Illinois State Normal University - Index Yearbook (Normal, IL)

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The Index, 1906 and for the art department. This building should contain a modern auditorium on the main lloor. In the vacated third Hoor of the main building we can fit up rooms for music, vocal, piano, and orchestral, and also a museum and laboratory for the department of geography. The influx of academic students under the Lindley act will soon require separate quarters for the academic department. These together with the upper grades of the training department will hnd suitable quarters in the rooms on the lirst Hoor rendered historic by their former dedication to this use. But buildings, libraries, apparatus, are only the instruments. The strength of the school lies in its teachers and students, if these be earnest, aspiring, devoted, consecrated to the great cause for which the normal school stands, the future is secure. DAVID FELMLEY. I0

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The Training School

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The Index, 1906 'Iln llllemoriam. ARNOLD TOMPKINS. Un August 14, IQO5, Arnold Tompkins, once president of the Illinois State Normal University, died at Menlo, Georgia, of typhoid fever. He had had to leave his duties as president of the Chicago Normal School, in May, because of threatened illness, but had recovered sufficiently to feel that he could fill his institute engagements for the summer. En route to Knox- ville, Tennessee, for the last of these, he was in a railroad wreck, from the nervous shock of which he did not recover. Unable to sleep, and hardly strong enough to stand, he fulhlled his Knoxville engagement by sheer force of will, and then went home, to his deathbed. Dr. Tompkins was a native of Illinois. He was born near Paris, in 1850. He secured his education, so far as schooling was concerned, at the Indiana State Normal School, at Terre Haute, and at the University of Indiana. He taught for a time at DePauw University, as dean of the Normal Department, and later became Professor of Literature in the Indiana State Normal School. His Illinois work dated from 1893. He held the position of Professor of Education at the State University, from vvhich he came to Normal in 1899 to become the president of the State Normal School. At the close of a year, he resigned to take charge of the Chicago Normal School. It is difficult to put into words the significance of Dr. Tomp- kins' life. Many people, in many states of the union, heard him lecture. Still more met him thru his books. Some thousands knew him in the class room and in the president's chair. All give the same account of him. As a writer, a speaker, and an active teacher, he stood for the spiritualizing, the vivifying, of the work of the school teacher. He saw, and loved, great truths, and he had the gift of apostleship. Que must see, must feel, must resolve, when listening to him, it was impossible not to be moved. But one could not forget the man, in the mes- sage, the big, brilliant, forceful, magnetic personality made ll