire and the ability to develop the mind, to direct the reason, to proclaim truth and the power to investigate it, to evoke manhood and manly strength used in manly ways, in the classroom and out of it. A college faculty must not delve among the tombs of a kind of corporate old mortality, with no destiny but to make legible again tombstone inscriptions. While not unmindful of the past, drawing from it lessons of wisdom for future guidance, a college faculty must keep step with progress, steady and sure.2

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In no uncertain terms Dr. Pepper made it plain that in his kind of college there was no room for the incompetent or the lazy.

The college is not a kindergarten. Disciplined youth must be well and thoroughly disciplined. The college cannot be an academy or a high school. Better is it to have in college ten students who are truly col- lege students than to have a thousand amorphous nondescripts. The college must have true students-youth with power and disposition to do the work and receive its benefits. A college is not a training school for the feeble-minded, a hospital for the sick, a retreat for the lazy, a reform school for the vicious. All such characters can be spared the college. None such are welcome. Their place, if anywhere, is out- side the college walls.3

A liberal education, contended Dr. Pepper, embodies three vital principles: catholicity, symmetry, and vitality. The first cannot be secured, he held, if studies are to be elective. The student must not be left to choose merely what appeals to his taste; he must be introduced to all fundamental areas of knowledge. In its symmetry, the program must be aimed at the whole man, at his personal trinity of body, mind, and spirit.

Accepting the keys of the college from Abner Coburn, chairman of the Trus- tees, Dr. Pepper said:

I accept from your hands these keys, the office of which they signify, the sacred trust which the office constitutes, and its duties, responsibili- ties, and sacrifices. The confidence thus reposed in me at once humbles and encourages me. To prove that it has not been misplaced will be my constant endeavor. Still all of us must place our ultimate hope not in man, but in the living God. To Him we now turn our eyes; to Him we make our appeal for blessing and success. That He will bless and help us is our assured conviction and our vital encouragement.+

When George Pepper became President, the College was still operating in the red, despite the endowment raised under Champlin and expanded under Robins. In fact an annual deficit had become so usual that, at the annual meeting in 1882, the Finance Committee felt that "the Board should be congratulated because the year's receipts came within $2500 of meeting the year's expenses." The com- mittee expressed hope that receipts and expenditures would at least balance each other in 1883.

The students were delighted with Dr. Pepper's warm personality and his utter lack of that formal pomposity which often characterized college officials in the nineteenth century. He instituted a custom of informal teas for various groups of students at his home. Interested in music, he promoted a series of concerts, by which he sought to cement college and community relations while at the same time bringing good musical programs to the attention of the students.

Appealing to the College Treasurer and prominent trustee, Judge Percival Bonney of Portland, Dr. Pepper secured Bonney's promise to raise among Port- land friends of the College the necessary money to install an organ to be built by the well-known manufacturer Estey of Boston. The Echo praised the new instrument, but was skeptical about the voices which it might accompany. "We hope that this improvement in the instrumental part of the chapel music will bring a corresponding improvement in the vocal part. There may be good

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singers in the choir, but together as a quartette they are a complete failure. We would prefer to hear them sing separately than to hear them mingle their voices in such terrible discords."

To the receptions given by Dr. and Mrs. Pepper, the Echo gave high praise.

The idea that students dislike to meet the professors outside their classes is a mistaken one. The rigidness of discipline and the stern dignity which characterized the college professor fifty years ago tended to im- press upon the mind of the student that the professor was an unpleasant personage always to be avoided. But as times have changed, so have men. Students are not accustomed now to look upon their professors with awe, but to regard them as persons whose duty it is to instruct, not to rule.

Not everything that President Pepper did was greeted with favor. The Echo, in November, 1882, voiced the seniors' disapproval of the President's course in Mental Philosophy, a subject which today would be called Psychology.

The seniors are having a mighty hard time. Half the term has passed, and they are still floundering in the darkness of mental science, eagerly gazing for just a peep of light. It is discouraging to any student to know that, if he puts all the time at his disposal on the lesson, he can only skim the surface. We have a textbook which, we are told, must be thoroughly mined in order to be understood. But it is not easy to do any successful mining upon ten or twelve pages of obscure text in the two hours we have available for preparation.

Another unpopular move of President Pepper's was the restitution of Thurs- day morning classes. Soon after the Civil War the old schedule that called for three recitations a day, five days a week, by each student had been modified. In order to accommodate the literary societies and the two fraternities, which held their weekly meetings on Wednesday evening, no recitation was held at 8 A.M. on Thursdays. That omission called for a juggling of schedule, or for a class to meet fewer times a week in a given subject. Such irregularity was obnoxious to Dr. Pepper, and on his insistence in 1883 the faculty voted to restore the early morning classes on Thursday. The old schedule of classes at 8 and 11:30 A.M. and at 4:30 P.M. on each day from Monday through Friday was thus resumed. A letter to the Editor of the Echo, in July, 1883, stated the student protest.

The mere number of catalogued recitations gives little information con- cerning the work done. Colby requires more work day by day in preparation for recitations than perhaps any other college in New Eng- land. Some of the other colleges allow a number of unexcused ab- scences; Colby compels attendance at all. A Colby student absent less than half a term must work out and recite each separate lesson lost. While in some colleges the professor of an ancient language reads in advance to the class all or part of each new lesson, necessitating only a rapid review by the student, at Colby we must laboriously work out each advance assignment with lexicon and grammar. Instead of the classroom being a place where the professor does most of the reciting, it is a searching examination of the results obtained by the student. Add to this a rigid system of ranking, and some idea may be formed

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of the kind of work expected from us. Quality has been the demand here. Now the Trustees ignore that requirement and demand quantity.

Editorially, the Echo pointed out that, during the first three years of the tenure of the present seniors, Wednesday evening had been free from prepara- tion of a recitation at eight o'clock the next morning, and thus the members of the societies-and that included nearly all the students-had opportunity to pre- pare for the literary exercises demanded in the society meetings and to make those meetings educationally valuable. The paper predicted that the change would ruin the societies. Furthermore, the Echo didn't like it because the extra time went so heavily to Greek and Latin, which many students considered as absorbing already too large a share of their study time. Said the Echo, "Greek and Latin receive practically the whole increase, gaining at least 50 recitations, while all other departments combined gain only 37."

Nothing came of this agitation and within a few years the students became quite accustomed to Thursday morning classes. In 1888-89, the last year of the Pepper administration, classes were still held regularly at the three designated hours of 8:00, 11:30, and 4:30. The 8:00 o'clock classes met six days a week, the 11:30 classes five days, and the 4:30 classes four days. Freshmen had Elocution once a week at 2 P.M. on Wednesday. Juniors who elected science had Physics at 2:30 instead of 4:30; and seniors in the classical course had German at 2:30 instead of Geology at 4:30. Four half-hours a week were re- quired of each class in Physical Culture. Sophomores, juniors and seniors had to write compositions five, four and three times a week, respectively. The actual classroom time of each student was about sixteen hours a week.

It was under President Pepper that a beginning was made toward what later became the classical and the scientific curricula. In fact, by 1888, although the catalogue made no such distinction, the Echo often referred to the electives open to students in junior and senior years as classical or literary on the one hand, and as scientific on the other hand.

Under the impetus of the dynamic President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard, advocates of the elective system of college studies gained ground rapidly in the 1880's. Few colleges went to Eliot's extreme of allowing the student to choose freely every study he would pursue in each of his four years-no majors, no minors, no demanded sequences, no specified graduation requirement except the number of completed courses. All colleges were, however, affected in some de- gree by the Eliot ideas.

Before Pepper had become President, a few electives had crept into the Colby curriculum, as has been pointed out in an earlier chapter. Under Pepper they increased slowly, not radically. In 1886 he explained to the Boston Alumni of Colby: "The faculty, with hearty unanimity, have agreed to make Latin and Greek wholly optional after the sophomore year, give to the modern languages a better chance, furnish all practical advantage to the natural and physical sciences, and secure a more complete harmony of all the studies. We admit election, but with such safeguards as will prevent disintegration. We deem unlimited electives a curse."

The Echo summed up the situation in its issue of March, 1886.

Students of the present generation, as they hear former graduates tell of the days when portions of the Greek and Latin texts were committed to memory, and when the sciences were crammed bodily from textbooks,

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are filled with feelings akin to those of a child who listens to his grand- father's tales of hardship and poverty.

During the past twenty-five years the courses and methods of instruc- tion in our colleges have undergone marked changes, and he would be bold indeed who would venture to prophesy what evolutions the next twenty-five years will witness. The curriculum at Colby has been slowly changing with the times. The most radical changes have been, however, made during the present year. The student may now con- sult his own taste to an extent hitherto unknown.

As matters now stand, the studies of the first two years remain as in the past. But, during the last two years, one may continue his classical studies or substitute work in science. History is required during the junior year and in one term of senior year. It will be elective for the two remaining senior terms. To attempt to classify and group the elec- tives under different courses must be regarded as an earnest of what is to come in the future.

In that last sentence the Echo did speak prophetically, but factually it was ahead of its time. The college catalogue definitely did not attempt "to classify and group the electives under different courses." The Echo was indeed right in prophesying that such a grouping would soon come, but even as bold a man as that 1886 student editor scarcely dared predict that Colby would soon be con- ferring the two distinct degrees of Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science.

Let us see what was required and what options the student enjoyed under the Pepper Curriculum of 1885.

Freshmen and sophomores were completely unaffected by the elective prin- ciple. Throughout freshman year the subjects were Latin, Greek and Mathemat- ics, with Elocution also required once a week, and Christian Ethics once a week in fall and winter terms, followed by a weekly session in Physiology and Hygiene in the spring term. The freshman program called altogether for sixteen recita- tions a week.

The sophomores, although all their subjects were required, pursued no one subject throughout the year. In the fall term they had Rhetoric and Latin, and in the first half of that term French, in the last half Mathematics. They met once a week also for English Literature. In the winter term the sophomore subjects were Rhetoric and Greek, with French and Mathematics each meeting twice a week throughout the term. The once hour session in English Literature was con- tinued. In the spring their subjects were Mechanics through the term, Greek and English Literature in the first half of the term, and French and Physics in the last half. The sophomore program called for fifteen hours a week of recitation.

When a student began the fall term of his junior year, he was by no means hit by a flock of bewildering electives. He was eased into the system very grad- ually indeed. In that term he was given a heavy dose of required Chemistry --- five hours a week of lecture and recitation and three hours of laboratory. He had to take Mineralogy four hours a week. During the first half of the term he was required to study Logic five days a week It was only in the last half of the term that he was confronted with a single, modest choice. He could then take half a term of either French or Physics. In the winter term the junior could con- tinue Chemistry or take Latin. He had to study Physics and Physiology. In the third term he could continue Chemistry or take German. He could choose be- tween Political Economy and Mathematics, and between Geology and Latin.

J. Seelye Bixler

C ..... ...... A

Franklin W. Johnson

A. Galen Eustis

Robert E. L. Strider II

Herbert L. Wadsworth

George G. Averill

George Otis Smith

Neil Leonard

ZACI

George H. Parmenter

Webster Chester

Herbert C. Libby

William J. Wilkinson

Edward J. Colgan

Beginning at Mayflower Hill

Quiet

A Loud Noise

Broken Ground

Merton Miller laying cornerstone of the library.

1938

The Lorimer brothers and President Johnson laying cornerstone of the Lori- mer Chapel.

Carl J. Weber in the Edwin Arlington Robinson Treasure Room, with portrait of Robinson on the wall above the poet's chair.

Beautifying the Hill

Johnson Day

Planting the Curtis trees

Johnson Pond

Commencement under the willows

Graduation Days

Commencement procession on College Avenue

Outdoor Commencement on Mayflower Hill

Montague Sculpture Court

Miller Library at night

East gate to the Bixler Art and Music Center

Children have fun near the President's House

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By the time a man got to be a senior, he could avoid scientific studies alto- gether if he so desired, and he could do so without further study of Latin or Greek, by selecting such term studies as Psychology, History, Philosophy, German, French, and Moral Science.

When Pepper left the presidency in 1889, Colby was a long way from mak- ing a true distinction between an A.B. course requiring study in the classical languages and a B.S. course concentrating in the sciences. The 1889 curriculum was even farther away from the day in President Johnson's time, when the faculty would awake to the realization that the only distinction of the B.S. course at Colby was the earning of a degree without the study of Latin. The rapid rise of the social sciences had, by 1930, made concentration in science no require- ment for the B.S. degree. When it was seen that the degree no longer carried its original meaning, the College decided to abandon it, and for a quarter of a cen- tury all Colby graduates have now been awarded the same degree of Bachelor of Arts.

But when George Pepper was head of the college, all that dispute about degrees was far in the future. Students who completed the four years' require- ments all received from Dr. Pepper's hands the one kind of diploma, designating them as bachelors of arts. It was left for Dr. Pepper's successors, especially Small, Butler, Roberts and Johnson, to preside over faculties who fought bitterly con- cerning the wisdom of two degrees or one. It is at least interesting to note that in the 1930's, the faculty came round the whole cycle to the position their prede- cessors had held half a century earlier under Dr. Pepper.

Impetus was given to the study of the sciences by men who joined the faculty under President Pepper. Frank S. Capen succeeded Moses Lyford as Professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy in 1884. A graduate of the University of Rochester, the institution that had been founded by a Colby grad- uate, Martin Brewer Anderson, Capen had done graduate work at Harvard and was especially interested in astronomy. Although he remained at Colby only two years, he introduced student experiments into the work in physics and he greatly stimulated interest in the old observatory, situated on a hill west of the college campus, near the later site of the Harris Bakery. In 1885 the Trus- tees heeded Professor Elder's plea to allow him to devote his full time to chemistry and the biological sciences, while they brought in an additional professor in the geological field. The new man was Marshman E. Wadsworth, who like Capen, stayed only two years. He was the first Colby scientist to hold the Ph.D. degree, but not the first faculty member to hold it. That honor had gone to Albion Wood- bury Small, the professor of History and Political Economy in the Pepper admin- istration.

Capen and Wadsworth paved the way for two men who were to play con- spicuous parts in the development of scientific studies at Colby, William A. Rogers and William S. Bayley. In 1886 the former succeeded Capen, but was given the new title of Professor of Physics and Astronomy. Bayley succeeded to both the position and title of Wadsworth, becoming Professor of Mineralogy and Geology in 1887.

William A. Rogers was the internationally known physicist for whom, two years after his arrival in Waterville, Col. Richard Cutts Shannon would erect the astounding building known as the Shannon Physical Laboratory and Observatory -a building constructed according to Rogers' specifications, to facilitate his im- portant research in physics. It is suspected that Col. Shannon had something to do with Rogers' coming to Colby. Perhaps the shrewd Colonel promised Rogers

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the building as an inducement for him to accept the position. Anyhow, the splendid building followed closely on the heels of Rogers' arrival.

Rogers came to Colby from the Harvard Astronomical Observatory, where he was Assistant Professor of Astronomy. He had been graduated from Brown in 1857, and for the next thirteen years was Professor of Mathematics and As- tronomy at Alfred University. During that time he had a year's leave to study theoretical and applied mechanics at Yale, then a further year at the Harvard Observatory. In 1870 he was appointed an assistant at the Observatory and was made an assistant professor in 1877. He received the A.M. degree from Yale in 1876. When he came to Colby, William Rogers was one of only four Americans who were honorary members of the Royal Microscopical Society of England. He was a member of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the German Astronomical Society, of the Society of Mechanical Engineers, and of the Amer- ican Association for the Advancement of Science.

In 1880 Rogers had visited London and Paris at the expense of the Amer- ican Academy, for the purpose of obtaining authorized copies of the Imperial yard and the French metre. Those copies were the first ever brought to the United States to serve as the basis of the standards of length, which Rogers himself made for Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and the Lick Observatory, as well as for the U. S. Signal Service. It was Rogers who worked out the standard yard and metre for the Department of Standards of the British Board of Trade. Later, in the sound and shock-proof quarters built for him by Col. Shannon at Colby, William Rogers made the standard yard still used by the United States Bureau of Standards.

Rogers' special work at Harvard had been observation of all the stars down to the ninth magnitude in the belt between 50 and 55 degrees north. Before coming to Colby he had published extensively, both in physical and astronomical journals. Among his works were two huge volumes of astronomical observations, and the text of a third was completed during his early years in Waterville. His first research at Colby concerned the laws under which different metals expand and contract under variations of temperature. He became an expert on ther- mometers, being able to calculate just the amount of error even the best of them were likely to show.

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The history of Colby College, Part 29

Author: Colby College Publication date: 1963 Publisher: Waterville, Colby College Press Number of Pages: 716

Author: Colby College
Publication date: 1963
Publisher: Waterville, Colby College Press
Number of Pages: 716