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

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...Y.-..- . an ' 'f v . 1 , A 7. ti- fl- Q., 1 1 1 no the college and it saw the beginnings of real appropriations by the State Legislature. In the thirty years that followed, a great univer- sity was shaped out of a small country college. It was a period that required creative builders, men of vision, men of steadiness and cau- tion in moments of perplexity, men willing to sacrifice themselves for the college and the Commonwealth. lt was a glorious opportunity such as comes to few men, and Professor Willard threw himself into it with all his sturdy New England soul, to it he gave all the great endowment of his inheritance and of his training. And the college forever will be the richer because he clave to it in the days that were dark and helped to guide it with his strong ideals. He was broader than his class-room and broader than the halls of administration. He gave of himself richly for the religious life of the college and the community. It had been during his undergraduate days that the Y. M. C. A. movement had begun its strong course as a power in the colleges. He had attended the earliest conventions and had felt to the full the spell of Moody and Henry Drummond, that spell that so mightily laid hold of John R. Mott, and Robert E. Spear, and Sherwood Eddy, and sent them into the work that has so shaken the student world for a generation. He brought the vision and the compelling power of this experience to Penn State, and for thirty years he was undoubtedly the leading worker and counsellor of the Y. M. C. A. at the college. He was a strong worker, too, in the church of his denomination in the village. As a citizen, standing always for the betterment of civic conditions in the borough, as a charter member of the Phi Kappa Phi honor society whose secretary he was up to last ,luneg and as a jovial member of the college literary club to which he contributed many rich hours--in many divers fields he will be long remembered. His home life was an ideal one. He was married in 1897 to Miss Henrietta Norris Nunn, of Baltimore, and his home on the campus has l10l

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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

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been since that time a centre for alumni pilgrimages and for the enter- tainment of college guests--a place of rare hospitality. Two chil- dren were born into this home, Mary Louisa, now an instructor in the college, and Edward Lawrence, now an undergraduate student. Few mathematicians have had more of poetry in their souls than he. From his great teacher at Dartmouth, Arthur S. Hardy, mathe- matician, novelist, poet, he learned that a scientist, even in what many deem the dryest of the sciences, need not have the native poetry with- in him denied and starved. Always as an avocation he kept abreast of the literature of the time, always he read and reread the older classics, and often he wrote for his club papers that surprised even those who knew him well by their trenchant criticism and their reve- lations of mastery of a field seemingly apart from his profession. He was a poet, though never a poet for publication. Only a few weeks before his death he penned this telling lyric, To the Pacific Oceanf, his valedictory, a lyric that reveals better than any words that I might pen the soul of the man, a soul sweeping in thought the mightiest of the oceans and dreaming of the vastness of a peace that touches on every side the infinite: Thou teeming child, of heaven, to whose peaceful bosom The swelling commerce of a world now turns, that stirs our souls To seek thy own great quiet and unfathomed rest, Bring back the Peace! full Hood, to the distracted life of men New horn, and o'er it, crowned with smiles, sing soft again The Angels' Song of Bethlehem. llll