Yale Alumni Association Banquet, Hartford
I was sincerely proud and grateful to be made a Master of Arts by this great and venerable university, and I would have come last June to testify this feeling, as I do now testify it, but that the sudden and unexpected notice of the honor done me found me at a distance from home and unable to discharge that duty and enjoy that privilege.
Along at first, say for the first month or so, I did not quite know how to proceed, because of my not knowing just what authorities and privileges belonged to the title which had been granted me, but after that I consulted some students of Trinity, in Hartford, and they made everything clear to me. It was through them that I found out that my title made me head of the governing body of the university, and lodged in me very broad and severely responsible powers. It is through trying to work these powers up to their maximum of efficiency that I have had such a checkered career this year. I was told that it would be necessary for me to report to you at this time, and of course I comply, though I would have preferred to put it off till I could make a better showing: for indeed I have been so pertinaciously hindered and obstructed at every turn by the faculty that it would be difficult to prove that the university is really in any better shape now than it was when I first took charge. In submitting my report, I am sorry to have to begin with the remark that respect for authority seems to be at a quite low ebb in the college. It is true that this has caused me pain, but it has not discouraged me. By advice, I turned my earliest attention to the Greek department. I told the Greek professor I had concluded to drop the use of the Greek written character, because it was so hard to spell with, and so impossible to read after you get it spelled. Let us draw the curtain there. I saw by what followed that nothing but early neglect saved him from being a very profane man.
I ordered the professor of mathematics to simplify the whole system, because the way it was, I couldn’t understand it, and I didn’t want things going on in the college in what was practically a clandestine fashion. I told him to drop the conundrum system; it was not suited to the dignity of a college, which should deal in facts, not guesses and suppositions; we didn’t want any more cases of if A and B stand at opposite poles of the earth’s surface and C at the equator of Jupiter, at what variations of angle will the left limb of the moon appear to these different parties? I said you just let that thing alone; it’s plenty time to get in a sweat about it when it happens; as like as not it ain’t going to do any harm anyway. His reception of these instructions bordered on insubordination; insomuch that I felt obliged to take his number, and report him.
I found the astronomer of the university gadding around after comets and other such odds and ends—tramps and derelicts of the skies. I told him pretty plainly that we couldn’t have that. I told him it was no economy to go on piling up and piling up raw material in the way of new stars and comets and asteroids that we couldn’t ever have any use for till we had worked off the old stock. I said if I caught him straw-berrying around after any more asteroids, especially, I should have to fire him out. Privately, prejudice got the best of me there, I ought to confess it. At bottom I don’t really mind comets so much, but somehow I have always been down on asteroids. There is nothing mature about them; I wouldn’t sit up nights, the way that man does, if I could get a basketful of them. He said it was the best line of goods he had; he said he could trade them to Rochester for comets, and trade the comets to Harvard for nebulae, and trade the nebulae to the Smithsonian for flint hatchets. I felt obliged to stop this thing on the spot; I said we couldn’t have the university turned into an astronomical junk shop.
And while I was at it I thought I might as well make the reform complete; the astronomer is extraordinarily mutinous; and so with your approval I will transfer him to the law department and put one of the law students in his place. A boy will be more biddable, more tractable, also cheaper. It is true he cannot be entrusted with important work at first, but he can comb the skies for nebulae till he gets his hand in. I have other changes in mind, but as they are in the nature of surprises, I judge it politic to leave them unspecified at this time.
February 6, 1889