Princeton University - Bric A Brac Yearbook (Princeton, NJ)

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Harold Willis Dodds, ph.d., l.h.d., litt.d., ll.d. President of Princeton University, 1933-1957

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DEDICATION THAT WISE and FAMILIAB FACE on the facing page, etched with the lines of multiple responsibilitv happil) and productivel) assumed, belongs to the man who this year retires as President of the University. He has served so well in that capacity for twenty-four years — the longest and greatest administration of them all. As a MAN he has won the respect and love of all those with whom he has been associated. His sincerity, judgment, honesty, and humility have endeared him to the unusually critical educational community. As an EDUCATOR and an ADMINISTRATOR he has managed to be one of the most effective of university presidents, without relying on stirring platform or radical reform. He has been a launcher and a builder, leading many thousands of young men out into the various life of the nation, and building under them a great university in which the), and we, may well take pride: a brilliant and hard working faculty, a changing and challenging curriculum, a student body of ever-increasing potential, a graduate school of intellectual frontiersmen, a firm and growing endow- ment, an efficientl) human administration, and such edifices of stone and mortar as our times and pressures — and our inward needs — have required. He has built slowlj and well on foundations that he never desired to alter, wanting less to create than to conserve | I thai in basic philosoph) Princeton has nol changed in the last twenty-four years. He has been one of the strongest defenders of the whole of liberal education, believing that it is education for use — not so much for the specific infor- mation it gives students, although this is often important; but because, in general, it teaches those habits of thought and analysis which permit students to absorb, quickly and accurately, new knowledge and appl) it with judgment. Trained intelligence, wide range of vision, discipline of mind and spirit — for Princeton to impart these qualities to each of its graduates has been his goal. The magnitude of achievement that has marked his six quadrenniums as President of Princeton can onlv inadequalelv he summarized or evaluated. He must be thought of as a guiding force, a co-ordinating thinker who put his ideas into practice in a maimer which developed and further strengthened an already strong institution. To HAROLD WILLIS DODDS for what be has done and for what he magnificentlj is— we respectfully dedicate this volume.

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F I R ST iU A DRENN] U M : F. STA B LI S H M E N T i 933- i 937 meantime: Germany got a Nazi Chancellor Eg Mussolini look Ethiopia; Edward I 111 lost a throne £g );. Kendall (now at Princeton) isolated Cortisone; Roosevelt won his first two terms, Spain erupted in war, Eire was horn, Okies were uprooted, the Hinden- Imrg burned, is Gone With the Wind sold something over a million copies. The youngest Princeton President in s years, he took office in his forty-fourth year, on the nine- teenth of June, to face un- daunted the problems of the Depression, as in his fifty-fourth year he was destined to face, still un- daunted, the problems of a World War, and in his sixty-fourth year, un- daunted still, the prob- lems of Inflation. With the same equanimity and good humor which had so well served him as Director of the Princeton SECOND QUADREN ' 93 Now, having always believed in learning by doing, he facilitated the introduction of the Creative Arts and Graphic Arts Programs. Now, further, the son of the Reverend Samuel Dodds assisted in the launching of a new De- partment of Religion. Now the longtime Secre- tary and President of the National Municipal League introduced the Bureau of Urban Re- search to the campus. Now he established Advisory Councils to all Departments of The University. Now the farsighted administrator set up the Princeton University Fund, which through many M E A Nil M E : Shirley Temple turned ten, King Farouk married, is Orson If ' elles Martianized Sew Jersey ? environs. Roosevelt won a third term is Whirhway a Kentucky Derby. Hitler in- vaded Poland is war began. London was bombed, Stalingrad besieged, Trotsky murdered, and Rudolph Hess interned. Survey of the Administration and Expenditures of the Government of the State of New Jersey, he now turned to the establishment of his university as a productive force in the life of the state and the nation. He inaugurated a plan for pensions and group insurance in the faculty; made possible the Office of Public Opinion Research, the Princeton Surveys of Local and State Government, and the Office of Population Research. Now, too, he welcomed the new Department of Music and the Program in the Humanities, first of the boundary- crossing study-plans that would develop under his wise guidance in the years ahead. This first quadren- nium began a long and honorable presidential career. NIUM: PREPARATION 7-194 ' future years would become the university ' s Samari- tan of Solvency. Now the educational statesman, a full eighteen months before Pearl Harbor, and despite national duties which strained his energies to the utmost, established a preparatory commit- tee whose task was to coordinate all the university ' s resources in man-power to be ready, at need, in the nation ' s service. Come what may, he said at the 1940 Commencement Kxercises, the University . . . promises that its whole organization, men, facilities and equipment, are again at the disposal of our government as it may require them, the visible symbol, it might be said, of 21,000 loyal alumni whom you of the Class of 1940 have joined this morning. The times were parlous but the man, as well as his university, was now prepared to act. rHIRD iM A I) RE [94I. This one began with Pearl Harbor. Within a week of tins dark day, such was his foresight, the Presi- dent announced plans 1 far ahead of other uni- versities) for Princeton ' s reorganization in the total war. These included ac- celeration for students, instruction for industrial workers, and the forging ot faculty striking power in all divisions of the war effort from weapon design to propaganda. While 10,000 alumni entered meantime: Bataan Es Corregidor; Coral Sea Eg Midway i North Africa is Italy: Quebec, Cairo, Teheran, is Yalta; the Normandy beaches Eg the depth. ' of Leyte Gulf; Hiroshima is :. I -I: Day, now I ' -J Day, £g JSJ eve name.- in gold in the central heart of Nassau Hall. NNIl m: war ' 945 the armed services, Princeton became a military post, training :o,ooo men drawn from the armed services, undertaking twenty-five federal research projects of far-reaching consequence. Round the calendar and half-way round the clock, soldiers, sailors, and marines reaped the benefits of both technical and liberal education. As if to signify the university ' s awareness of the value of both types of education came the new Department of Aeronauti- cal Engineering, the new Program in American Civilization, and the plan tor the publication of the papers of Thomas Jefferson. Thus natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities stood together.