Courtney Craig Smith '38 was installed Saturday as the ninth president of Swarthmore College. In his inaugural address, Smith said that the public must be taught that colleges are more than "the haven of half-backs, cheer leaders, junior proms, and absent-minded but wonderfully conspiratorial professors."
Smith, at 36, is one of the youngest college presidents in the nation. His installation was held in conjunction with Swarthmore's Homecoming and Founders' Day and was modeled after a Friends' meeting.
When Smith began to speak, the public address system did not work and he could not be heard. Smith waited a minute while it was being fixed, then began again: "Whatever I was going to say about modern science would be pertinent now."
In his prepared speech, Smith went on that the college should focus on the individual student rather than the society in which he lives.
Upon graduating from Harvard in 1938, Smith was chosen as a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College, Oxford. He became an assistant professor of English at Princeton in 1948.
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