Feature

FOUR PROFESSORS WHO ARE RETIRING

JUNE 1969
Feature
FOUR PROFESSORS WHO ARE RETIRING
JUNE 1969

JAMES L. SCOTT, A.M. '39, completes the 42nd year of his affiliation with Dartmouth this month. After receiving his A.B. degree in 1926 from Swarthmore College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, he went to the University of Wisconsin as a teaching fellow in German. In 1927 he came to Dartmouth as an instructor in the Department of German. He became an assistant professor in 1935 and a full professor four years later. He served as chairman of the department for two different periods, 1941-43 and 1952-53.

His teaching at the College was temporarily interrupted during World War II. He served in the Army as an interpreter for six months and then worked in defense-related industry for three years.

While at Dartmouth he has devoted most of his teaching time to instructing students in German I and II. But he has also taught, in alternate years, two courses in German literature: German 61, Humanism through Sturm und Drang, and German 63, Schiller.

A bachelor, Professor Scott over the years has demonstrated a quiet and scholarly nature. With retirement he plans to leave Hanover and return to his hometown of Tarentum in Pennsylvania.

ROBERT A. McKENNAN '25, Professor of Anthropology, selected his profession with an eye toward combining his interest in learning with his love of the out-of-doors. He notes that anthropology is "a field of study that combines travel in distant places with research, and humanism with science." His anthropological traveling has indeed taken him to distant places including Uzbekistan in Central Asia and Hokkaido Island, Japan.

He began his graduate work in anthropology at Harvard in 1927 and received his Ph.D. in 1933. He joined the faculty of the Department of Sociology at Dartmouth in 1930. The College's recognition of anthropology as an independent field of study with its own departmental major has provided one of Professor McKennan's greatest satisfactions in recent years. He notes, "It has been nice to concentrate one's final teaching years on students who are so interested in your chosen subject, and to see an increasing number of them go on to professional work."

He inaugurated the introductory course Anthropology 1 and continued to teach it until 1967. He also has regularly taught a course in Cultural Anthropology and another on the American Indian, the latter being the focus of his field research over the years. Professor McKennan has spent several summers in Alaska and nearby sections of Canada studying the culture of the northernmost American Indians. Out of these field trips have come three monographs, WalapaiEthnography (co-author, 1935), The Upper Tanana Indians (1959), and The Chandalar Kutchin (1965).

With no classes to teach next fall, Professor McKennan will be able to spend more time in his favorite woodcock coverts. He notes, "as my wife of all these years will bear ready witness, 35 years in northern New England have not dulled my boyhood interest in hunting and fishing, and I have discovered several new facets of these archetypal activities, namely, woodcock shooting, pointer dogs, and Canadian salmon fishing."

FRANCIS E. MERRILL '26 will be spending the first year of his official retirement from Dartmouth at the University of Nice in France, where he now holds a visiting professorship for two years. He is teaching courses in both sociology and American culture for students of American literature.

Elected to Phi Beta Kappa at Dartmouth and valedictorian of his class, Professor Merrill received his advanced degrees from the University of Chicago, an A.M. in 1934 and a Ph.D. in 1937. He joined the faculty at Dartmouth in 1935 as an instructor in the Department of Sociology. He became an assistant professor in 1938 and a full professor in 1946. For three years during World War II he was away from Dartmouth serving in the federal government.

Professor Merrill is a prolific writer and an author of seven books and numerous articles. His Society and Culture, now in its fourth edition, is recognized as one of the best introductory sociology textbooks in a highly competitive field, and SocialDisorganization, of which he is coauthor, is practically unchallenged in the field of social problems. He is also the author of Courtship and Marriage, used as a textbook in college courses with the same title, such as the one Professor Merrill has taught for a number of years at the College.

While a member of the Dartmouth faculty, Professor Merrill with his wife has traveled extensively in France. In 1955 he was the recipient of a grant-in-aid from the Social Science Research Council for a study of the French family. Then in 1959-60 he was awarded his first Fulbright Fellowship to France and taught one semester at the University of Rennes in Brittany and the second semester at the University of Aix-en-Provence. Because of his facility in the French language developed through traveling, he was able to adjust to lecturing in a language not his own. In 1966-67 he received his second Fulbright award to France and lectured at the University of Nice. His return to Nice this year as one of the few non-French scholars offered positions in the French national university system may be the beginning of a second teaching career for Professor Merrill, now that his academic responsibilities at Dartmouth have ended.

HUGH SINCLAIR MORRISON '26, Leon E. Williams Professor Of Art, has spent almost all of his teaching career at Dartmouth. A Phi Beta Kappa member and summa cum laude graduate from Dartmouth, he earned a master's degree at Princeton and taught at the University of Chicago. Then he returned to Dartmouth in 1932 as an assistant professor in the Department of Art, rising to the rank of full professor in 1938. In 1963 he was appointed to the endowed faculty chair named for the late Leon E. Williams 'l5.

In his words, "my chief interest has always been architecture, especially modern architecture." His first book was a study of Louis Sullivan: Prophet of Modern Architecture, published in 1935 and still considered definitive on the subject. He turned to colonial architecture for his second book published in 1952, Early American Architecture. It was awarded second prize in the 1953 Book of the Year Competition of the Society of Architectural Historians and selected in 1954 for a White House Award as one of the 200 best books in all fields published in the preceding five years.

In spite of the praise accorded his books and various articles, Professor Morrison does not see himself as a research scholar. Over the years he has been "more actively interested in the teaching and administrative side" of his professorship and served as chairman of the Art Department for a number of years.

He has served as consultant to several architectural and historic groups and as a jury member for architectural competitions. He has also been active in civic affairs in Hanover, serving on the Finance Committee and the Town Planning Board, and has served on various college committees, including the Hopkins Center Building Committee.

Since 1962 when Professor Morrison's wife, the former Charlotte Ford, retired as Alumni Recorder after 35 years of collecting information about Dartmouth men, they have been able to spend more time at their winter home in Siesta Key, Sarasota, Florida. Retirement for both will find them making longer stays in Siesta Key, but they will continue to maintain their home in Hanover.