"Misfit" Cornell

Casting about for likely members of the M Club of Cornell University, Walter Clark Teagle, president of the Standard Oil Co., of New Jersey, hit upon the name of his rich classmate, Hayward Kendall, Cleveland coalman, and wrote him a letter. It is easy to become a member of the M Club--simply agree to contribute $1,000 annually to Cornell University. But Classmate Kendall did not want to join; and he said so in a wide open letter to President Livingston Farrand of Cornell. The letter in part:

"Even with the will I couldn't help comfortably while paying for a winter home in Florida out of income. And by a home in Florida I don't mean a duchy or principality with a kingly villa in the centre, like the Great Khan Teagle's estate, but a few humble acres on the Gulf and a simple cottage with bougainvillea and cocoanut palms and poison ivy around it.

"My friends speak of a heritage I have gotten from Cornell University. The only legacy I am certain I received from that institution of learning was the licker habit. It took me years to get over it. And, quite frankly, I could have acquired the same habit in two years at Harvard, while it took me four at Cornell. . . .

"I refuse to get steamed up over Cornell. You have neither an Eastern university nor a frankly Western one. All you have is a group of rather inharmonious buildings in a glorious setting, a silly, undemocratic, un-Christian fraternity system and a large mass of unwelcome, misplaced women called coeds. . . .

"And who can get the date of the Norman invasion or the French irregular verbs fixed in his mind when a bare-kneed cutie, all scented up with Black Narcissus, is sitting just across the aisle? No one without the sales resistance of a Galahad! . . .

"I refuse to contribute a dime to your present misfit university with its caste system and sexy characteristics. But to show you I am acting in good faith, I will agree to leave Cornell a million dollars if the fraternity and club system is completely abolished and the women students are given a separate college of their own. . . .

"Pardon my rough and tumble entrance to your party. But a brick through the window arouses quicker interest than a dollar's worth of pansies laid lovingly on the threshold."

This was not a sour grapes letter, for Mr. Kendall as a Cornell undergraduate (class of 1898) was taken into Delta Kappa Epsilon and was managing editor of the Cornell Widow (funny).