His successor, Nils Wessell, was a former student of Carmichael's and was brought to Tufts as dean of the college when the Psychology Chairman became President in 1939. Indeed it was through Carmichael, a Tufts graduate in 1921, that Wessell first heard of the Medford College. Actually Wessell was studying for his Ph.D. in psychology at Rochester with the intention of going into Industrial Personnel work.
In his three years as President thus far Wessell has made good use of this efficency training and last year hired a comptroller to put the University on a definite budget system for the first time in its history. Also in Wessell's administration the College has acquired a new $660,000 Arts Center from a Boston lawyer named Edward Cohen. Cohen, who studied at Boston College and the University of California, received an honorary degree at Tufts' centennial exercises in 1952. A feature in the Center is a large mural in egg tempera including all of Tufts' dignitaries from its first president, Hosea Ballou II, to Wessell.
In the history which is recorded on this mural, Tufts has grown in value from $100,000, the amount raised to found the college, to its present finaincial value of $36,000,000, of which half is in endowment. Most Tufts men are familiar with the story of how its original funds were raised. At a Universalist convention in New York the Reverend Ballou preached the sermon to open the convention on the forty-eighth verse of the twelfth chapter of Luke: "Unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required; and to whom men have committed much, of them will they ask the more."
Dean Turned Down
Two offers were first made for a site for this new college: one was a wind-swept hill on the Somerville farm of Charles Tufts, the other on the Franklin, Mass. farm of Oliver Dean. When Dean's offer was turned down, he established Dean Academy instead, intended as a preparatory school for Tufts College.
Another outstanding first contributor to the new college was the famed circus owner, P.T. Barnum. In 1882 Barnum gave Tufts a museum and from time to time provided it with animal skins to be stuffed for exhibit. Then in 1885 Barnum's most colossal specimen and the world's largest elephant in captivity, Jumbo, was tragically killed by a railroad train. As usual, Barnum promised the elephant's hide to Tufts. But first he took it on a tour of Europe, where twice as many people paid to see Jumbo stuffed (as compared to his earnings when he was alive).
Of course, getting Jumbo onto the Tufts campus and into the Barnum Museum caused no little stir. The building's stone steps had to be removed and its floor lowered three times before Jumbo gained his final resting place in 1890. By that time the huge elephant had officially become the Tufts' mascot and the college was nicknamed the "Jumbos."
Classtime is probably the most friendly period of the Jumbos' day. It is rare to find a professor who does not call each of his students by his or her first name after the first month of classes. And the students themselves, for instance, never walk from class to class by themselves or even in pairs.
Tufts' course system may soon undergo a partial face-lifting as a result of a recent Carnegie Foundation study grant of $35,000. At present the school offers a wide variety of liberal arts courses along with its special undergraduate College of Engineering.
Tufts plans for the future are still very modest. It has no desire to become a large expanding university, but only to enhance its reputation of being the good little university on the hill. And it appears that as long as democracy prospers and increases, this small hilltop democracy is sure to continue its successful ways.