PRESIDENT LOWELL

On behalf of the undergraduates and students in the graduate schools of Harvard University the CRIMSON extends to President Lowell its heartiest congratulations and good wishes on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. The CRIMSON further ventures to hope that the University may be blessed with his guiding hand and courageous, experienced leadership for many years to come, that the seventeen years of his administration may be extended at least to twenty two.

Even the most cursory examination of his achievements during these seventeen years reveals the extent to which President Lowell has added to and extended the structure that is Harvard. In many ways the years from 1909 to the present have been as critical and as formative as the forty preceding during which President Eliot labored so fruitfully. The questions of admission requirements, of the curriculum, of the graduate schools, and of the material facilities of the University have all been pressing. They have been met in a farsighted, broad-visioned manner by Mr. Lowell.

Although Harvard University has already become a national institution in the broadest sense of the term when President Lowell took office he found a surprisingly small percentage of undergraduates coming from homes outside of New England. The chief reason for this condition was that schools in the South, the Middle West and the Far West often did not prepare directly for the old plan examination. He therefore instituted the new plan admission rules whereby a candidate might take four general examinations in the broad fields covered by every first class school. The success of this innovation is illustrated by the following figures. In the year before the institution of the plan, 8.5 per cent of the students admitted came from the Atlantic States and 4.5 per cent from west of the Alleghanies. In the first year after the operation of the new plan 31 per cent came from the Atlantic States and 21 per cent from west of the Alleghanies. The new plan examinations have since been found to have other advantages and have superceded everywhere to large extent the old style admission requirements. Recently President Lowell further extended the principle of broadening geographically the character of the undergraduate body by the institution of the first seventh rule, by which the first seventh of a graduating class in specified grade A schools may be admitted without examination. The whole movement is on the one hand, toward wider geographical distribution, and on the other toward admission requirements emphasizing the general culture and possibilities of candidates rather than on the mastery of certain definite facts divided into the compartments of second year Latin, English history, trigonometry etcetera.

Building on the foundation of the elective system Mr. Lowell has created what may well be later considered his chief claim to fame as a foremost educator, the system of concentration and distribution, of general examinations, and a modified tutorial plan. Under him Harvard has been a pioneer in this field. The system is too well known to warrant discussion here but it is interesting to note that an examination of his annual reports shows a broad conception of its development from the very beginning of his administration. In the 1909 report he writes, in explaining the new concentration and distribution division, that "it is to require every student to make a choice of electives that will secure a systematic education and . . . to make the student plan his college curriculum seriously and plan it as a whole." In the 1910-11 report, discussing the initiation of two general examinations in the Medical School, he writes "their possible application is by no means limited to the Medical School." In 1911-12 he definitely recommends departmental and divisional examinations and the use of a tutorial system. In 1914-15 the department of History, Government, and Economics adopted his recommendation, and since then it has been applied to almost every department in the college. This, President Lowell's broad, courageous conception, in its far-reaching effects on the curriculum, in its revision of the theory of the liberal college, is probably the very flower of his achievements.

In the graduate schools his guidance is best illustrated by the School of Business Administration, which he carefully nursed during its precarious years early in his administration and has finally developed into the foremost institution of its kind in America, partly by his wise choice of Mr. Donham as Dean and partly by his own conception of its future. Material evidence of its prosperity and future fruitfulness now stands across the Charles still in the process of development, but well beyond the experimental stage. The Law School is now conducting a drive which will enable it to offer a unique service to the formulation and examination of law in the United States. This effort, it is to be hoped, will also bear fruit before the end of Mr. Lowell's administration.

Among the material facilities which have been developed under his guidance the Freshman dormitories must be ranked first for they have had a very definite and beneficial effect upon the life and development of the first year students in the University. Second, there is the extension of the scheme known as cloistering the Yard, bringing with it the election of new and much needed senior dormitories. Among the other material improvements are the Jefferson Laboratory and Widener Library built and efficiently organized under him also.

In addition to his work as a educator, President Lowell ranks with Lord Bryce as a foremost authority on government. His "Essays on Government," "The Government and Parties of Continental Europe," and particularly the "Government of England" still rank as standard authorities despite the changes in governmental machinery since his day.

Many of us at times have opposed President Lowell, have considered such and such a policy mistaken. Such occasions will probably occur again. But opposition at scattered points is inevitable where strength, conviction and vision are qualities of a man in a responsible and outstanding position. There has been, so far as we know, nothing but pride in the general outlines of his building, in the strength and lasting quality of achievements like the tutorial and concentration system and his handling of the admission requirements. Harvard has been indeed fortunate to have been guided in succession by two such Presidents as Eliot and Lowell.