President Neilson of Smith

WHILE I have been writing of Mr. Neilson I have thought often of the discussion about his portrait which the Smith Alumnae gave to the college upon his retirement. As a member of the committee that eventually chose the artist, Mr. Alexander James, I recall vividly the contradictory advice offered us as to what the picture should embody. One group of admirers said, “We want an outstanding portrait of a great liberal. No classical representation would be appropriate for him.” Another group argued, “You will cheat us with your modern work of art; we want a real likeness, even photographic in its details.” The controversy raged for weeks, but the subject of it, when appealed to, only advised, “Thrift, in a matter of small importance.” The first word terrifies me. In describing this great Scotchman I should properly use the restraint of speech characteristic of his race — he would be the first to cross out my adjectives — but I cannot practice thrift in my praise.

How can I describe one who had such diverse qualities? He was a scholar but also a man of action; he was full of courage and caution, severe yet sympathetic, imaginative and at the same time intensely practical; a great modern who loved the medieval world. It is a study in contrasts and here is the background.

He was born in Scotland, at Doune, Perthshire, March 28, 1869, the son of David and Mary (Allan) Neilson, and the youngest of four children. He had an older brother, Robert, who was to help him later with his education, and two sisters, Elizabeth and Jean. They describe him as “an all-round intelligent little boy, gentle and earnest, very sensitive, with tears near the surface, who walked much with his father.” From the earliest years his intellectual curiosity was keen and even at six he wanted to find the right answer to every question put to him by a teasing brother. After one failure he took a turn in the garden and then begged Robert, “Sayyon again, I’ve an answer for ye noo.” About the same time he was found one morning, forgetful of his breakfast, stretched out on the floor of his bedroom with a big concordance of the Bible before him. The parson had spoken in his sermon of the “other Mary” and the boy was trying to discover if Mary Magdalene and Mary, the sister of Lazarus, were the same person.

The Neilson household was a lively one, for his mother, Mary Neilson, had three sisters and four brothers, all married and living not too far away for much visiting back and forth. She was witty and gay in the family circle and the favorite aunt of forty nephews and nieces. David Neilson, his father, was the village schoolmaster, a man greatly beloved, to whom everyone went when in trouble. He was constantly overworked, and if he could not secure a pupil teacher he called on young William, only eleven, to take occasional classes for him even though the boy was obliged to stand on a chair to reach the blackboard.

Mr. Neilson counted his first real teaching experience as beginning at thirteen, after his father’s death, when he became monitor in the village school, in charge of what would be in America the sixth grade. Besides some instruction in Latin and Greek given after hours, he received £10 for the year’s work. “I earned it,” he commented once, rather grimly, “though I taught badly at first.”

During his preparation for college, at Montrose Academy, he lived with his Grandmother Allan. She was over ninety, but of a lively spirit and very religious. She made her grandson read Spurgeon’s sermons aloud to her regularly, though she often fell asleep while he droned over the pages. At such times young William would try to do a little reading on his own (he was never without a book in his pocket and read regularly on the three-mile walk to school every day), but the old lady always woke up and demanded more Spurgeon.

He won the Dux Medal, the highest honor of the Academy, and a County Scholarship that took him to the University of Edinburgh in 1886. In telling of his departure he used to describe humorously his small black bag “filled chiefly with homemade jam, the jars wrapped around with heavy underwear knitted by my mother and sisters.” He had to practice every possible economy in Edinburgh and always declared that he ate so much oatmeal and liver in those years that he never wanted to taste them again. His attention was turned to the study of philosophy by an uncle, Peter Lyall, who had opened his library to the young man. Another kinsman, William Allan, who had come under the influence of William Morris, first interested Mr. Neilson in drawing and painting. With a classmate, Ernest Hobbs, he lived for some time in the heart of the slums of Edinburgh, at the University Settlement, where he taught wood carving and gave lectures to the men. Hobbs describes him as the genius of the place; a happy, high-spirited leader who easily persuaded other students to assist him. He was known to pour tea on the heads of his helpers when they grew too serious.

In 1891 he graduated from the University with honors in Philosophy, and as he had won a traveling fellowship in Education, he came to Canada and studied educational methods there and in the United States. It was on this ocean crossing that he won the ship’s pool, and he used to explain with amusement that when he was asked to contribute to it, he had supposed he was giving to charity. With his strict upbringing he looked upon his windfall as unholy money and turned it over at once to the Seamen’s Fund for Widows and Orphans. “But as a thrifty Scot,” Mr. Neilson would add, “of course I reserved for myself my original shilling.”

For four years he was resident English Master in Upper Canada College, Toronto: “Four of the most painful years of my life,” he has said. The necessity for giving physical punishment to the boys caused him anguish of spirit. Stephen Leacock was a colleague of his and they grew friendly over their efforts at discipline. Mr. Neilson caned a multitude in his first year; after that he seldom had to strike an offender.

There followed two years at the Harvard Graduate School, where he took his Ph.D. with his dissertation on “The Origins and Sources of the Court of Love,” a study in medieval allegory. He had been attracted to the University in 1893 by seeing, at the World’s Fair in Chicago, a pamphlet on the courses given at Cambridge, and was especially interested in the work offered by Professor Francis Child in English Ballads and on Shakespeare by Professor Kittredge.

2

His college teaching began with two years at Bryn Mawr as Associate Professor in English and then he was back and forth between Harvard and Columbia for seventeen years. The last eleven were spent at Harvard as Professor of English. His students included both men and women, for he lectured at Barnard and Radcliffe and during two summers lectured at the University of California. In 19141915 he was Exchange Professor at the University of Paris. This bare outline of his academic career shows that he had taught in four countries, four universities, and three colleges before he was lured to Smith. Perhaps I am making the cap and gown too prominent in the picture. There was an interlude in Germany that lightens the scene.

In 1904 he went over to take the examinations for Harvard, at Bonn, and spent the summer in Offenburg, Germany, in the family of Oskar Muser, a lawyer and a member of the Landtag of the Duchy of Baden. His daughter was to become Mr. Neilson’s wife. It was upon the pleading of an American friend that the young student was received into the household. Mrs. Neilson in her delightful book, The House I Knew, has described her first sight of her future husband: “He stooped a little, and his pockets were bulging with books which turned out to be small dictionaries (they were to be his life companions!), and he said of himself, ‘I feel like a donkey with a pack basket on each side.’ ” During his stay, Herr Muser often helped out the young Scot’s bad German with Latin, but it was Elisabeth Muser who gave him daily lessons and proved herself a charming though very exacting teacher. Many hours were spent reading Creiznach’s Mediaeval Drama under the great copper beech at the back of the house. A bilingual courtship resulted and in June, 1906, after Mr. Neilson had had two years at Harvard, he returned to marry Elisabeth Muser and carried her off to Cambridge.

An old friend says of this period: “I remember an early impression I had of him there, flashing along with a black cape and dark hat, glancing around with a piercing look and seeming to the callow student rather diabolic on the whole.” He was a thrilling teacher and the men in his overcrowded classes were alternately awed by his “ferocious scholarship” and fascinated by his humor that “flashed like lightning over all his work.” In the comments on his teaching I have been struck by the constant use of symbols of light, as if every word shone. His wit was “lambent,” “incandescent”; he “illuminated” details of research; “his dominant quality was luminosity.” One of his students, afterwards a colleague, has described his method in his famous course on the Romantic Poets: “He trained us everlastingly in the principles and practices of criticism. All types of criticism were outlined for us and we read critical works. Once a week he would place a poem on the board and require us to analyze and criticize it. His comments went to the heart of the matter every time. They were brief and searching. One boy who wrote a somewhat lyrical appreciation of Keats and Shelley received as a criticism three words, ‘Enthusiastic but unimportant.’” Another student has said, “Mr. Neilson made us aware of what delight there may be in a really detached approach to the consideration of an idea for its own sake. He had the power to reveal the fun (among other things) of the intellectual life.” Everyone agreed that it was impossible to cram for his examinations, and Mr. Neilson himself boasted that he “beat the tutor” every time. He knew all his students well and on one occasion went personally and pulled out of bed a boy who had overslept, so that he might get to his finals on time.

At the risk of being “photographic” in my picture, I must put a row of books behind him: the famous Five Foot Shelf that he and President Eliot got out together and for which they were arraigned because of the name “Harvard Classics”; Essentials of Poetry, lectures delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston; The Facts about Shakespeare (with Professor Thorndike); Burns, How to Know Him. As editor he produced The Chief Elizabethan Dramatists and (with Professor Webster) The Chief British Poets of the 14th and 15th Centuries; he was general joint editor of The Tudor Shakespeare, and was responsible for the new text of Shakespeare in The Cambridge Poets. This last was completely revised in 1942 with C. J. Hill.

As a scholar President Neilson held first rank. His learning covered a wide field: the Medieval, Elizabethan, and Modern periods in literature. He was an outstanding authority on Chaucer and Shakespeare, a brilliant successor to Professor Kittredge of Harvard. In evaluating his work his colleagues praise especially his new approaches to research. They cite his management of textual questions in his own edition of Shakespeare and the masterly argument of his introductory essay,

3

IT WAS Professor Sidney B. Fay of Harvard who suggested to the Smith Trustees, in 1917, that Mr. Neilson would make an excellent President of the college. After an interview with him, they gave him the call to come to us. He liked to tease me in later years by saying that he never really expected to become our head. He hesitated over the matter a long time. The fact that the two former Presidents of Smith had been clergymen made him, a layman, doubtful of his ability to undertake the position. However, he and Mrs. Neilson went to Northampton to look the ground over. That first visit was a disappointing one. It fell on a hot, misty day in August, when no hills were visible and the grass of the campus was dry and brown. The place seemed lifeless and uninteresting, and Mrs. Neilson felt that the President’s house, facing on Elm Street, where a trolley line ran dangerously near the front door, was not suited to bringing up their three young children safely and happily.

They went back to Cambridge and found their home there looking unusually attractive with its lilac hedge and gay garden. They decided not to leave it. Mr. Neilson wrote the Smith committee that there were grave obstacles in the way of his accepting their invitation: he felt that the residence of the President would not do for his family; he could not undertake to raise money; and, the strongest objection of all, he could not promise “to offer supplication aloud in Chapel.” He was far from believing that the Board of Trustees would consider favorably his conditions of acceptance, but he had reckoned without their determination, especially that of the Chairman of the Committee to Choose a President, Mr. Thomas W. Lament. He persuaded the Board that all Mr. Neilson’s objections to coming could be met and wrote him that the new President should have a new house; he would be under no obligation to ask for money; and he might interpret prayer as he wished. Mr. Neilson accepted the position and he came to Northampton on September 17, 1917.

Mr. Lamont has made many magnificent gifts to institutions of learning in this country, but he never contributed more to American education than when he induced William Allan Neilson to become the President of Smith.

The freshman class of that fall delight to tell of Mr. Neilson’s first encounter with John, the cockney night watchman of the college, whom he met on the night of his arrival when strolling over the campus, smoking his after-dinner cigar: —

JOHN: “’Oo are ye now? No smoking allowed here,

I tell ye.”

MR. NEILSON: “I thought that I was the new President of the College.”

JOHN (pulling him under his lantern for inspection): “Come on now, none of that, ‘oo are ye and what are ye doin ‘ere?”

MR. NEILSON: “Well, as a matter of fact, I am the President of the College and I’m glad to see you know your business, John.”

There was a cry of outraged scholars at Mr. Neilson’s decision to leave Harvard. His colleagues did not believe that he would prove a good administrator; they felt that a brilliant teacher was deserting a position of great influence exactly suited to his gifts for one of a businessman, a role in which his success was doubtful. Several factors entered into his decision and one of them was probably his knowledge that he had latent powers which could not be used at Harvard; he had ideals of education too that could not be developed from a professor’s chair. After his mind was made up to leave Cambridge, he told one of his close friends there, “Well, I like to function.” Mrs. Wallace Notestein (Ada Comstock), the former Dean of Smith, has suggested another reason: “Perhaps it was this, — that he cared more for education than for scholarship in a single field and that he saw in Smith an opportunity to concern himself with all the elements which enter into a student’s college experience. He said himself that the ideal of education which he found and perpetuated at Smith implied care for the entire personality of the student.”

4

THE duties of a college president have never been accurately defined. We are told that he must above all things be a scholar to maintain standards of study; an able administrator to manage his physical plant; a judge of men to choose and hold a superior faculty; a good speaker to advertise his institution; a man who can convince his trustees of the wisdom of his policies, persuade parents that their children are being fairly treated, inspire the undergraduates, win the loyalty of his alumnae, and beg large sums for his college. Mr. Neilson fulfilled all these requirements but the last. He once described the President’s job as a combination of the work of a hired man and a lightning rod for discontent.

He had a passionate faith in education which glowed throughout his life. To him it was part of the eternal struggle for freedom of the human soul and he battled for it on many fields. Every act of his administration, from framing the tiniest rule of student behavior to the expansion of graduate work, showed his zeal for liberty. He was the strongest believer in the higher education of women whom I have ever known. There were to be no compromises for sex; no fetters of utilitarianism. Without mercy he opposed specialization in the training of girls in a liberal college. Mothers who asked for housekeeping courses, or fathers who suggested typewriting classes, received scant sympathy. Again and again he stated that the aim of the liberal college should be to develop a student as a person, to awaken sensibilities and powers which would make her a more worth-while human being. He felt that women so trained were better able to serve home and society and that they had a richer and more significant life because of such training. Independent thinking was what he was after, and as his successor, President Davis, has said, “He opened the doors of the college to all the winds that blow.”

He feared excessive docility on the part of the girls. “Smith College has never stood for the handing out of prepared packages of belief to its students,” he said. “It has stood for the finding of truth, for its communication for free and open discussion, and most of all, for the training of young women in methods of thought, methods of acquiring information that will enable them to find the truth for themselves.” When the question of academic freedom arose at Smith he upheld his faculty under fire. “Our tradition is in favor of complete freedom,” he said, “and our experience seems to show that such freedom produces loyalty to the college and consideration for its interests. With the writing and speaking of the faculty outside, the college has not concerned itself at all. . . . The history of attempts to limit academic freedom leaves no doubt as to the answer. The greatest universities have been the most tolerant.”

It sounds easy now, but what a tempest of criticism fell upon us in those early years! Bitter protests came to me about immoral teachings and indecent freedom of discussion in classes. One alumna begged me to call the Board of Trustees together and have President Neilson dismissed at once. Her letter made me so angry that I could hardly answer it civilly. I replied that the Board could easily be called together, but that every member of it would give the President a vote of confidence. He was glad of our support but he had been the brave “lightning rod” that met the storm.

For many years the President spoke daily at morning chapel, the service which he called the “heart of the college,” and his talks were famous for humor and eloquence. He did not come into his immense popularity immediately; the girls were afraid of his irony; but enthusiasm grew as they knew him and before long he was adored. His subjects varied from proper posture (“You will get lumbago if you sit slumped over as you are this morning”) to every phase of the world situation. He emphasized constantly the responsibility of educated women to form their own opinions on questions of the day. Every campus problem was treated in relation to the world so that students saw their daily work in its larger meaning; they were led to view their own lives as a whole and to take long views as to the future.

His power over the student body became remarkable. He never preached or talked down to them, but with incalculable skill he could persuade them against their own wishes to a right course. They delighted in his wit even when it was turned against them, for he had the light touch of the artist in reproof and could make a scolding completely friendly. When he refused a request for more entertainment on the campus, they nicknamed him “Willy-Nilly.” As a missionary of humor to the young he was unsurpassed, and he was a diplomat at breaking bad news. One fall the opening of Smith was delayed two weeks because of a polio epidemic and in adjusting the calendar to this lost time a favorite holiday, when The girls made excursions into the hills, had to be sacrificed. On the morning of their return, as they assembled in College Hall, the President stated blandly, “Mountain Day was yesterday!” The idea of celebrating a holiday in absentia struck the girls as so funny that the whole student body broke into laughter instead of groans of disappointment at this announcement.

He had a beautiful voice, resonant, with subtly varied cadences, and when he read the Bible at Chapel it became a living literature to his students, Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic. One of them has said, “He made the Lord’s Prayer peculiarly our own.” The salty sentences from the Proverbs were often on his tongue, and the Psalms sang as they came from his lips. On the anniversary of a great leader he would quote, “Let us now praise famous men,” and he always read, “Whatsoever things are lovely,” Philippians 4, at the Last Chapel before Commencement. I have heard him address that college assembly many times, in sorrow and rejoicing, and I have wondered always at his ability to make the greenest freshman feel that he was talking directly to her. The students were never a mass to him, rather the “two thousand daughters” he often called them, and he counseled them like a wise father. His influence lasted far beyond college years. As one graduate of his day has said, “Every student who heard him speak would go to him in her mind as an arbiter, a judge, a touchstone, even on things quite unrelated to college life.”

Despite administration duties, President Neilson taught for twelve years at Smith College. He carried an elective course in the History of English Literature which was overwhelmingly popular, and he conducted a seminar in Elizabethan Literature. It was a rigorous training, with penetrating questions and unexpected discussions, for he would never let anyone rest comfortably on a bed of quotations; he prodded for an original opinion, and authorities were often dismissed as “stuffed owls.” Here as in Harvard he shone, flashed, and illuminated. Gay and provocative, he made learning a happy experience. The seminar was held in his own home and he always wanted tea provided, but, fearing that time would be wasted, he insisted upon pouring it himself. His service was so swift that students left the house with both throats and minds tingling. The President entered fully into the lighter moments of the college. Irreproachable in dignity, he made no fetish of it, and a Harvard professor who complained that he himself could not maintain it in his classroom received the consoling reply, “After all, dignity is a poor substitute for personality.” My sketch needs bright colors for the merry giveand-take of pleasantries between Mr. Neilson and the students. It was something more than serenading him or hanging May baskets on his door — they tried to match their wits against his or to win his approval of a jest. No one enjoyed more than he a brilliant take-off of himself by an undergraduate at one of the informal campus entertainments; nor the Shakespeare dinner artfully arranged by a group of students to trap him, the great Shakespearean scholar, into a mistake; nor again the attempt of the girls two mornings running at Chapel to win his notice by appearing first all dressed in pink and again all dressed in blue. He made noopen comment on that last prank but in private he remarked that any burst of spontaneity from the students gave him fresh hope for the college. At his informal readings in the Library the girls sat at his feet literally and figuratively. He was willing to let himself go and to show his joy in poetry. To hear Burns in his rich Scotch was like being transported to another world. Extremely sensitive to rhythm, he has been known to dance to the music of a ballad, and the skirl of the bagpipes excited him always.

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RUNNING back over his successful regime, one wonders why anyone could have doubted Mr. Neilson’s powers of administration. He carried Smith through twenty most difficult years; a world war, the boom, the depression, and the New Deal; and this without a deficit and with growing honor for the institution. As a distinguished scholar his intellectual sway over faculty and students was natural; it was his executive ability that surprised his friends. The business of running a big college became his meat and drink.

When he came to Northampton he faced a difficult dormitory situation. One third of the students were living in the town and an undemocratic system of invitation houses had developed which fostered snobbishness and was in direct opposition to our declared policy of keeping college charges low so that the undergraduate body might represent all economic classes. For sixteen years he labored to provide campus houses for everybody; and during his time ten dormitories were added to the college, a gymnasium, a music building, and an art gallery were built, and the Library was enlarged. As new buildings went up he followed with Scotch shrewdness every detail of construction. He knew how doors should be hung and kitchen drains run; he watched every grass plot on the campus. With a keen eye for natural beauty he saw that the college was neglecting it at her back door, and he opened up the grounds to a sight of Paradise Pond and the hills beyond, thereby gaining a view which seemed to double the extent of a meager campus. He called all his workmen by name, and their respect for his knowledge is shown in the tribute of the bricklayer who, though ill, refused to leave his job because, he said, “Only the President and me knows how to lay these bricks.” By his wise planning and careful use of her limited endowment he saved Smith thousands of dollars. We hoped that Harvard was looking!

But this physical development of the college was secondary always to his chief concern, scholarship. Intellectually his standards were exacting and his criticism of anything below the best was sharp; but his warmth of heart turned away wrath. There was a positive grace in his relationship with people; his understanding of the other person’s point of view was so sympathetic that a clash of opinions left no hard feeling. Administrative procedure always amused him and he avoided it as if it were a great white elephant in his path. Sir Philip Sidney’s motto, “No wisdom without courage,” might have been his own, for he went ahead fearlessly reorganizing departments and revising the curriculum. I should not give an idea of hasty changes. If the walls of Jericho fell before him, he had walked around them at least seven times first. Against opposition from the alumnae he gradually raised the requirements for both entrance and graduation. The Graduate School was expanded and the work in music and art was stimulated by his interest. Nothing pleased him more than an unexpected trip to New York “to see a little Renoir we might buy.”

On his Tenth Anniversary his Trustees established the William Allan Neilson Chair of Research to bring distinguished scholars from many fields to the college. In expressing his pleasure over the Chair, which the President always referred to afterwards as his “personal immortality,” he said, “I do not believe an institution can teach effectively unless a large part of its faculty is interested in new truth and is participating in the search for it.”

He was more than anything else a great, broadening force, with his mind intent upon new ways of educating people. It was his aim so far as possible “to get away from hard and fast regulations, from mere statistics, to personality.” With the idea of less rigidity in education he introduced the plan of Special Honors, by which students of outstanding ability were freed from classroom work during their last two years and were given special opportunities for independent study under a faculty adviser. This plan has been widely popular in recent years, but Smith was the first woman’s college to put it into effect. Another experiment in freedom was the Junior Year Abroad which began with the Junior Year in France. The plan allowed properly qualified juniors to spend ten months in France, Italy, or Spain, living in families of the country, studying in foreign universities, and taking examinations from their professors. Small groups of students from different colleges, under the leadership of the University of Delaware, had been following this arrangement of study for several years, but Smith was the first woman’s college to offer the Junior Year Abroad as part of the regular curriculum.

A further illustration of his desire for liberty of action for the girls as part of their education is shown in the adoption of Student Government under his inspiration. He believed in the principle of growth through responsibility and that it was a move from an imposed discipline to a self-imposed one. “You are here to grow into women,” he said. And when the girls abolished the time-honored ten o’clock rule for lights out and voted to allow smoking, he refused to let them down, although he disagreed with their decisions. “If we believe in Student Government,” he declared, “we must stand by its mistakes as well as its wisdom.” He commented dryly that there was no especial honor in burning the electricity of the college; and as to smoking, he begged the students to smoke like gentlemen, and added his oft-quoted bon mot, “It is a dirty, expensive, and unhygienic habit — to which I am devoted.”

In his dealings with serious infractions of the college regulations, he always leaned towards mercy. The Judicial Board, the students’ self-government court, found him advising moderation in discipline. They would propose expelling a girl and he would suggest suspension as something less severe, but effective. The penalties demanded were sometimes novel. One student complained that she had not received a proper warning about her marks and a second chance was given her on condition that she hold a paid position in the outside world for a year as proof that she would work when she came back to college. She accepted the challenge, fulfilled the requirement, and returned to a triumphant career of A’s and B’s.

In the early 1920’s there was one department at Smith which was very unpopular. Three prominent sophomores determined to have it reorganized. They pasted broadsides all over the campus describing the unfitness of certain members of the department and by implication demanding their dismissal. Feeling ran high; the whole undergraduate body appeared to be behind the reformers and a torchlight procession was planned in their honor. Then the President spoke in Chapel. He reminded the students that much freedom was given them because the administration trusted their intelligent use of it; he dwelt eloquently upon what loyalty to an institution meant and regretted that the authors of the broadside had not learned it; they had discredited their own Student Government and by a selfish individualism had exposed the college to unfortunate publicity. The trio of sophomores who had entered Chapel as crusaders walked out as culprits and found that all their fellow students had turned against them. The offenders feared suspension but they were only required to apologize to the department that they had criticized.

On another occasion the President called three mischief-makers to his office and showed them a piece of wood riddled with holes. “This has been destroyed by termites,” he said, “creatures who work underground and who are undermining Smith College. I have nothing more to say to you.”

The Trustees kept their original promise to him and he was never required to be a financial agent for the college. He inspired his Alumnae to raise money. I accompanied him on several trips during the campaign for the Four Million Dollar Endowment Fund and heard him first amuse and then thrill an audience over the cause of women’s education. After any speech of his, the actual asking for money was not difficult for subordinates. We chuckled together over the remonstrance of one old gentleman who said, “Mr. Neilson, I don’t believe in so much education for girls. If a girl is pretty she doesn’t need a college education and if she isn’t pretty, it isn’t adequate,” and then gave him a fat check! The Seven Women’s Colleges, in their joint effort to arouse interest in the endowment of their institutions, leaned heavily upon Mr. Neilson for support. It was no passing of the hat that he encouraged; rather a campaign to evoke a different spirit towards the claim of women that they have an equal share with their brothers in the educational resources of the country.

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THROUGHOUT the administration the President’s home played an important part in his success. Students, faculty, trustees, and friends from everywhere were entertained in that charming house which was always unconventional and easy, with gay badinage going on about the family table. The President was delightfully resourceful with his children. Once when they were quite young and a dinner party was in progress, a voice was heard in the hall. Our host went out and found a small daughter at the foot of the stairs. “Father,” she said, “I haven’t had enough asparagus.” “No, Caroline,” he answered with grave sympathy, “no one has ever had enough asparagus.”

Mrs. Neilson is the type of woman who creates a homelike atmosphere wherever she may be, with flowers put in the right place and chairs ready for any group. She shared every intellectual interest of her husband, and her wit sparkled with his. Her vivid personality was never overshadowed by the President’s, and though her position demanded of her a certain pattern of life, the pattern never dominated her; rather she illumined it. At official functions the President could never be kept in the receiving line. Absorbed in conversation with some guest, he would entirely forget his social duties and his wife would have to send after him. He was an enchanting person and his arrival at any entertainment increased the gayety of the occasion. An extra candle was lighted as he entered. Unconsciously his spontaneity inspired others, who went away surprised at their own brilliance.

Both Neilson daughters studied at Smith; Margaret, the elder, after being an honor student there, graduated from Amherst Agricultural College; Caroline received her diploma summa cum laude, from her father’s hand. The only son, Allan, a boy of much promise, died at seventeen, a grief so great that his parents could hardly ever speak his name again.

No one ever had to explain trouble to President Neilson. His sensitive spirit ran ahead to the hard place where you were standing and offered help at once. In any crisis his official family came to him: a domestic difficulty, a financial problem, an ethical question; and he never turned anyone away. However, his compassionate heart sometimes betrayed him, for, believing always the best about everyone, he refused to see any evil until it was actually forced upon him, and consequently he made mistakes in judgment about people.

Even when the academic load was heaviest, the President carried manifold outside activities. For eight years he went one day each week to Springfield to work on Webster’s New International Dictionary. He wrote countless reviews and delivered innumerable addresses. Good feeling increased between town and gown because of his unassuming work for every public interest in Northampton. He served the whole Connecticut Valley, notably as Chairman of Speakers of the Springfield Public Forums, and Chairman of the Connecticut Valley Branch of the Foreign Policy Association. He believed that education had a responsibility in ordinary living, and the ideals of citizenship which he had urged upon the girls he practiced before their eyes.

I have sat with him on many boards and marveled that a man of his powers could show such plodding faithfulness in the drudgery of committee work. Slow-moving meetings must have irked him, for he was an expert presiding officer and could manage a long agenda with speed and skill. In bewildered discussions he saw through to the core of things and made the point at issue clear. Watching him work out a problem, I have often thought what a great ambassador he would have made, for he not only convinced you logically but charmed you into agreeing with him. There was the “silvery common sense” of Jane Austen about his decisions. At a faculty meeting where the question of printing the titles of the teachers in a more prominent manner than hitherto was argued ad nauseam, he finally commented quietly: “To change the catalogue as suggested will cost $500. We must retrench somewhere to meet this expense.” A fresh economy was not attractive; the discussion stopped immediately.

As a liberal he stood in the forefront of the battle of human rights. Neither city nor college followed him fully. Some of his greatest admirers felt that his devotion to freedom kept him from discriminating in causes of the oppressed. One of the most dramatic incidents of his career was his defense of Sacco and Vanzetti during their last months of life in Massachusetts. President Neilson presided over a public meeting in Northampton called to consider their case, and when he presented the facts as he understood them, anger swept the audience. There were cries of “Mob him! Mob him!” While he remained completely calm through the tumult, his friends trembled for his safety.

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HE became a national figure, and he was recognized both at home and abroad. The governments of France and Spain decorated him and eleven institutions gave him honorary degrees. The LL.D. from his own University of Edinburgh, when he was referred to as “a learned exponent of a gayer and lighter jurisprudence,” especially pleased him. The gorgeous scarlet and blue robe of the University became him and brought out his marked resemblance to Chaucer. He had the noble head and the merry eyes of the poet.

The war had deeply affected him and he was active in every effort for peace. I can mention only a few of his ever widening humanitarian interests: he was Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Commission to Study the Organization of Peace, and he exerted a powerful influence upon the thinking of the country on the problem of international coöperation; he was a director of the National Refugee Service; Co-chairman of the Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born; he organized Food for Freedom to stimulate interest in relief overseas; with Dean Woodbridge of Columbia, John Finley, and others, he founded the American Scholar; from 1942 on he was an Overseer of Harvard (and rejoiced frankly when the Medical School was opened to women); for years he was a pillar of strength to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

But a list of President Neilson’s good works gives only a faint idea of the genius behind them. No one could work with him without rising to a higher conception of man; his spirit soared above differences of race or religion with such complete tolerance that he saw only common humanity. His greatness as a college president lay in the example of his own life, a superb blending of action and thought. He gave a pattern of the kind of education he had tried to provide for his students. All his experiences — early poverty, teaching unruly boys, the sight of misery in the slums, stern ideals of education, citizenship local and national — flowered in his work as President. He proved that learning is mellowed by living, and living enriched by scholarship. As a man he was one of the rarest human beings of our time; with his transcendent qualities of courage, integrity, and wisdom, he far surpassed the sum of his services and successes.

In June, 1939, he retired from the presidency of Smith College. His Trustees made valiant efforts to keep him at Northampton, but they could not dissuade him from this step. There was a great outpouring of devotion at his final Commencement; gifts and testimonials came thick and fast. I like to remember him planting the Scotch elm which the gardeners gave him, to the music of the bagpipes, and reviewing the Alumnae procession from the Library steps, when each person dropped a small cardboard heart at his feet till he was up to his ankles in red. At the close of the Commencement exercises, among other degrees, he conferred upon Mrs. Neilson an L.H.D. which the Trustees had urged: “The most delicate and embarrassing task they ever demanded of me,” he said. In a few farewell words he spoke gently of the comradeship of the faculty, the loyalty of the Alumnae, the irresistible responsiveness of the undergraduates, ending, “and so I take my leave.” As the President and Mrs. Neilson walked down the aisle together, the whole assembly rose and the very air breathed affection for them.

His resignation did not mean retirement from active work. The New York Times made a true prophecy when it commented: “As a private citizen William Allan Neilson will have more leisure lucidly to teach and wittily to enliven this University of the United States.” From a one-room schoolhouse in a small village he had become schoolmaster to an entire nation. He was so constantly called upon for counsel and help in a war-torn world that he had little time to enjoy his new home, a transformed farmhouse in Falls Village, Connecticut, where he and Mrs. Neilson went to live.

The Trustees of Smith commissioned him to write a History of the College, a hard task for a man who was far too modest to treat adequately his own regime; and he spent several winters in Northampton on research for the book. He was there working on his uncompleted draft when he was suddenly taken ill, and after a few days in the College Infirmary, he died, on February 13, 1946. He went as he would like to have gone, in a place dear to him, surrounded by friends, still in the fullness of his powers. One could not rightly mourn. But there are some people whose deaths are unbelievable because they have embodied so much life and his was like that. Thomas Wolfe has said that there are those who have “the quality of richness and joy in them and they communicate it to everything they touch. ... It is probably the richest resource of the spirit. It is better than all formal learning and it cannot be learned although it grows in power and richness with living.” William Allan Neilson had this quality. He heightened one’s sense of life and gave a fresh significance to all its possibilities. And now “All the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.”