It is 23 years since the academic, as well as the larger, world was startled by the resignation of President Eliot, still in the full force of his powers. President Lowell is an equally resolute resigner. He, too, elects to stop while the going is still strong.

Of course it is phenomenal that Harvard, or any other university, should have had successively two such presidents as Mr. Eliot and Mr. Lowell. Here were two Caesars. Whence will come such another? President Eliot created the university, and in so doing set the type and standard for American universities. President Lowell saved the Lineral Arts College as an academic unit in the American scheme of education at a moment when it was threatened with absorption into the professional schools or with dissolution into a junior college or a vocational hodge-podge. The work of both men examplifies the little-understood principle that if you do well the work in your own dooryard you have done it well for all dooryards.

Specifically, what Mr. Lowell did in the Harvard Yard was first to unify the curriculum by insisting on a more reasoned use of the elective system. Boys were no longer allowed to roam at their own free will among snap courses; they were required to know something of several subjects and much of some one subject. Next, he abolished the sprawling formlessness of undergraduate social life by gathering all the freshmen in a group of dormitories specially built for them down beside the Charles. That was considered a great innovation. But a greater, and more needed, was to follow: the House Plan.

The story of its inception, of the first meeting between Mr. Lowell and Mr. Harkness, the donor of the money to build the Harvard Houses, is now generally known, and few stories in modern academic annuals are more dramatic. Mr. Lowell had thought out the House Plan down to architects' blue prints which were already in existence when a stranger walked into University Hall and offered the funds to make this intellectual creation a concrete reality of intellectual ferment.

But behind these obvious achievements is one greater and more abiding. Not so easy to measure, its value is immeasurably more profound. A quarter of a century ago Harvard College was an institution where young men could work hard and learn much if they chose, and mostly they did so choose; but it was also a place where a certain type of young man could incredibly idle and yet obtain a degree. It is not too much to say that today an idler cannot get into Harvard, and if he did get in he could not stay in. When Mr. Lowell took office the presidents of Western State universities were saying, "At least, our students are not loafers. At least, if a student comes to us the presumption is that he has come because he wishes to learn. But you privately endowed Eastern universities have sunk to the level of harboring the idle sons of the leisure classes." In the Harvard of today they may or may not be the sons of the leisure classes, but one thing is certain, they are not idle: not if they stay. And meanwhile, after the lapse of two decades, the presidents of these Western institutions are back, asking: "How is it that you are able to get these young men to study? We can't."

What happened was that Mr. Lowell foresaw the cultural crisis in American life and deliberately prepared for it. He was able to persuade or maneuver the undergraduates into an espousal of intellectual cultivation. Hard mental labor is now fashionable; in Harvard College, and better than fashionable; it is at last socially respectable and better than that, it is rejoiced in and enjoyed for its own sake by young men who discover to their amazement and delight that they have brains and that it is exhilarating to be able to use them.

Thus has Mr. Lowell fixed the imprint of his creative thought on the rising edifice of American education. He has antagonized a good many people on a good many subjects, and it would be unpardonably disingenuous to pretend that there is but one opinion about his achievement; but leaving eulogies to the professional encomiasts, it is with pride and satisfaction that the greatness of yet another Harvard, Massachusetts and American career is here acknowledged.  --The Boston Globe