University of Massachusetts Amherst - Index Yearbook (Amherst, MA)

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ipbtratton 6 X O 4 Class of 1934 Bebicate our Snbcx to Walttv Cberett prince a congenial frienb, a tfjorougf) sicftolar anb an inspiring tcacfjer T N a letter which I wrote some years ago, as a freshman of about three weeks standing at what was then Massachusetts Agricultural College, I find the following sentence, which concludes a rather enthusiastic description of my course of study: 1 like my professors, too; especially my English professor. And although time deals roughly with many of our boyish enthusiasms, 1 have never, through four years as a student and three as a member of the faculty, lost that liking; rather the years have strengthened and deepened the admiration and affection which I then felt for the man to whom this Index is dedicated. Professor Walter E. Prince. Nor is this feeling mine alone; I know that it has been and is shared by many others who have been students here at some time during the course of more than twenty years. It is for them that 1 speak as well as for myself in trying to express the reasons for our affection and gratitude. Professor Prince is first of all an individualist. It would perhaps be too strong a statement to say that he was, like William Blake, born into the church of rebels. I do not know whether the quality was inherited, or whether it gradually developed during his youth, his college years at Brown University, where he received his bachelor ' s degree in iqo4 and his master ' s in iqoj, and his years of teaching at the University of Maine, whence he came to this college in iqii; but certainly no one who knows him can have the slightest doubt that independence of thought and action has ever been one of the guiding principles of his life. This is not, perhaps, a characteristic which is common in college communities. But the present instance shows that on this campus, at least, the students are still unspoiled enough to recognize it and admire it, knowing that a teacher who is true to himself cannot be false to them. This independence of thought and action has led him always to stand fearlessly for an ideal of education which is becoming more and more rare in our American colleges : that higher education should not have for its aim merely practical or vocational training, but that it should develop the intellectual and moral character of students as well ; that it should not seek only to prepare them for success in the commercial world, but should lead them to regard the eternal verities — should cultivate in them a tolerance of, a sympathy for, and a loyalty to things in which they can have no personal or selfish interest : the ideals of truth and beauty and goodness by which the best and the wisest men have always lived. N or are these aims introduced into his courses at the expense of substantiality. Professor Prince has a passion for thoroughness, as students in his course in freshman composition discover while they struggle to apply the rules of grammar and rhetoric, and he is a genuine scholar, as upperclassmen find when they listen to his lectures upon Chaucer or the Elizabethans. But he tries

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IttUrx (HatxUntB (Enable of Contents; Dedication Calendar Views Administration Faculty Alumni Graduate School Seniors Juniors Sophomores Freshmen Fraternities Sororities Organizations . Dances Snap Shots Athletics Views Military Advertisements II 17 23 3Q 44 47 61 121 I3Q 149 177 185 217 224 22q 253 257 267

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Ittlrrx ifjttrattntt always to impress upon his freshmen that grammar and rhetoric are only means to an end; and he attempts always to interpret the facts of literary history in the light of the ideals of the men who created it. Nor, again, do these things of the spirit ever become mere cold abstractions of the class- room, devoid of all human interest. Professor Prince ' s life has not been one which the world would call pleasant or successful. He has been teaching for nearly thirty years, with no other reward than that which every true teacher finds in his work itself. And it is but a year since the death of Mrs. Prince brought to an end — not, we trust, in defeat — a battle which they two had waged for nearly a quarter of a century for the life and happiness of a talented and gracious woman. But through it all, he has never lost the deep faith in life, the almost boyish zest for experience, especially in the realm of the intellect and the imagination, which is so prominent a trait in the great Elizabethan writers with whose lives and works he is so intimate. There remains yet unmentioned one element among those that have earned for Professor Prince a measure of affection which it is the privilege of few teachers to receive. Those students who have come to know him best know that his first thought is always, as a teacher ' s should be, for them and not for himself: that the forthright manner and unequivocating habit of speech be- fore which many a freshman has trembled only veil the warmth and sympathy — almost the tenderness — of a heart which the years can never harden into indifference toward any scene or actor in the drama of human life. Ejzju-c.- a u . .,.