The Great Awakener

(From The New York Telegraph)

When Dr. William Jewett Tucker was elected to the presidency of Dartmouth College in 1893 that institution was ranked among the important and honorable small institutions of learning in the land where such seats of learning have thrived from the beginning of education in America. When he retired from active direction of the college's affairs in 1909 Dartmouth had grown in size and importance to a front rank among the great schools of the United States. They call the period of his incumbency the era of "the great awakening" up in Hanover.

Dr. Tucker assumed office at a most interesting period in the history of the development of the higher education in America. It was a day when colleges had to go out and find students. They had to seek for the financial sinews and continuously strive for the upbuilding of endowments which would meet and sustain the institutions. Dartmouth had twenty-six members of its faculty when Dr. Tucker took charge. It had eighty-one when his activities ceased. And that is but a tiny part of the story of expansion.

College presidents in bygone days had a hard row to hoe. The colleges languished, the professors' salaries were low, the scholars of merit in the faculties were ever in demand in the world of outside interests and activities and there was little to hold a specialist to the chair of an institution which paid him $3,000 a year when big business was just beginning to understand the need of technical knowledge and scientific theories and was willing to pay double or thrice that amount to get their men.

These were just the problems to enlist the attention and the zeal and the industry of William Jewett Tucker and others like him. He was one of the men who can be credited with altering the whole face of the educational map in the Western World.