USA > Maine > Kennebec County > Waterville > The history of Colby College > Part 47
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Professor Wilkinson was in wide demand as a public lecturer, and he gen- erously responded to the calls. His special field was modern European history, but his real love was current political and international affairs. He often talked about a forthcoming book before it came from the press. He saw the dangers in our wartime alliance with Russia long before many national leaders were aware of it. In politics he was "an unrepentant liberal," and he vented bitter scorn on those conservatives who blocked the League of Nations devised by his beloved teacher, Woodrow Wilson. Nor was he a mere armchair politician. As a Democrat, he was elected alderman in Waterville's strongly Republican Ward Four.
When he retired in 1947, the tributes paid Professor Wilkinson by former students were many and memorable. Norman Palmer, 1930, who had been not only pupil, but also faculty colleague of Wilkinson at Colby, said: "Steeped in
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the classics, a lover of the English literary and cultural heritage, a Jeffersonian democrat and a Wilsonian internationalist, you have reinforced your teaching by your breadth of view, your tolerance of human failings, and your unique per- sonality."
Dwight Sargent, 1939, now in charge of the editorial page of the New York Herald-Tribune, at the time of Wilkinson's retirement had just finished his war- time job of informing American troops about world-wide political events. He wrote: "What little judgment I had in this work I can trace to your classes. You prevented me from being an isolationist. Whatever slant I have on foreign affairs is sounder than it would be if I had not spent many hours listening to you."
With the deep affection of hundreds of Colby people, William J. Wilkinson retired to the quiet of his southern home in Johnson City, Tennessee, where he died on April 7, 1950.
Curtis H. Morrow was brought to Colby in the centennial year of 1920, to carry on the great tradition in economics and sociology started by Albion Wood- bury Small. Morrow had been one of Dwight Moody's Mount Hermon boys and was always proud of the religious influence of that famous school. Like Small before him, Morrow was a lay preacher, often supplying pulpits during his years at Colby. He was a product of G. Stanley Hall's days at Clark University, tak- ing all three degrees, B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. For six years he was assistant librarian of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester. Joining the Colby faculty as associate professor, he was promoted to a full professorship in 1924, and as time went on saw his one-man Department of Economics and Sociology staffed by six persons.
Although he was quite at home in the field of economics, his real love was that of Albion Woodbury Small, sociology, and in his last years on the Colby faculty he devoted his teaching to that subject, although he continued to admin- ister the combined department. He was greatly interested in local sociological problems, and he conducted valuable research on employment, housing, French- Canadian assimilation, and other phases of Waterville life. Seeing the needless duplication of effort by the individual welfare agencies, he organized and super- vised a clearing house for charity cases. He took an active interest in such organizations as the Home for Little Wanderers and the Home for Aged Women, and was prominent in the activities of the Waterville Baptist Church. After sev- eral years of retirement, Professor Morrow died in 1959.
Two men constituted the Department of Physics when Johnson became Presi- dent. Nathaniel Wheeler, a graduate of Colby in 1909, with a master's degree from McGill University, had been assistant professor at McGill for eleven years, when President Roberts invited him back to his alma mater in 1920. His full pro- fessorship came in 1921, and he remained at the head of the physics department until 1942, when he left to carry on the family farm in New Hampshire. Wheeler was a devout Baptist and served for many years as clerk of the Waterville Bap- tist Church. He was an ardent prohibitionist, who worked valiantly in that cause even after the repeal of national prohibition.
Wheeler's loyal colleague was Winthrop Stanley, a graduate of the Uni- versity of Maine. Holding only a bachelor's degree, Stanley never reached rank higher than assistant professor, but his value to Colby extended far beyond the im- plication of his rank. Not only did he teach the elementary and some of the advanced classes; he was also the mechanic and repair man of the department. Scores of pieces of valuable apparatus were the result of his craftsmanship. He reached the age of retirement in 1950 and deserved real rest. But in a few years
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THEY ALSO TAUGHT
he was called back to the department to assist in an emergency. Though then in failing health, he uncomplainingly walked up the three flights to the top floor of the Keyes Building, where the physics laboratories were located. So, in spite of retirement, this loyal, friendly man was actively associated with the Colby Department of Physics until his death on April 22, 1955.
In 1924 there came to Colby the man called "Eddie Joe." Born in Bos- ton in 1886, Edward Joseph Colgan first intended to be an engineer, but after one year at MIT in 1905-6, he turned to a business career. After six years amid the buffets and trials of the business world he decided to be a teacher. Although without a college degree, he held two Arkansas principalships in succes- sion, at Gillett and DeQueen. Determined that he must have a college degree, he entered Harvard and secured the Associate in Arts degree in 1917, just in time to be off for France with the American Expeditionary Forces.
After the war Colgan took the master's degree at Harvard, then pursued fur- ther study at that university's graduate school of education. From 1922-24 he was head of the Department of Philosophy of Education at Alfred University, then came to Colby as Associate Professor of Education and Psychology.
Under Colgan, for the first time, teacher training at Colby was put on a professional basis. Not only did he send many of his students out into the field as teachers in the secondary schools, but he also made himself useful to Colby graduates already in the schoolrooms before he came to the College. He was . especially influential in an organized group of schoolmen in Kennebec and Som- erset Counties, and he was always prominent at the annual conventions of the Maine Teachers Association.
The lot of the teacher of education in a liberal arts college during the 1920's and 1930's was anything but happy. Professors in the conventional disciplines looked down upon what they called the "educationists." That there could be any such thing as a science or organized technique of teaching was ludicrous to such men. So "Eddie Joe" had to approach his work under the opprobrium of being labeled a mere shop instructor. There just couldn't be anything basic about the subject matter contained in courses of education. Colgan faced all the criticism buoyantly and courageously. He did indeed use some professional lingo that his colleagues found incomprehensible, and he did keep pushing for the heavily loaded major requirements to be relaxed a bit in favor of a few courses for prospective teachers. When a professor from Teachers College at Columbia became Colby's new president, Colgan's hopes rose, and indeed his road was made somewhat easier. Anyhow Colgan made the best of the situation, through bright days and dark. Gradually, as he secured assistance in the department, he turned his personal attention more and more to psychology, but he never lost interest in the teacher-training program. When he retired in 1955, Colby teach- ers all over the land owed much of their success to the interest taken in them long ago, not only as prospective teachers, but also as human beings, by the man they called "Eddie Joe."
Lester F. Weeks was George Parmenter's "boy." Graduating with Phi Beta Kappa honors in 1915, Weeks was Parmenter's star student. Parmenter sent him straight off to Harvard, where he took the master's degree in chemistry in 1916. For two years he was on the staff at the University of Maine, then joined Parmenter in the Colby department. There he was assistant professor from 1918-28, associate professor from 1928 to 1947, and full professor from 1947 to 1954, when he reached retirement age. During leaves of absence Weeks did research at Cornell and at Cambridge University in England. At the time of
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his retirement he held one of Colby's few named professorships as Merrill Pro- fessor of Chemistry.
Having a laudable conception of the place of chemistry in a liberal arts college, Weeks did much to develop courses for the non-professionals, even for those with little scientific aptitude. In doing this, he did not detract from Par- menter's long established emphasis on the preparation of professional chemists, but he did make it clear that at least one Colby scientist felt that students had a right to worthwhile information about chemistry without becoming chemists.
Lester Weeks was always interested in public affairs. He served in both branches of the city government, was a member of the State Legislature and a director of the Kennebec Water District. After his retirement he organized an interesting and active club in Waterville for retired persons. Nor did he imme- diately abandon teaching. There is wide demand for retired college teachers to serve as substitutes for persons on leave, and Weeks served in that capacity for one year at Kenyon College and for three years at Ohio Wesleyan University, where he was still active in 1960.
It was Cecil Rollins who gave to Colby its enviable reputation in dramatic art. There had long been a student dramatic society, and many a Colby play had been coached by a talented Waterville woman, Miss Exerene Flood. But not until Rollins took charge did drama become a part of the curriculum.
Cecil A. Rollins graduated from Colby in 1917, just in time to enter military service in the First World War, though he did get in a few months' teaching at Hebron Academy before donning a uniform. He returned to his alma mater as instructor in Latin and English in 1919. Three years later he went to Har- vard for graduate study and received his master's degree in 1923. Back he came to Colby in 1924 as instructor in English, was made assistant professor in 1926 and associate professor in 1930. For many years he was in charge of Freshman English, having as many as eight other members of the English staff associated with him in its teaching. After thirty-six years of college teaching, Rollins re- signed in 1955 to make his home in Scarborough, where he and Mrs. Rollins con- tinued avidly their hobby of bird watching.
It was in 1925, when he tackled the dramatic program, that Rollins found his true forte. Under his guidance the dramatic society, Powder and Wig, pro- duced many outstanding plays from Greek tragedy to the latest Broadway hits. Patiently he and Mrs. Rollins built up an impressive store of properties. No detail of costuming, stage effects, make-up, or "business" escaped their attention. Rollins encouraged his students to write as well as act, and several original plays were thus produced.
After the death of Galen Eustis in 1958 and the retirement of Ernest Mar- riner in 1960, only four members of the faculty who were on the staff when Franklin Johnson became president were still teaching at Colby. They were Everett Strong, who had come as a young teacher of modern languages in 1922 and had made himself invaluable not only in his department but also in his in- terest in music; Walter Breckenridge, who had entered the department of Eco- nomics and Sociology in 1928, and had risen from instructor to full professor and head of the department; "Breck's" close friend, Damon to his Pythias, Al- fred Chapman, a graduate of Colby in 1925, who likewise had risen from in- structor in English to department chairman and holder of one of the named professorships, Roberts Professor of English; and Ellsworth ("Bill") Millett of the Class of 1925, who became an athletic coach at the College in 1927, was made a member of the faculty in 1934, and is now known to every alumnus as "Mr. Colby," the beloved alumni secretary.
CHAPTER XXXV
A Great Administrator
A FTER taking more than a year to select a successor to President Rob- erts, the Trustees made a truly inspired choice. If there was ever a man su- premely fitted to head the College in a time of crisis, that man was Franklin Winslow Johnson. He modestly considered himself unfit for so great a task, and it took considerable urging to secure his final acceptance. When the Trus- tees elected him to the presidency on November 17, 1928, neither they nor he could possibly know that very soon Colby "must move or die," and that the Herculean task of moving must be attempted in the midst of the nation's worst depression followed by the nation's greatest war.
Franklin Johnson was elected president thirty-seven years after his own graduation from Colby in the Class of 1891. A native of Maine, he had pre- pared for college at Wilton Academy, and had been a Colby freshman when his predecessor, Arthur Roberts, had been a sophomore. For three years, John- son's closest college friend and roommate was Dana Hall, 1890, with whom he later served on the Colby Trustees. The two lived as neighbors in Chicago, where Hall was a partner in the textbook publishing firm of Ginn and Com- pany. Before 1928, Mr. Hall and Mrs. Carolyn Lord Johnson had both died, and the many friends of Franklin Johnson and Imogene Hall were delighted to learn of their marriage just before Johnson assumed the Colby post in 1929. Throughout the Johnson administration, Mrs. Johnson was the gracious hostess at scores of college functions, and her home was always open to faculty, students, and townspeople.
Born in the Franklin County town of Jay in 1870, Johnson was almost sixty years old when he became president at Colby. He intended to retire at the age of 65, if not earlier. But as the years went by, the Trustees would not let him think of retiring. There was a job to be done that only he could ac- complish. Such were his loyalty, his faith, and his determination that he could only listen to the repeated pleas. Not until 1942, when he had reached the age of 72, did the Board at last reluctantly relieve him of the presidential duties, and then only with his promise that he would be on hand to render every pos- sible assistance in completing the move to Mayflower Hill.
After his Colby graduation in 1891, Johnson went to Washington County as principal of Calais Academy, where he remained for three years. The death of Dr. James Hanson, renowned principal of Coburn Classical Institute, caused the combined Colby and Coburn authorities to turn to the young man who was making such a pronounced success at Calais. At Coburn Johnson served with distinction for eleven years, maintaining that school's close ties with the College, and preparing a large number of boys and girls for Colby admission.
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In 1905 Johnson became one of that distinguished company of Colby men who were lured to the University of Chicago, but in his case it was the secondary rather than the collegiate field that attracted him to the metropolis of the Middle West. He became principal of Morgan Park Academy, an organic part of the University of Chicago. When the University's School of Education set up its experimental University of Chicago High School, in 1907, Johnson was made principal, and in that office he became known throughout the country as a leader in secondary education. In that principalship Johnson remained for twelve years, then in 1919 was called to a professorship in secondary education at Teachers College, Columbia University. His textbook, Administration and Supervision of the High School, had become an authoritative work in that field when he left the bank of the Hudson for the less urban bank of the Kennebec.
During World War I Johnson had been commissioned a major in the Sani- tary Corps and served as chief of rehabilitation service at the Army hospital at Colonia, New Jersey, later going to Washington in charge of rehabilitation per- sonnel in the office of the Surgeon General. In 1926 he had spent six months in the Near East, lecturing in the American colleges established in Syria, Pales- tine, and Egypt. Meanwhile Colby had honored him with the L.H.D. degree. To many of Johnson's personal friends, his acceptance of the Colby presi- dency was regarded as coming back home. He was given a rousing greeting at a meeting of the combined service clubs, a dinner and reception by the faculty, and hearty welcome by both divisions of the students. At a public reception he was enthusiastically received by Waterville citizens, many of whom had known him as principal of Coburn.
On June 14, 1929, in the presence of a large assembly of "the Colby family" and delegates from more than forty other colleges, Franklin Winslow Johnson was inaugurated the fifteenth president of Colby College. The guest speaker was his friend, William F. Russell, Dean of Teachers College. In his acceptance ad- dress the new president proposed a thorough study of admission, curriculum and teaching, to be carried on cooperatively by faculty and students, and to be fol- lowed by such changes as should seem desirable in the light of discovered facts. He said:
The student and the teacher make a college. Administrative offices, trus- tees, alumni and friends render necessary but relatively unimportant service. Material resources facilitate the work of a college but do not assure its success. The honorable record of Colby during the past century has been made only by the devoted service of teachers who have stimulated students to intellectual pursuits.
In assuming this presidency I have no policies which I will undertake to impose. I shall try to lead all concerned in a serious study of the problems confronting the College, with the hope that together we may develop policies that are consistent with the best traditions of the past and will enhance the service of this college to society. I want Colby to continue to be a small college, a Christian college, true to the faith in which it was founded, but not adhering to outworn forms. May this college have the courage born of faith to venture beyond the de- mands of the immediate present to fulfill the social needs of its second century.1
When one considers President Johnson's supreme achievement of raising several millions of dollars to move the college to a new site, it is ironical to re-
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A GREAT ADMINISTRATOR
call that in his acceptance of the presidency he stipulated that he was not to be a money-raiser. As the years went by, Johnson often told, with considerable amusement, how he had been determined to devote all his time and talents to the educational improvement of the college. He saw to it that spread upon the trustee records for November 17, 1928, was the following provision: "It is agreed that the main efforts of Dr. Johnson shall be directed to the building up of the College as an educational institution, rather than to canvassing funds for en- dowment and equipment."
The new president felt the time had come for the College to have a dean of the men's division, to relieve the president of detailed attention to the problems of the male students, just as the Dean of Women had for many years supervised the educational and personal needs of the girls. In response to the President's request, on April 6, 1929, the Trustees elected Ernest C. Marriner Dean of the Men's Division. Although the first person to be elected Dean of Men at Colby and thus the first to bear the official title, he was not the first to perform the duties of that office. During the closing years of President White's administration, Arthur Roberts had performed most of the duties usually associated with the position of dean, and had been locally referred to as Dean Roberts. Johnson made the position official, and in the fall of 1929 Marriner left the college library for the new post.
So outstanding was Johnson's success in performing the seemingly insuperable task of moving the college that it is easy to overlook his achievements in the very area which he had originally stipulated as his special province-"building up the college as an educational institution." The plain fact is that Franklin John- son was a superb administrator. Although seeking advice and opinions from others and always weighing the evidence on both sides of any controversial issue, he knew when it was his duty to make the final decision, and he did not hesitate to make it. He believed in the democratic process, but he did not believe that the daily affairs of a college should be administered by a continuous town meet- ing. He delegated authority to subordinates and supported vigorously their deci- sions. He exerted leadership, but never dictatorship over the faculty, insisting that decisions concerning such things as admission, curriculum, and graduation requirements must be made by that body. On one occasion an irate father ap- pealed to him to make an exception of his son's case and permit graduation denied by faculty regulations. "Do you mean to say you haven't the authority to overrule that regulation? In my business I make the final decisions." John- son replied: "I doubt if I have that authority, but even if I did I wouldn't think of exercising it. In these matters the faculty must be supreme."
Before we turn in a subsequent chapter to the Mayflower Hill story, it is fitting to note a few of the educational achievements made by Franklin Johnson as President of Colby. Almost his first act was to emphasize the uneven faculty- student ratio, and to demand immediate measures to correct it. At the first meet- ing of the Trustees after his inauguration-a meeting held in Portland in Novem- ber, 1929, Johnson said:
The College is not adequately staffed to handle our present enrollment of 600 students. The ratio of student enrollment to faculty in New England colleges shows that Colby is inferior to all others in this re- spect. With us the ratio is 17 to 1; at Bates it is 16 to 1; at Bowdoin 10 to 1; at Amherst 9 to 1.
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The President asked the Trustees to limit the enrollment, and in April, 1930 the Board voted to restrict the total number in 1930-31 to six hundred students. In his annual report in June, 1930, the President said:
In colleges of our type the median student ratio is eleven to one. Our ratio of seventeen to one is surpassed by only two of the 115 col- leges we have studied. This means that our staff carry an excessive student load and that individual students are not receiving the dis- criminating attention that they need. The restriction of attendance to 600, voted at our April meeting, will relieve the present situation only slightly.
For the first time, in the fall of 1930, qualified applicants in both divisions were refused admission. In retrospect it is astounding to note how little effect the depression had upon Colby enrollment. When one recalls the hardship en- countered by many individual students, necessitating withdrawal from college or failure to return after the summer vacation, the official enrollment figures come as a surprise: 612 students in 1930-31; 610 in 1931-32; 612 again in 1932-33. It is true that, as the depression worsened, the limitation of enrollment came to have less meaning, but that limitation to 600 was retained until 1938 when, at John- son's suggestion, the restriction was lifted because of additions to the faculty and the opening of Boutelle House for women and Taylor House for men.
By 1936 Johnson was able to report that limitation of enrollment and addi- tions to the faculty had brought the ratio down to 12 to 1. He said, "It is a cause of great satisfaction that, during these years of depression, when many colleges have reduced their staffs, we have been able to improve our situation substan- tially, and the College now stands among the best in respect to student-faculty ratio."
Colby was one of a very few American colleges which did not reduce faculty salaries at any time during the depression. In March, 1933, when the nation's banks were closed, Johnson told the Colby faculty that the finances of the Col- lege were not seriously embarrassed by the closing because recently paid tuition fees enabled the meeting of current expenses. In the spring of 1934, it was rumored that the faculty were in for serious cuts in salary to offset the year's deficit. Johnson declared the rumor baseless. He said no such measure was contemplated, and if any trustee should suggest it, he would make vigorous pro- test.
For more than a hundred years a majority of Colby students held residence in Maine. In 1932, for the first time, slightly more than half of the freshman men came from outside the state, and in 1937 less than half of the new women lived in Maine. In respect to total freshmen the change had come suddenly. In 1933 the percentage of new students from outside the state was forty; in 1934 it was thirty-six, in 1935 it was again forty, and in 1936 was forty-two. In 1937 it had jumped to fifty-three percent. President Johnson expressed his concern about this trend in his 1938 report:
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