THE DEAN UNMASKED

A Profile of E. Gordon Bill, Lively Head of the Faculty

IT WAS remarked of Samuel Johnson that there was nothing of the bear about him but his skin. This seems to be true also of Dean E. Gordon Bill. Often brusque in manner, generally extremely brief on the telephone, often bursting forth with "damns" in conversation, the Dean conceals underneath this explosive intensity a great kindliness and an al- most feminine sense of sympathy for anyone who is unhappy, bereaved, or in trouble.

Owen D. Young once said at a dinner in New York at which they were both speakers: "I like Dartmouth College and I like this Dean who pretends to be hard-boiled, but who at heart is a poet."

When the late poet Franklin McDuffee was a freshman he loathed mathematics but got to love it after a semester with Dean Bill, who was then teaching that subject. Their friendship developed with their common interest in birds, and when McDuffee wrote his lovely song "Dartmouth Undying" he dedicated it to his friend and instructor in the following words: "Belately but whole-heartedly dedicated to E. G. B. who has done so much to keep Dartmouth alive."

At sixty-one Dean Bill still has tremendous energy and vitality, and he has always possessed a great zest for life. "Full of pep" is one of his favorite phrases. When the Bills first came to Hanover in 1912, Eugene and Martha Clark became their fast friends. They went on many picnics together and it was while they were cookr ing steaks on the hill above the reservoir that they discovered a hermit thrush nesting. After this on spring mornings the Dean would invariably walk out to take pictures of this thrush and get back in time for an 8 o'clock class which, incidentally, he always preferred to those later in the day.

Dean Bill still is an early riser arid on his trips with Fred Howland '87 and other contract addicts he is always the first to get up.- These annual card-playing trips have gone on for more than twenty years. The Dean makes all the arrangements and brings all the refreshments. They are really great fun and it is too bad that stenographic notes have not been made of the conversations.

The Dean is somewhat of a gourmet and knows exactly how to prepare lobsters, clams and oysters, corn on the cob, and other New England dishes. He is an excellent man to be with on a party whether it is fishing at the Lake Mitchell Trout Club, playing cards at Lake Mansfield or in the Laurentians, or at a cocktail party. There is never a dull moment when he is around, for he is an excellent story teller and loves laughter and good fun.

One of his chief characteristics is his hatred of cant and humbug. His forthrightness, almost bluntness, in his opinions and in his speech, leaves no room for misunderstanding. He is honest to the core and in his belief that half a loaf is better than none at all he is typically English in his spirit of compromise.

E. Gordon Bill is of English and Scotch descent. The family name Bill has been traced back to William Bill, LL.D., D.D. (1505-1561), who was the only man in the history of the British Empire who held simultaneously, and under both Protestant and Catholic sovereigns, the following offices: Master of Trinity, Provost of Eton, and Dean of Westminster.

His great-grandfather, whose father was a United Empire Loyalist, and who received large tracts of land in Nova Scotia at the time of the Revolution, was the first Senator appointed by Queen Victoria at the time Canada was incorporated (1867). His father, one of Nova Scotia's great characters, started with a large estate but used it all up in politics, fast horses imported from Kentucky, and Hereford bulls imported from England. It was said of him all over the Province, and especially in King's County where he lived, "Head up and tail up, and away goes Caleb."

His mother, Margaret Bligh, always idolized by the Dean, was Scotch and had also descended from a prominent Empire Loyalist family which had been granted large tracts of land near Billtown. The Blighs have always been prominent in the province in education, law, and the other professions.

Dean Bill was born in Billtown, Nova Scotia, on June 23, 1884. In a recent letter he discussed his Tom Sawyer kind of boy- hood as follows: "As you may remember, my early boyhood was spent on a magnificent farm in Billtown, Nova Scotia, which had been granted to one of my ancestors who was a United Empire Loyalist. My father used this magnificent property largely to raise trotters, the progenitors of which he bought in Kentucky. The farm had really gorgeous and extensive meadows, so large that a small brook flowed for perhaps two miles through them. This brook was absolutely alive with trout, and I am not bragging when I say that I am quite sure I could fish it with worms as well as anyone. I knew of hundreds of spots where there was mighty apt to be a trout. This might be, for example, at a spot where the brook was only a foot and a half wide, but two or three feet deep. As the food supply was plentiful, one was apt to get large as well as small trout. There were some places where the brook widened out into deep pools big enough to swim in. I remember that one of these had a black hornets' nest under the edge of the bank; and a fine but very naive Englishman who later married my aunt—was taken down to this pool by some of the Bill boys to swim au naturel. Of course great care was taken to seat him so that his feet would dangle right over this hornets' nest; and the sight of him tearing across the big meadow with a swarm of hornets following him was talked about for many years. He is the same gentleman who wanted to learn to milk and again one of the Bill boys saw to it that he took his stool and pail to attempt to milk a peculiarly wild and excitable steer. As I remember it, he and the pail landed several feet back somewhere.

"I cannot tell you how many things I can recall about that brook and the meadows. Father was always in national politics and there was a constant stream of visitors to our place. Once two men from some city who were good fishermen came there, and before they got through they had caught a washtub full of trout. They probably had better rods than the old skinned hackmatack poles that I used to use. Two other things I happen to recall about that stream and meadows were the enormous crops of mushrooms we picked and the smell of mint that was all along the brook."

At the age of seventeen Dean Bill, in 1902, graduated from Acadia University with an A.B. degree. His early graduation is explained by the fact that he grew up in a country community which had a one- room schoolhouse. Neither he nor any of his six brothers and sisters were allowed to learn their letters before the age of seven, but then their father insisted on paying out of his own pocket for male teachers, several of whom later became distinguished Canadian educators. This meant that after "finishing off" in the high school and academy of the college town of Wolfville, the Dean entered college after a total of only six years in school and graduated with honors without much effort. This fact has always made the Dean wonder about the slow processes in our primary and secondary school education.

In his senior year at Acadia the Dean was six feet one inch tall, weighed 117 pounds, was "fresher than paint," and never opened his mouth unless he cracked a pun. He was business manager of football and hockey. He had an awfully good time at Acadia.

After graduation he was at loose ends for a couple of years but did some heavy work in a lumber yard, ran a level on a Canadian Pacific Railway survey in northern Alberta, and took an M.A. in chemistry.

When he was twenty-two he was married "on a shoestring" to Lucy Ethel Van Wart at St. John, New Brunswick. His wife, noted for her beauty, has never had an enemy in the world, and has always been a great help to the Dean. She was descended from one of the Dutch Empire Loyalist families along the Hudson who during the Revolution settled on the St. John's River in New Brunswick. After his wedding, Dean Bill returned to Yale, where he was doing graduate work, but he began to have qualms about supporting a wife and paying for his schooling. He wrote to Dean Phillips of the Yale Graduate School who was in the White Moun- tains. The reply received was: "Young man, don't sweat under the collar." By the time the note came Dean Bill was tutoring sixteen hours a day. Ambitious, and energetic, he made enough money to pay off long-standing college debts and later, in 1910-11, to take his wife with him to Europe where he studied under. the great Polish mathematician, E. Study, at the University of Bonn.

Dean Bill wrote his thesis in 1907 under Max Mason and received his doctorate in 1908. He remained at Yale two more years as instructor in mathematics.

He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, never missing a meeting, and has always opposed modernization of Phi Beta Kappa elections, feeling that scholars who do their job well, irrespective of other qualifications, should be singled out for this distinction. In 1935 Acadia University honored him with its highest degree, Doctor of Civil Law.

Dean Bill did not like his particular field of research and feels certain now as he did then that he would never have set the world on fire in research, but paradoxically it was the thought of research requiring sabbatical leave that made him come to Dartmouth in 1912. At the University of Bonn, he had shifted from differential calculus to differential geometry. On his return to this country he went to Purdue University, which he liked but which had no system of sabbatical leaves In spite of his reason for coming to Dart mouth he didn't take a sabbatical for eighteen years!

Dean Bill has never published a calculUs which he completed and had been ac cepted for publication with the help 0f the late Dartmouth Professor John Wesley Young: the manuscript has remained in his bottom drawer for nearly twenty-five years.

His father wrote him from Nova Scotia strongly advising him against coming to Dartmouth. He wrote: "The first thing you will see in Hanover is a yoke of oxen " And, as the Dean tells it, believe it or not, that is exactly what he and Mrs. Bill did see on West Wheelock Street the day they arrived, though he cannot recall see- ing one since.

From 1912 to 1919 Dean Bill was Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Dartmouth and made an enviable record as a teacher. At the time he was appointed to the new office of Dean of Freshmen and Director of Admissions, Professor Young came home and said to his wife, "There goes a great teacher and promising research man to hell!" The Dean found that he could teach better than anything else he had ever done, and he still thinks it is the most exhilarating and useful occupation that a man can have; but when he took over his position as Director of Admissions he was so terrifically busy that he couldn't possibly continue his teaching too.

From April 1918 to October 1919, Dean Bill, at the age of 34, and still a Canadian citizen, was asked to come to Ottawa as statistician for the Canadian Selective Draft which in Canada, as in Great Britain, was run by the Department of Justice. Dean Bill's brother was the Senior Counsel for the Department, and the Chief Justice, E. L. Newcomb, was a Nova Scotian. Dean Bill's rapid promotion, which he modestly says came from a series of unbelievable pieces of luck, was phenomenal. He worked long hours, from statistician became Acting Director, and finally, travelling all over Canada in the process, ran the whole show as Director, and at the end wrote the official history of the Selective Service in Canada for World War I.

Despite attractive offers in Canada he returned to Dartmouth in 1919 because he wanted to teach mathematics. He has practically never taught a particle of mathematics since that time.

The spade work of the Selective Process for Admissions was done in lgai by the Committee on Admissions. As chairman of the committee Dean Bill wrote up the report for presentation to the Trustees as a recommendation of the committee. It was accepted without a change and each year thereafter was slightly amended and bettered. Other institutions then raised eyebrows but its principles for a long time past have dominated most admission systems in this country. It should be emhasized that the Selective Process for Admissions which Dartmouth inaugurated has had a tremendous and far-reaching influence on the American college and is, in the Dean's opinion, our greatest contribution to college education in the United States.

The Dean has always been amused when an alumnus has come in to tell him that when he was in college as a freshman he had been told by Dean Bill that he wasn't college material and that he could save everyone concerned money and effort by going home. The joke, the Dean claims, is that he never said this in his life to anyone unless he thought he was a good prospect if only he would snap out of his laziness as a freshman. He was patient with dubs but was severe with boys who didn't live up to their possibilities.

The Dean was always a violent opponent of the old rationed cut system, and is an advocate of the present system where attendance is theoretically a matter for the boy and his instructor to decide.

Dean Bill unquestionably possesses many commonsense ideas about education. He has been particularly interested in individualized education, and has always preferred to let a boy do about what he wanted to do if he had a strong enough motivating force behind him. He has been a cynic about the validity of the expression, "He hasn't any brains." He believes that the whole history of our alumni indicates that C and D men go places as soon as they become activated by a motive which interests them. He is for a greatly increased testing program that will attempt to discover boys' real interests so that their education may be backed by their own strong motivation. He believes that every boy who enters Dartmouth College under the Selective Process has brains enough to do a first-class job if he can be interested in doing it.

He has an unchanging belief in the excellent qualities of our undergraduates. At the time of Pearl Harbor he became quite incensed at the criticisms aimed at American undergraduate attitudes. We had bragged for years about teaching our men so that they would make up their own minds, and yet, when they started to do so in a perfectly normal manner, they were severely criticized and it was even inferred that our type of education had been tested and found wanting. From Pearl Harbor on we knew that these criticisms were wrong, and if by any chance, one of the functions of the College is to train men for participation in war, the Dean thinks our past curriculum and instruction has amply proved itself. Certainly the record of Dartmouth men in this war, in all branches of the service, speaks for itself. Sons of the College have roundly vindicated their Dartmouth training and the Dartmouth spirit.

It has been the Dean's function to secure the data concerning prospective Senior Fellows and he has, after their election. often become their father confessor. He is an advocate of the project method for Senior Fellowships, or, in other words, of the belief that they should embark on some bit of research along the lines of their interests. The results have been so successful in general that the profoundly important idea back of the Senior Fellow- ships has now been pretty well sold to the faculty which originally was somewhat cynical about it.

Dean Bill is quite a crusader and at the moment he is concerned with the means of increasing greatly the use of our magnificent library in instruction. This will mean a change from the traditional classroom technique in certain instances to one in which a large number of students will be involved in minor research in the library along the lines of their chief interests. The work of the Senior Fellows has pointed the way and the new title of George C. Wood, who as Professor of Belles Lettres now spends most of his time enhancing the library's usefulness to both the undergraduates and faculty, is an indication of what we are working toward in the postwar college.

The Dean is now playing with the idea of bringing in one or more persons who will be available to teach students interested in playing some sort of musical instrument. This would be an extra-curricular program and the boy would receive no college credit for his efforts. He would tinker around for enjoyment and because he was interested. Whether the Dean got the idea from Paul Sample's flute playing I do not know, but there is no doubt that the College's artist-in-residence gets a great kick out of it, and it is precisely this sort of thing that the Dean wants to make possible for many.

The Dean has created the functions of the office of Dean of the Faculty, for when he was appointed to the position neither he nor probably anyone else had the least idea of what the duties of the office were to be. He considers that incomparably the most important duty of the Dean of the Faculty is in connection with the choice and retention of good teachers, and he is proud of the large number of crack new members who have been appointed since he became Dean. He feels certain that the caliber of the present teaching faculty is higher than it has ever been in the past and that its level is constantly rising.

He is especially proud of what has become known on the campus as "Bill's Frills." These are all extra-curricular projects and might be generally described as "education for leisure." Among the appointments made to this end, some of them with the Dean's direct sponsorship, have been those of Paul Sample 'so, artistin-residence, who encourages and instructs students interested in painting and drawing; Virgil Poling, director of the Student Workshop, who instructs men in wood- working and other useful handicrafts; Richard Weaver (and now since Weaver's resignation, Douglas Wade) as College Naturalist, who interests students in birds, natural history and the outdoors (along with Ross McKenney of the D.O.C. who was not brought here by the Dean); Ray Nash who instructs men in printing, typography, and the art of the book in general; and Wedgewood Bowen, curator of the College Museum, who has made incredible strides in increasing and developing the collections housed in old Wilson Hall. Dean Bill has also backed the work of the two clinics which correct speech defects and teach more rapid reading. He has a strong conviction that when boys do things without the thought of any possible credit, the results are apt to be of particular value and permanence.

The Dean is a confidant of many members of the faculty and is popular with most of them, for they know, if they know the Dean at all, that he is honest, a loyal friend, and understands the faculty point of view. He never misses writing notes of sympathy or congratulation at the appropriate times, and his notes are perfect in their sincerity, simplicity, and expression.

He has little sympathy with criticisms of so-called "snap" courses, as he believes that easy courses, if there are such, are not necessarily poor courses. If the student is interested he tends to do better work. In fact, the Dean has always been a cynic on the validity of any current and ephemeral student opinion concerning educational procedures.

When the distinguished Dr. John Stewart Bryan accepted the presidency of William and Mary some years ago, he asked John D. Rockefeller Jr. where he could best find out what a liberal arts college should be, and the answer was "Dartmouth College and Mr. Hopkins." Mr. Bryan claims he asked why Mr. Hopkins was such a good college president and was told that it was because he sat in the bleachers with the boys and ate peanuts. In any case, Dean Bill, as Dartmouth's representative, was sent to Williamsburg and returned there many times after President Bryan's inauguration. At the very start Mr. Bryan asked Dean Bill to be his guest, and the Dean replied, "In general, I never enjoy being anyone's house guest, and I hope you won't mind my saying that I would rather have an attic room in the local hostelry than a suite in your house." Perhaps this is what started a great friendship which has been as deep and affectionate as any the Dean has ever had. Mr. Bryan publicly and on innumer- able occasions has said that much of the recent success of William and Mary in its reversion to the old liberal arts type of institution has been due to Dartmouth.

The Dean has never been able to work by the clock. All his life he has been a great player but when a job has to be done he works steadily and intensely at all hours until it is completed. Most of the constructive work he has done at Dartmouth College has been done on Sunday mornings working alone in his office. He has missed scarcely a morning since 1921.

Probably no man who has been connected with Dartmouth for more than thirty years has had his name mentioned so seldom in the local press as Dean Bill. He has always avoided publicity but many ideas now in operation at Dartmouth College originated with him, as for example the pre-war practice of having after commencement a series of faculty lectures appropriately called Hanover Holiday. There are many others.

It ought to be mentioned here that Dean Bill is the only Bill on record who was never baptized in the Baptist Church. His stubbornness prevailed against the whole family, but shortly after coming to Hanover, when he decided that this was the place where he wanted to raise his family, he did join the Congregational Church. He soon became superintendent of the White Church Sunday School and inaugurated so many adult courses that the school took on the complexion of a university.

He has always been active in local bird studies and was President of the Hanover Bird Club which was very active in its early years. In 1926 he persuaded twenty- eight members of the community to pay something like $4O each for a pair of the best Scotch granite curling stones. This sport, a natural for Hanover, finally ceased owing to the uncertainty of our winter climate. The members never could be sure that the ice would be clear and the Dean got tired of constant telephoning to them. A shelter over the ice was a necessity and it never was constructed.

Dean Bill is known as the best contract player in Hanover; he is wildly enthusiastic about golf, which he had to give up in recent years because of gouty feet—this has always been a great cross for him to bear; and now he is an ardent and successful gardener. He has had great luck with his garden and during the summer he puts a lot of time and hard work into it. He is a fairly heavy reader but generally avoids books that have been designed to educate him. He is fond of books about birds and primitive peoples, as well as books of genuine human interest. He invariably reads himself to sleep with a mystery story which he has forgotten by the next day. When any discussion becomes philosophical he is lost (he has been known to fall asleep during one) which may be due to his mathematical training which requires exact definitions, and he often wonders whether philosophers really understand what they are talking about themselves. The first thing he looks for in a newspaper is any report of harness racing. One of his favorite journals is Hoof Beats, in one issue of which the Dean had a lively correspondence about horse racing, and he will never forget the trip he once made with Mrs. Bill to Lexington, Kentucky, where they saw, among other things, the old General Withers farm from which his father imported his stallion and mare trotters to Nova Scotia. He has always been a sports fan, but though he has served as judge at the finish at track meets for thirty years he usually is bored with track events

He is very proud of Paul Sample's por trait of him which hangs in his livin room. When this was unveiled, Professor Kenneth A. Robinson, author of an al- ready classic American poem "American Laughter," wrote the following toast which, I think, may serve as a fitting end to this profile: Oh Gordon Bill Long may you fill These academic cloisters With hearty wit And lots of it, And fresh ideas—and oysters. Now Sample (Paul) Enshrines them all —The splendid things our Dean is- Wherefore we toast Our pictured host In champagne or Martinis. Two men of parts Combine their arts To earn this toast we're giving —The painter of the American scene, And he whose art—l mean the Dean- Is lusty American living!

PORTRAIT OF DEAN BILL painted by Paul Sample '20, Dartmouth's artist in residence, and celebrated in the poetry which ends this profile.

A FAMILIAR AND LEADING FIGURE AT DARTMOUTH COMMENCEMENTS for many years, Dean Bill presents the candidates for honorary degrees and also awards the advanced-degree diplomas, as shown above.

AN ACTIVE CURLING ENTHUSIAST in days gone by. Dean Bill is shown on Occom Pond about the time that he persuaded 28 Hanover cronies to part with $4 each for a pair of the best Scotch granite curling stones—never used up to their full value.

PROFESSOR OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE