Appreciations of the Man Who Built Up
Out of a Fresh-Water College the
Great University of Chicago.
The proposed monument to the late President William Rainey Harper of the
University of Chicago is to take the form of a library building. Thus will
be fittingly suggested the practical trend of his life, in which
scholarship was joined with utilitarianism. So businesslike were this
educator's methods in building up a great university upon the foundation
of a provincial college that he was severely criticized for the seeming
incongruity between his aims and the means he used. And yet, as the New
York _Evening Post_ has said:
Whatever may be thought of his policies, his personality now
appears in a fine and heroic light. No one can consider the
admirable fortitude and self-forgetting equanimity he
displayed in his long and hopeless fight against pain and
death, without perceiving that here was a heroic soul, to
which epithets borrowed from trade had no proper
application.
As his administration proceeded along the golden way laid by
Mr. Rockefeller, it became evident that President Harper
faced all problems as new problems, and that his optimism
admitted no difficulties. When it was discovered that the
University of Chicago lacked college life and spirit,
college life and spirit were straightway improvised, or at
least encouraged, by the appointment of a famous athlete to
the faculty, and later by the building of dormitories. No
detail of university life escaped him. If he lacked some of
the finer sympathies and perceptions that go to make the
ideal university president, he was a figure instinct with
vital energy, ingenious and resourceful in all matters--in
its qualities and defects thoroughly American and of our
time. The present, in which he lived by preference, will
give him an almost unbounded admiration; sober judgment
based upon the past will gradually smooth the inequalities
of his work.
President Harper was a man who did things. It is doubtful whether he
himself placed the highest importance upon his executive work; it is not
unlikely that he would prefer to be remembered as a Hebrew scholar and the
author of abstruse commentaries. But a man is not always himself the best
judge of the relative values of his own work. Professor Albert Bushnell
Hart, writing in the Boston _Transcript_, thus estimates President
Harper's career:
To sum up, the great characteristic of President Harper was
his unflagging and generous belief that things could be
done. In his thirteen years of service he saw Chicago
University rise to a place in the first rank of the world's
institutions of learning. It never seemed to occur to him
that a thing must be abandoned or even postponed because it
was difficult. When he felt that the time had come for a law
school, he created it. He found the Blaine School of
Training for Teachers in existence, and absorbed it. Nothing
seemed beyond his powers, yet he always had time for the
visitor and the guest, kept up his teaching to the last, and
was one of the chief citizens of Chicago and of Illinois.
Who can doubt that President Harper's intensity of love and
service for the university of which he was really the
founder and always the principal force shortened his days,
and yet who could wish to leave a more enduring monument
than his life-work?
The presidents of several colleges have spoken of him as follows:
President Woodrow Wilson, of Princeton University:
"President Harper's death deprives the country of one of the
most extraordinary and attractive figures, and the last
months of his life have added a touch of heroism through
which he won the warm admiration of the whole country. His
loss is very serious indeed."
President Schurman, of Cornell University: "President Harper
was preeminent as an educational administrator, and was the
greatest college president of the last fifteen years. The
University of Chicago will remain for all time as a monument
to his memory."
President Hadley, of Yale: "President Harper was a brilliant
instructor, skilful organizer, and a man of rare business
ability."
President Eliot, of Harvard: "His life, wonderfully active
and energetic, was brought, by excessive work, to too early
a close."