The Man with 2,000 Daughters

A restless man--that was the way friends on the Harvard faculty described William Allan Neilson. He was 48 when he left his professorship of English at Harvard to become president of Smith College, in 1917. Said a colleague: "I'll give Smith three years of Neilson at the outside."

The prophecy was off by 19 years, but the error was understandable. Blue-eyed, pixie-faced, sharp-bearded William Allan Neilson had wandered far and frequently since he first began to teach. His father was the village schoolmaster at Doune, in Perthshire, Scotland. One day, when his father was absent, ten-year-old William took over the class in the one-room schoolhouse. Three years later his father died, and William had to teach for a living. After graduating with honors from the University of Edinburgh, he taught at Upper Canada College in Toronto, Bryn Mawr, Columbia, Harvard.

Internationalism & Lumbago. Few presidents have sunk their roots deeper or let their branches spread so wide. During the 22 years of the Neilson era, Smith became the biggest women's college in the world, and one of the most prestigious in the U.S. Neilson believed in educational equality for women, but he scorned the notion that college should 36 a trade school for girls.

He built on-campus dormitories, because he thought there was too much disparity between rich & poor in Smith's cliquish off-campus "gold coast," did much to banish Smith's finishing-school atmosphere. Neilson treated his "2,000 daughters"*as intellectual equals, with no pomposity. In his weekly chats in chapel he was as apt to urge them to internationalism as he was to lecture them on their posture, lest they end with lumbago.

Famed for wit as well as pedagogy, Dr. Neilson was also a scholar, author of authoritative books (Essentials of Poetry, Burns, How to Know Him, etc.). He was associate editor of his friend Charles W. Eliot's "five foot shelf" of Harvard classics, and editor in chief of the second (1934) edition of Webster's New International Dictionary.

No Shades, No Smoking. He brought Bertrand Russell and Harold Laski to Smith, ardently defended Sacco and Vanzetti. In a notable free speech fight in 1926, he stuck by faculty member Dr. Harry Elmer Barnes, who was under fire for writing a book which absolved Germany of a good portion of World War I guilt and spread the blame over the other powers. Said Neilson in 1927: "The question . . . has always seemed to me to be not 'Are [Professor X's] views correct?' but 'Can the college afford to suppress him or his views at the cost of creating an atmosphere of censorship?' " He sometimes scolded Smith girls for knitting or gum-chewing in class. "Smoking," he once told them, "is a dirty, expensive and unhygienic habit, to which I am devoted." When he lifted the ban on tobacco, he asked only that the girls "smoke like gentlemen."

When the girls petitioned him for more campus entertainment, President Neilson told them not to act like the "spoiled brats of Park Avenue" but to learn to entertain themselves "or cut out all entertainment until you have acquired a fresh appetite." To Northampton neighbors who complained that Smith girls undressed without pulling down their shades, Neilson snapped: "Pull down your own shades." Neilson legends, like that of the girl out after hours who tried to climb in by a fire-escape and succeeded only when a strange hand (the President's) gave her a boost from behind, are as common on Smith's campus as elm leaves.

When Dr. Neilson retired in 1939 more than 2,400 adoring alumnae threw their hearts (artfully fashioned of red cardboard) at his feet. He went off to Falls Village, Conn. to write, and to work for liberal causes he believed in. He returned to Smith a few months ago, at 76, to complete a history of the college he was writing. Last week, in the college infirmary, Dr. Neilson's own heart beat its last.

* He also had two of his own, who went to Smith.

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