"Copey", Yesterday

"Copey" is seventy today; and wherever there are Harvard men that means rich memories. There may be those who can speak of "Professor Charles Townsend Copeland"; to his students he is forever "Copey," one of the greatest teachers who ever walked across Harvard yard. For nearly half a century "Copey" has been scolding his students and cantankerously teaching them to write good English and to love good writing: and though they never knew a more crotchety professor, they love him for his every absurdity.

Other men have had more academic degrees and more academic distinctions. "Copey" never got beyond the A. B. degree. He never wrote a learned thesis for the Ph.D. parchment. And, Harvard, foolishly enough, penalized him for it. "Copey" was fifty before he was granted even an associate professorship; sixty-five before the grudging doctors made him a full professor. But the men who met him in his classroom in old Sever Hall, or climbed the stairs to his bachelor's sanctum in Hollis, and the hordes who poured into the Union whenever it was announced that "Copey" would read knew better than the faculty. They knew that "Copey" was one of the supreme teachers of their generation. Men may quarrel over the explanation, but they agree upon the fact.

So we join in hailing "Copey." He cannot be different at seventy from himself at sixty or at fifty. Doubtless he wears the same mustard suits, has the same temperamental aversion to drafts, the same outmoded predilection for Kipling and Dickens, and the same sadistic joy in making a late comer to his class or reading room miserable. He cannot have changed. And in days when second-rate academicians clutter the pages of "Who's Who" with learned degrees, and still bore their students; when university statisticians reckon in card catalogues the efficiency records of the faculty members, it is good to recall the impression that "Copey" has left upon these decades of Harvard men. He taught few classes, and limited their membership; but how the man could teach! N. Y. Herald Tribune.