"Preceptor Guys"

Here's to those preceptor guys

Who're coming here to make us wise--

Too late to stuff them down our throats,

They'll make poor Oughty-six the goats.

This verse was added to the Princeton University "Faculty Song" in the spring of 1905, after Woodrow Wilson had announced his plans for Princeton's famed, pioneering preceptorial system. A year later the Class of 1906 was singing:

Here's to those preceptor guys Fifty stiffs to make us wise--

Easy jobs and lots of pay,

They work the students night and day.

Besides the 50 new preceptors--supervisors of small study conferences held in conjunction with lecture courses--Princeton took on 37 new faculty members in 1905-06, made preceptors of 14 who were already there. Chosen from the nation's ablest, these 101 teachers, most of them young, were to become proud of themselves as a group. Seventy of them stayed in pedagogy. Most of them reached prominence--such prominence that last week the Princeton Alumni Weekly asked proudly, ''Where Are the Preceptor Guys?" and told about them as follows:

Four are deans: at Rutgers, Walter Taylor Marvin; at Princeton, Christian Gauss, Augustus Trowbridge, Luther Pfahler Eisenhart. Three became headmasters: Emerson Boyd Morrow of Gilman, Louis Wardlaw Miles whom he succeeded, and Charles Hodge Jones of Silver Bay School (New York). Department heads at Princeton are Roger Bruce Cash Johnson (philosophy), Edward Samuel Corwin (politics), Duane Reed Stuart (classics), Robert Kilburn Root (English), Charles Rufus Morey (art & archaeology), Henry Norris Russell (astronomy), Charles Grosvenor Osgood Jr. (formerly English). Department heads elsewhere: Ernest Ludlow Bogart (economics, University of Illinois), George Dwight Kellogg (classics, Union University), Gilbert Ames Bliss (mathematics, University of Chicago), John Wesley Young (mathematics, University of Kansas). John Edward Wallace Wallin (psychology, University of Pittsburgh and elsewhere), Alfred Ernest Richards (English, University of New Hampshire).

Varnum Lansing ("Wilkie") Collins is Princeton's secretary; Frederick Leroy Hutson its onetime registrar. Adam Leroy Jones is director of admissions at Columbia; George Dobbin Brown was librarian at General Theological Seminary. Princeton teachers but not "preceptor guys" were Scientists Sir James Hopwood Jeans and Owen Willans Richardson. Variously famed are Connecticut's Senator Hiram Bingham (Yaleman), Novelist Maxwell Struthers Burt, Songman Sigmund Spaeth and his crew-coaching, English-teaching half-brother John Duncan, Donald Clive Stuart, adviser of the Triangle Club, Charles William Kennedy, retired chairman of the Committee on Athletics.

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