Penn State University - La Vie Yearbook (University Park, PA)

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JOSEPH MOODY WILLARD By Fred Lewis Pattee F4 IED December 10, 1923, Joseph Moody Willard, in the g iifty-ninth year of his age and the thirty-first year of his service to the Pennsylvania State College. The ranks of 'am Mraz that small older group which worked through the criti- cal transition period of the institution have been sadly depleted of late.. Once again death has taken from the faculty its senior member. Professor Willard was of old Puritan stock, a native of New Hampshire, and a son of Dartmouth her college. He came from a sturdy ancestry which had been in New England since pilgrim days. One of his line, Joseph Willard, was President of Harvard, another on the maternal side by pledging his property in the critical days of the Dartmouth College case, saved the institution from disaster, and in grateful recognition of it the college has perpetuated his name in one of its halls. No alumnus was ever more stamped by the best his alma mater had to give him than was Professor Willard. Often he talked to the men of Penn State of the Dartmouth ideals and often in freshman mass meetings he read to them the stirring words of the great Dartmouth Ode, dwelling feelingly on the lines: Around the world they keep for her Their old chivalric faithg They have the still North in their souls, The hill-winds in their breath, And the granite of New Hampshire ls made part of them till death. A chip of New Hampshire granite, he was inflexible in all that touched the strong fundamentals of characterg he was as dependable as his native granite foundations, he was earnest, active, thorough in . E81

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To the memory of JOSEPH MOODY WILLARD in appreciation of the kindly interest and self-sacrihcing spirit of helpfulness with which he served Penn State for so many years, we, the Class of Nineteen Twenty-five, affectionately dedicate our LA VIE

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P all that he undertook. From his student days thoroughness was a Watchword with him. After a brilliant college course he fitted himself for his chosen field of mathematics at Johns Hopkins University, then the leading graduate school in America, and after a three years' course was elected to the headship of the Department of Mathematics at Penn State, beginning his work in September, 1893. Since then, taking hardly a single vacation, he gave his best to the college. He wrote no books, he gave 110 thoughts to selfish advancement, he chose rather to build himself without reserve into the institution and into the lives of his students. More than ninety per cent. of the alumni have come directly under his influence. As a teacher he was thorough and inspiring. He stood inflexibly for high standards of scholarship, and for clear thinking and accuracy and individual initiative, and he was able to inspire his ideals into those who worked with him and into his classroom work. As a de- partment administrator he was tireless, always courteous, always con- siderate of his instructors, always taking upon himself more of the load than ever he assigned to any of his workers. As a member of the Council of Administration from its inauguration until near the end of his life, he had a voice in shaping all the policies out of which has grown the Penn State of today. The thirty years, the full total of his professional life, which he gave to the college cover almost exactly what may be called the sec- ond period in the history of Penn State-the era of expansion. The pioneer period, that time of seed-sowing, of doubts and fears, of pov- erty and exlemporization, of smallness in everything except vision and faith, that period of the early leaders, the founders strong and great -Pugh, McAllister, Beaver, Atherton and others, was closing when he began his work. The year he came, 1893, saw the dedication of the Engineering Building, the first great step in the expansion of l9l