City College of New York - Microcosm Yearbook (New York, NY)

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• THE 1 924- • MICROCOSM John Huston Finley, formerly president of Knox College and later professor of politics at Princeton was inaugurated president of City College in September 1903 on the same day as the cornerstone of the greater college was laid. His was the decade of intensive activity which ushered in the Modern Era for the college. Under his aegis, night and extension courses were added. Upon his retirement in 1913 to accept the leadership of the State Department of Edu- cation, the trustees chose Sidney Edward Mezes, president of the University of Texas, as his successor. The immediate results of the new policy were seen in the pronounced impetus given the movement for student democracy and self-government and a siege of peerless activity, extensive in its scope, on the part of the administration. By 1921, C.C.N.Y. had widened its sphere of influence and justified a virtual university status by the introduction of three new schools, all supplementing the work of the venerable College of Liberal Arts and Science. These were, the School of Business and Civic Administration, under Professor Frederick B. Robinson, the School of Tech- nology, headed by Professor Frederick Skene, and the School of Education, of which Professor Paul Klapper is dean. All these schools carry work leading to graduate degrees. During the Great War, City College made an enviable record for full- spirited patriotism and whole-hearted service. On the fifteenth of February, 1917, the faculty, subsequent to student mass meetings, voted to place itself and all the resources of the college, l oth physical and intellectual, at the service of the national government, and on April 3rd the trustees corroborated this resolution and transmitted it to President Wilson. And these words were something more than mere sounding brass. The first battalion for college men in the country was organized by the Evening Session of the college. This battalion drilled in the Stadium at night and boasted representatives from twenty-six American and five foreign universities. Two hundred and sixty-five Day Session undergraduates joined up under the Stars and Stripes before the S.A.T.C. transformed the college into a train- ing camp. The C.C.N.Y, ambulance, sent to the front with the Metropolitan Unit through the contributions of the alumni, and with Malcolm B. Schloss. a sophomore as driver was twice decorated for gallantry in action. The first Signal Corps School established in the country was set up at City College. Responding at once to the emergency call from “over there,” the college de- molished its forge and foundry rooms and turned them into a multiplex tele- graph laboratory. In less than two months the first contingent of multiplex operators was on its way from the college to France. At the Peace Conference in Paris following the Great War, President Mezes acted as chairman of the Division of Experts attached to the American delegation, and in this capacity rendered notable service. During his absence abroad, Dean Carleton L. Brownson served as acting-President. With the President on the Board of Experts went Nelson P. Mead, Stephen Pierce Wo twenty-five .1

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found itself launched on its career with a half dozen students and Harvard found no need of adding a second man to its faculty staff” until sixty years after its founding. Our Military Science courses, in 1924 arc directly descend- ant from the great West Point tradition of the college’s early days. From Horace Webster, a product of the U. S. Military Academy, who held the post of President for twenty-one years, there emanated a tradition of strict discip- line and a military atmosphere which remained with the college during its adolescence and blossomed forth full grown during the recent war. In those days, a concerted hue and cry for aesthetics on a wholesale scale would have incurred anathema, for a rigid course in mathematics was the backbone of the curriculum. Hut, as Philip J. Moscnthal, '83, in his Essay on The Spirit of the College” has pointed out, the spirit of the finer culture was not lacking. If we had the military influence of Webster and Webb, we bad the literary influence of Anthon and Barton.” “Ye students think hole great a man is he Who ean at once a Harare and Webster be. was the amusing tribute of the college poet to the first President, earnest and dogmatic, and wholesomely intolerant of indolence. Richard Bowker, tells us the Doctor was rather a combination of Cato and Andrew Jackson. He stamped his mark indelibly on the faculty and student l»otly of his time, and to the venerable alumnus, he is the sort of man who looms up in memory as the years go by. For thirty-three years following the retirement of Dr. Webster (1869), General Webb, Civil War hero of Pensacola, Bull Run and the Seven Days’ Hattie, contributed his untiring efforts to the cause of the college. By his historic appearance on the floor of the state senate in 1898. he was directly instrumental in securing the passage of the supplementary act providing for the sum of $200,(XX) for the new college site. Staunch in his opposition to the new elective propaganda” and to the modernist innovations in higher education. Webb faithfully piloted the ship through its most dangerous age. With Hliphalct Nott, McCosh, Barnard and Eliot, he deservedly should be ranked among the really distinctive college presidents in the history of higher education in America. During the period of General Webb’s incumbency, two acts were passed which largely increased the college’s field for service. In 1882 the state legislature repealed that section of the statutes relating to the college which had named attendance at the public schools of New York City as a perequisite for admission, thus throwing open the college to all young men of sufficient preparation. In 1900 the legislature created a separate Board of Trustees, to be ap| ointed by the Mayor, and to be composed of nine members. An interregnum of one year, during which Professor Alfred George Comp- ton served as acting-president, followed the resignation of President Webb. twenty-four

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• THE 1 924- ■ microcosm Duggan, Lewis Freeman Mott, William Bradley Otis, and Justin Hartley Moore. The college soon returned to its peace-time status but has fortunately still retained its high war-time blood pressure for comprehensive and extensive activity. In recognition of the catholicity of interest, the disinterestedness of scholarship and the freedom from dogma which have ever characterized col- lege tradition, and in line with the genial tolerance of Nicholas, its patron saint, the banners of the Universities of Berlin, Heidelburg, Prague and Cracow were restored to their rightful positions in the Great Hall of World Learning. To the notable collection has been added the emblem of the great University of Strasbourg. Among the most historic and colorful events in the history of the college was the unveiling of the ancient marble stele from Marathon, presented to the college in the Spring of 192.1 by the Greek government and obtained through the loyal offices of John 11. Finley. The monument, dating from 350 II. C. originally stood near the triumphal mound reared over the bodies of the 192 Athenians who perished in the decisive battle which saved the ancient world from Oriental domination. The ornamental carving on the stone is still clear and the inscriptions are legible. It hears the names of two brothers, El pines and Eunikos, the sons of Elpinikos of the township of Probaiinthium. The tablet has been fittingly placed in the great Greek Stadium, made possible through the munificence of Adolph Lewisohn, which Arnold W. Brunner de- signed along classical lines, with its twenty tiers of seats surrounded by a great collonade of sixty-four Doric columns, sixteen feet high. In their aca- demic settings, both symbolize the contribution that was Greece of a free and untrammclcd search after truth, and such has been the motivating force in the educational policy of Alma Mater throughout its ceaseless pro- gress. “There is an instinctive sense,” wrote John Huston Finley, quoting from Emerson’s essay on J’olilics, “that the highest end of government is the culture of men. that if men can he educated, the institutions will share their im- provement and the moral sentiment will write the law of the land.” The seventy-five years that have passed bear inqicrishablc witness that that in- stinctive sense has found noble expression in the College of the City of New York. May the City College in the remaining years of its first century mark olT a tradition of catholic interest, of profound scholarship, of character-molding, of vigorous maintenance of the policy of the open door” to all worthy seekers after knowledge, regardless of race, religion or wealth, and 'a wholesome, free-spirited democracy, which shall lay the foundations for the Greater College of the Greater Era! M. twenty-six a c