USA > Maine > Kennebec County > Waterville > The history of Colby College > Part 38
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Under previous presidents, the Trustees had been reluctant to grant formal recognition to alumni representation on their Board. Year after year the Alumni Association had asked for that recognition. The best they could get was per- mission to nominate candidates, but the Board would not agree definitely to elect one of those nominees, though they often did so. President White at once became a champion of alumni representation, with the result that, on due peti- tion from the Colby Trustees, the Maine Legislature, on March 11, 1903, passed an amendment to the Charter, providing that nine trustees, three each year for terms of three years, should be elected directly by the Alumni Association. (See Appendix P.)
Under a cloud of criticism and with men's enrollment at its lowest ebb for many years, but with substantial and lasting accomplishments to his credit, Charles Lincoln White left the Colby presidency. Seeking to replace him, the Trustees remembered how fortunate had been their turning to the ranks of the Colby faculty when they had chosen James T. Champlin and later Albion Woodbury Small. On the faculty in 1908 was just the man they needed. The time was ripe for the dynamic administration of Arthur Jeremiah Roberts.
CHAPTER XXVIII
Honeymoon Years
E VERY new head of an organization, from the smallest corporation to the President of the United States, enjoys what the press calls an executive honey- moon, a period when the new broom sweeps clean, when all goes smoothly and every act is greeted with approval. Usually the period lasts not longer than a year, but occasionally, when a man of singular aptitude achieves spectacular success in his new job, the honeymoon is more extensive. Such was the case with Arthur Roberts, for his remarkable fitness for the presidency of Colby Col- lege gave him an executive honeymoon of nearly nine years, from the summer of 1908 until the April day in 1917 when Woodrow Wilson asked the Congress to declare the Nation at war.
When the Trustees accepted President White's resignation on March 4, 1908, they at once appointed a committee, under the chairmanship of Leslie C. Cor- nish, to seek a new president. Already Judge Cornish and Judge Wing, promi- nent members of the committee, had been considering Professor Roberts. When a number of alumni also suggested his election, the committee authorized Dudley P. Bailey to write to all members of the Board and to members of the faculty con- cerning their opinion of such a choice. The committee knew that a number of leading Baptists would be skeptical. When his promotion to a full professorship had been urged, in the second year of his service as an instructor, sixteen years earlier, the Trustees had postponed favorable action on the ground that Roberts was not a Baptist, and they must carefully observe the provision attached to Gardner Colby's gift, demanding that at least half of the faculty be regular mem- bers of Baptist churches. Certain friends of the College feared that the restric- tions on student life imposed by President White might now be relaxed. Some of those persons asked the committee where Roberts stood on such practices as card playing and dancing.
It was President White who did most to satisfy the skeptics. His letter to Mr. Bailey was a definite endorsement of Roberts.
I am sure Professor Roberts is the wise choice, and I should feel very happy to go away leaving the College in his hands. There is a gen- eral turning to him from alumni, faculty and students. Professor Rob- erts holds very conservative views on dancing as it relates to the two divisions of the College. I am confident he would not encourage any such thing on the campus. I do not know how he feels about playing cards, but I am sure he would not encourage public or private card parties between the college divisions.
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Not all of the Trustees were convinced, even after President White's en- dorsement. One of them wrote:
I wish Roberts were a minister, more widely known, and had a wider culture, but we know pretty well what he is and what he would do. I wish I knew how the faculty would accept his promotion. Have you thought of Donovan or Bradbury, of Shailer Mathews or Meserve?1
On the matter of Roberts' church affiliation, the Board's secretary, Rev. Edwin C. Whittemore, was explicit. Roberts had become a member of the Water- ville Baptist Church. Dr. Whittemore wrote:
Professor Roberts is a working member of our church and is highly es- teemed in it. As to the question of amusements, I have never heard him declare himself. I am informed that he opposes college dancing, both on educational and on moral grounds. I think our Baptist con- stituency do not know enough about him to have any definite opinion, but for me he is the man for the place.
Another of the Board's leading clergymen had no doubts about Roberts' stand on campus amusements.
I am sure Roberts considers dancing and card playing a waste of time, and that their practice under the protection of the College is offensive to a large part of its constituency. This is an inference which I draw from my knowledge of the man, for I regard him as a stalwart Christian. I believe the President of Colby College should occupy no doubtful posi- tion with respect to college amusements, for it is the personality of the President, rather than specific rules, that must control this delicate sub- ject.
It was the senior member of the faculty, Julian Taylor, who clinched the case for Roberts. He had already been teaching Latin at the College for eighteen years when a lively, athletic freshman named Arthur Roberts entered the institu- tion from a Waterboro farm. He had given the young man straight "A's" in all his Latin courses and had recommended to President Small that Roberts be invited to an instructorship immediately after graduation. He admired the young professor's popularity with the students-a popularity that sacrificed nothing of academic standards or moral principles. He had observed how Roberts had helped settle the student disturbance in 1903 without in the slightest degree be- ing disloyal to the administration. Although he had several times informed indi- vidual trustees that Roberts was his choice for president, he made sure that the Board should officially know of his preference by addressing a letter to them only a few days before their special meeting in Portland on April 1, 1908.
What are you going to do in Portland on Wednesday? Elect Roberts, I hope. He is the man. I hear mention of Shailer Mathews. Probably there is not a ghost of a chance that he would come, and if he would, in my judgment Roberts is the better man for this place at this time. It may seem hasty to settle the question at once, but there will be great advantage if an interregnum can be avoided, especially in the effect on the freshman class, an important consideration in the present emergency.
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Meanwhile Judge Cornish had approached Roberts directly. On March 16 he wrote to Dudley Bailey:
I had an interview with Professor Roberts on Saturday. He said he might hesitate to accept the presidency at the present time, and should much prefer that he be made Acting President for one year, as the step was so important both for him and for the College. He thought a year's trial might be advantageous for both.
When the Trustees assembled on April first, Cornish presented Roberts' views, then laid before the Board the committee's unanimous recommendation that, in spite of the professor's hesitancy, the Trustees should proceed to elect him the permanent President of Colby College. That is just what they did, and on April 1, 1908, Arthur Jeremiah Roberts was chosen to be Colby's thirteenth president, to take office on July first.
Although the Board were so confident that Roberts was the man for the job that they would not heed his request to be made only Acting President, Roberts himself was not so optimistic. He knew there were many hazards to face, many hurdles to surmount. Little did he imagine, as he took over command from President White, that he would serve in the office longer than any other Colby president in 150 years, and that he would at last fulfill the wish of the colored janitor, Sam Osborne, who had once said to Judge Bonney, "I tell you, sah, what dis college needs am a President's fun'ral. I want somebody to stay Presi- dent till he dies, jist the way I'm goin' to stay."
Arthur Roberts was the first outright layman to serve as President of Colby College. It is true that neither Nathaniel Butler nor Albion Woodbury Small ever served in a pastorate, but both were Baptist preachers. Small had attended Newton Theological Institution, and Butler, though he never attended a theological seminary, was ordained into the Baptist ministry while serving as Professor of English Literature at the University of Chicago. Arthur Roberts never studied theology, was never ordained, and, until after he had been teaching for several years, was not even a Baptist. Yet he should not be called a secular president. As Dr. Whittemore said, at the time of his election to the presidency Roberts was a devoted member of the church which his presidential predecessor, Jeremiah Chaplin, had founded in 1818. Without excessive piety and without the slightest show or pretense, Arthur Roberts was a deeply religious man. His chapel talks --- little sermons, not secular lectures-are remembered gratefully by alumni of his time, and like baccaulareate sermons delivered in the later years of his ad- ministration were outstanding for their clarity, simplicity, and spiritual emphasis. The few doubters in 1908 soon learned that the religious life of the Colby campus would be fostered and kept significant by the new president.
Since the autumn of 1904, every one of four successive entering classes had contained more women than men. For the first three of those years the numbers were close: 49 to 45, 41 to 39, and 34 to 31, but in 1907 the margin widened to 45 women and 34 men. Trustees, faculty and alumni were alarmed. Enrollment of freshman men had fallen by twenty percent in four years. Roberts had been active in the controversy about the Women's Division, and he knew the decision of the Trustees to continue the coordinate system had been wise. Yet it was unthinkable to him that Colby should gradually become a woman's college. He refused to believe that men would not attend a college where there was an appreciable number of women. The way to solve the problem, he in-
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sisted, was to enroll enough men so that the Men's Division would always be larger. Then he proceeded to show all skeptics that he would do exactly that.
To the profound astonishment of all observers, sixty-five freshman men registered at Colby in the fall of 1908. Although the number of freshman women increased to 59, the men were at last in the majority. In President White's last year the total enrollment of women had been 128, while all the men numbered only 111. In his very first year as president, Roberts reversed the majority, and it was never again to be changed except in time of war. Instead of a total of 239 students in the college, as there had been in 1907, there were in 1908 a total of 283, a single year's gain of 18 percent.
In 1909 the number of freshman women was only 34, while the freshman men numbered 72. The enrollment in the divisions was 171 men and 127 women, a total of 298. In 1910 the total enrollment, for the first time in Colby history, exceeded three hundred. In fact it reached 358.
How was it possible for President Roberts to double the male enrollment in two years? What were his methods? In the first place he took every possible advantage of what, throughout his whole administration, proved to be the best recruiting force for Colby-the Colby teachers in the secondary schools. Presi- dent White had repeatedly lamented that even the four Colby preparatory schools (Coburn, Hebron, Higgins, and Ricker) were sending fewer boys to Colby every year. In 1907 only eleven men came from all four of those schools. To those academies, where official connection with the College had long been so close that the College had certain financial responsibilities toward them, President Roberts turned his vigorous attention. Between the first of April and the close of the schools in 1908, he had visited both Higgins and Ricker, made two trips to Hebron, and was a repeated caller at Coburn. The results were most gratify- ing. When it came time for September registration at the College, the freshman men included nine from Coburn, eight from Hebron, five from Higgins, and four from Ricker.
Wherever there was a Colby principal or teacher in a school, in Maine or elsewhere, Roberts got in touch with him. Whenever he received encouragement, he visited the school. The result was one or more boys from 32 different schools. Colby was still a Maine college, and all except eight of the freshman men came from Maine schools.
So energetic and determined was "Rob," so willing to jump on train or stagecoach and travel many miles to see a boy, and so magnetic and stirring was his personality when he met the boy, that what had been a timid suggestion by some teacher turned into a reality. Many stories could be told of these personal encounters between the big, burly president and the little, green boy. One must suffice.
In a small high school in western Maine, the Class of 1909 consisted of two boys and five girls. Since the beginning of their junior year, only one of them, a boy, had been taking the full college preparatory course, which then meant four years of Latin. Only two graduates of the school were then in college, one at Dartmouth and one at Bowdoin. Although college graduates in the town were few, they held prominent positions, and almost all of them were Bowdoin men. The place was known as a Bowdoin town.
It happened that, in 1909, the town high school was in charge of a Colby principal, Thomas Tooker of the Class of 1896. The boy had repeatedly told Tooker that college was financially out of the question, but the principal insisted that the boy keep on with Latin, although through both junior and senior years
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the boy was the lone student in Tooker's Latin class. Day after day he recited from Cicero and Virgil, seated in front of the principal's desk in the main study hall of the school, while the principal kept at least one eye and one ear alert to disturbances in the crowded room.
Thoroughly convinced that college was not for him, the boy had made an oral agreement with the local superintendent of schools to teach a one-room rural school the next fall. Then one day in the spring there strode into that study hall a large-framed, broad-shouldered man with a deep booming voice, but with the most kindly eyes. Long afterward the boy learned that Principal Tooker had urged the man to come to town just to talk with this boy. Introduced as Presi- dent Roberts of Colby, the man spoke to the whole school, urging them to keep college always in mind. "If you prepare for college, somehow a way will be found for you to go," he said.
After the school was dismissed, the three-college president, principal, and boy -- talked together. The boy repeated what he had so often told the principal -- he simply couldn't get the money to go to college. Suddenly President Roberts said to Tooker, "Let's go see his father." The father's store was more than a mile away, at the top of a long steep hill. That didn't stop Roberts for a minute, and the three walked there at a brisk pace. In astonishingly brief time Roberts had convinced the boy's father that, with the help of a college job, the boy could get through his freshman year on not more than a hundred dollars.
The following September, with $85 saved from summer earnings, the boy boarded the little narrow gauge train, changed at the junction to the broad gauge for Portland, and changed again for the train for Waterville-to a town and a college that he had never seen. Arriving, he inquired his way to the President's office, where he found a line of freshmen ahead of him. When it came his turn, he was greeted by name, although Roberts had seen him only once, four months earlier. The boy wanted to ask lots of questions about where he would stay, where he would work for his board, and how to safeguard his small store of cash. President Roberts had anticipated them all. He said, "They'll take care of you tonight at the ATO House, but they're full and can't keep you there. Tomor- row you see Mrs. Shurtleff at 4 College Place about a room. But right now, before the banks close, you go straight down town and put your money in a checking ac- count. Then you see Mrs. Jones at the Hanford Hotel and tell her you're ready to go to work."
That story of how one boy entered Colby in 1909 is typical of President Roberts' recruiting methods. It does not creep into this history second hand, for the present historian was that boy.
In the fall of 1911 total enrollment, for the first time, exceeded 400, and in 1914 it reached 450, when a total of 150 freshmen, 102 of whom were men, entered the College. In 1916-17, the year before the United States entered World War I, there were 259 men and 163 women enrolled.
The increase in enrollment was accompanied by a comparable increase in faculty. President Roberts approached the latter with caution. In spite of the success of his immediate recruiting, during the spring and summer of 1908, he made no additions to the teaching staff for 1908-09. He even economized on total salaries, for he replaced himself in the professorship of rhetoric with an instructor at $800.
By the autumn of 1909, Roberts felt justified in making substantial addi- tions to the faculty. Herbert C. Libby, who was to become one of the widest known and most influential of all Colby teachers, was brought in for part-time
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instruction in public speaking. David Young, who had served as an assistant in chemistry, was made a regular instructor. Karl Kennison, of the Class of 1906, was taken on as a second man in mathematics. For the first time, Colby now had four women in faculty status, for in addition to Dean Small and Miss Eliza- beth Bass, the instructor in physical education for women, Roberts added Miss Florence Dunn of the Class of 1896 in Latin and Mrs. Clarence White, a graduate of Oberlin, in Music.
The Department of Music at Colby has now become so important and has achieved such renown that it is often supposed that the department had its origin in recent years. It is true that the department was recently revived after a long period of dormancy. For many years previous to the 1940's, the College had offered no instruction in musical theory or appreciation, but had provided only part-time direction of the choral group. The beginning of musical instruction, however, on a sound academic basis and with graduation credit, had begun in 1909, when Mrs. White taught courses in musical theory and appreciation. Yet there was one great difference from the later musical offerings. Mrs. White's courses were open only to students of the Women's Division. It would be a long time after 1909 before any woman would be permitted to teach Colby men.
The four women among the 21 persons on the 1909 faculty were strictly relegated to the women's end of the campus. As Dean of Women, Miss Carrie Small had succeeded Miss Berry; Miss Bass, even to get necessary equipment for the women's physical education, had to beg appropriations from the Athletic Association, but she had no voice in that association's affairs; Miss Dunn taught Latin to women, not a solitary man being allowed to stray into her classes. Mrs. White would gladly have accepted men into her music classes, just as she had seen men and women study music together at Oberlin, but such intellectual mingling of the sexes would not do at Colby. Everyone was constantly reminded that this College was coordinate, not coeducational.
In the first eight years of the Roberts administration the student enrollment had thus increased from 239 to 422, while the faculty had grown from 16 to 29. It seldom happens in a small, poorly endowed private college that increase in faculty keeps pace with rising student enrollment. It is therefore very much to President Roberts' credit that, while student numbers were growing by 76 per cent, the accompanying faculty increase was 81 per cent.
During those pre-war years other significant things were happening besides growth of student body and of faculty. One long-needed reform began with Roberts' first year as President. Colby adopted the semester system. Begin- ning with the prestige universities, American colleges had for a dozen or more years been inclined to discard, as units of college work, the old system of three annual terms, and to replace them with a system of two semesters. The reform was gratefully received at Colby, by students and faculty alike. It enabled the giving of term courses of greater length and more respectable coverage; it avoided the setting aside of three annual periods for examination; and it facilitated the issuance of comparable records to the graduate schools of the universities.
The institution of Colby Day had been started by President White in 1905, but it was Roberts who turned it into the memorable annual occasion of Colby Night, held on the eve of one of the football games of the state series, with college band, rousing speeches, and the President's offering of barrels of Mac- intosh apples.
How closely Colby Night came to be connected with President Roberts is shown by a paragraph in the Echo of October 19, 1910.
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President Roberts rose to speak, but before he could utter a word every Colby man had risen, and under the leadership of Bridges, '11, made the rafters ring with their hearty cheers for "Rob." Never had the old gym seen such spirit. Enthusiasm was so high that, when the undergraduates stopped cheering, continued applause came from the seats occupied by the alumni. Several minutes elapsed before "Rob" could be heard. It was a well deserved tribute to the popularity of Colby's beloved president.
Arthur Roberts had the reputation of being a lenient disciplinarian. Miss Bertha Soule says, "When it was a question of misconduct, and members of the faculty urged dismissal from college, President Roberts was still looking for the best in the boy."? To Roberts, dismissal of a boy was admission of failure on the part of the College, quite as much as failure by the boy. A faculty member once said, "Roberts would fight to the last ditch with and for a student who was failing either in his courses or in his conduct, to save him."3
Those who criticized Roberts for his leniency overlooked the fact that he got results. It is true that many a culprit got off with slight, if any, punishment, but there was something about the President's personality that held remarkable control over both individuals and groups. Which is more important, to let a single miscreant escape, or to change a long-established bad custom? Here is a case in point.
Roberts remembered very well the controversy carried on between the editor of the Echo and the publisher of a Fairfield newspaper regarding hazing, and the subsequent unsavory publicity. In spite of the Echo's protests, and the news- paper's exaggerations, Roberts knew that hazing, including a rather free use of wielded paddles, still thrived at Colby. A less astute president, determined to end the practice, would have issued a decree, threatening to expel any sophomore individual or group who molested a freshman. That Roberts did nothing of the sort is revealed by an account in the Echo of October 27, 1909. The usual encounter on Bloody Monday night between attacking freshmen and besieged sophomores in North College had resulted in several injuries and several hun- dred dollars of damage. Something had to be done. According to the Echo, this is what happened.
Tuesday morning President Roberts called a meeting of the sophomores after chapel to discuss the question of hazing. He said that hazing was a thing of the past in our progressive colleges, that physical indignities did not take the freshness out of the freshmen. He stated that such actions as that of Bloody Monday, followed by continued rounding up of freshmen who were accused of breaking the sophomore rules, hurt the College. The affair of last Friday night, when a free-for-all battle occurred in Oakland, where the freshmen tried to hold their reception, was especially disgraceful. He said he did not want to dictate to the class, but he felt he was expressing the opinion of the faculty and alumni in condemning hazing.
The sophomore class proceeded to hold a meeting after President Rob- erts left the room. They resolved, out of respect for the President, and for the welfare of the College, to abolish hazing and to leave the correction of freshmen entirely to the fraternities.
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