To the Board of Overseers:
The President of the University has the honor to submit the following report for the year 1912-13:--
We have been fortunate in not losing by death a single member of the instructing staff in any department of the University during the academic year; but we have lost at the Observatory Oliver Clinton Wendell, who had taken part in the observations there since 1880, and been Assistant Professor of Astronomy since 1898. At the Library we have lost William Hopkins Tillinghast, whose services covered a period of nearly thirty years, twenty-six of them as Assistant Librarian. At the very close of the year, Reginald Heber Fitz, Hersey Professor of the Theory and Practice of Physic, Emeritus, died, leaving a reputation that will long endure in the medical profession.
There have been several resignations by reason of age. After a service of thirty-seven years, Professor John Chipman Gray the last of the great teachers who gave to the Law School its modern development and renown, felt the need of retiring during the course of the year. The Law School has lost also Mr. John Himes Arnold, its Librarian for forty years, by whose care and skill in purchasing books the library has grown to be the great collection of legal literature that it is today. From the Medical School have retired Dr. Clarence John Blake, instructor since 1875 and Professor of Otology since 1888; Dr. Franz Pfaff, who has served the School as instructor since 1894, becoming later Assistant Professor and Professor of Pharmacology; and Dr. John Hildreth McColom, whose service, first as instructor and then as Assistant Professor and Professor of Contagious Diseases, dates from 1896. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences has lost two notable figures for the same reason: Professor George Herbert Palmer, who has been a member of the instructing staff for forty-three years, and who crowned his services to the University by winning among the Western Exchange Colleges the affection long felt for him in Cambridge; and Francis Greenwood Peabody, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals, and for five years Dean of the Divinity School, whose name is deeply associated with the movement that has placed that School and the University Chapel on a non-sectarian basis. The only other resignation from a full professor's chair was that of Ira Nelson Hollis, for twenty years Professor of Engineering, who resigned to become President of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Changes in Faculty.
The appointments to professors' chairs have been numerous. The following men, already serving as assistant professors, have been promoted to full professorships: Winthrop John Vanleuven Osterhout was made Professor of Botany; Ralph Barton Perry and James Haughton Woods, Professors of Philosophy; Lincoln Frederick Schaub, Professor of Commercial Law; and Oliver Mitchell Wentworth Sprague, Edmund Cogswell Converse, Professor of Banking, -- these last two in the School of Business Administration. Charles Henry Conrad Wright, an Associate Professor, was made full professor of the French Language and Literature; and Joseph Warren, hitherto an instructor, became Professor of Law. Four assistant professors were made associate professors: William Morse Cole, of Accounting; Irvah Lester Winter, of Public Speaking; Edward Hall Nichols and Charles Allen Porter, of Surgery. Five appointments were made of men not in the service of the University; those of Wallace Walter Atwood, Professor of Physiography; Alexander George McAdie, Abbott Lawrence Rotch, Professor of Meteorology; Ernest Carroll Moore, Professor of Education; Richard Pearson Strong, Professor of Tropical Medicine; and Reid Hunt, Professor of Pharmacology.
We sent abroad as exchange professors: to Berlin, Charles Sedgwick Minot, James Stillman Professor of Comparative Anatomy; to Paris, George Grafton Wilson, Professor of International Law; and to the four Western Colleges, George Herbert Palmer, Alford Professor of Moral Philosophy. We were fortunate in receiving from Germany, Rudolf Eucken, Professor of Philosophy at Jena; from France, Emile Legouis, Professor of English at The Sorbonne; and from the Western Colleges, Paul Frederick Peck, Professor of History at Grinnell; Dwight Everett Watkins, Professor of Public Speaking and English at Knox; and Guy Harry Albright, Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Colorado.
New Admission Plan Successful.
The new plan of admission to Harvard College, although not yet perfected, has now been in operation long enough to give a definite measure of its usefulness. The proportion of applicants making use of it has been steadily increasing, while with the disappearance of the idea that it involved a lowering of the requirements, and the consequent lessening of poorly qualified candidates, the percentage of rejections has diminished. The plan is not indeed, designed to open the door to less well-educated boys, but to those with well-stocked minds who have not been specially trained for admission to Harvard College. The result of the examinations seems to show that the best scholars from any good high school can pass them, while those who are at the most only fair scholars from distant schools cannot. This is by no means contrary to the object sought,--the admission of the most promising youth from schools in all parts of the nation.
One of the aims of any system of college entrance examinations is a relatively constant standard of requirements. Fluctuations from year to year in the severity of the tests, as a whole or in particular subjects, are discouraging to school teachers and unfair to the candidates. But constancy of standard is by no means so easy to obtain as an out-sider may suppose. The examiners of necessity change, and the standard can be maintained evenly only by a survey of the whole list of marks after it has been completed. Yet the pressure for a rapid decision of cases causes the marks to be sent to the Committee as soon as they are awarded, and gives no sufficient opportunity for review by the examiners. Serious increases in the proportion of failures in the summer of fall of 1913 brought this matter to the attention of the Faculty, which agreed on October 21, 1913, that the Committee on Admissions shall have power to call upon the various departments to modify their marking if the standard appears to be irregular, or to deal with the marks received in such way as appears to the Committee to be just. The change is a marked improvement in the method of admission, and should secure a more even standard than has been possible heretofore.
A survey of the figures in the report of the Chairman of the Committee on Admission shows that the new plan admits a larger proportion of candidates for the degree of Bachelor of Science than the old plan; that is, of boys who have not studied Latin, or who have not studied it thoroughly enough to offer it for examination. Since the plan springs from an effort to reach the high schools of the country, such a result is not a surprise.
The relative numbers of Bachelors of Arts and of Science, or of candidates for these degrees, in the last seven classes have been as follows:-- *These are the numbers of degrees conferred during the year, no distinction being made for those conferred in one year as of another. *These do not include the three-year men who took their degree in 1913. Standing of Classics Changed. Read more in NewsRecommended Articles
