Big Glow

When Daniel L. Marsh took over as president in 1926, he found almost everything wrong with Boston University. Its college of liberal arts was crowded into an old Harvard Medical School building just off Copley Square. Its own medical school was third-rate, its law school was taking students directly out of high school. Its treasury was nearly $500,000 in debt, and its campus was little more than a lot of scattered old brownstones.

B.U. did not stay that way long. A Methodist minister from western Pennsylvania, Daniel Marsh was a burly man with a bubbling vitality and the Bible in his blood. He was up at 6 each morning, and by the time he got off to work ("Decisions! Decisions! Decisions!") he had his little black notebook filled with the things he wanted to do for B.U. The things he did--and the decisions he made--turned the campus upside down.

He set up a college of music, an evening college of commerce. He established schools of nursing and public relations, reorganized the graduate school and the school of social work. He increased the school of medicine's budget sevenfold, stiffened the standards of the law school. He added dormitories, scores of classrooms, built a new science building, a school of theology. In 25 years, B.U.'s enrollment climbed from 9,000 to 30,000, until B.U. became the fifth largest university in the U.S.

But Daniel Marsh's sights were not bounded by his rising campus skyline, nor did he wish B.U. to become merely "the biggest this or that." His main job, as he saw it, was to create a "university consciousness." At one level, he picked out for B.U. the first school colors it had ever had--scarlet and white. At another, he brought students of many nations and religions to his campus, so that the "march from littleness to bigness" would also be a march away from regional and denominational narrowness, "losing no loyalties in the process [and] keeping alive all the while the spiritual glow." The spirit glows today in a beautiful new chapel.

This month the long administration of President Marsh comes to an end. At 70, he is retiring. Last week, to take his place, Methodist-affiliated B.U. appointed Methodist Minister Harold C. Case of Pasadena, 48. B.U. was not too shaken by the change, for Daniel Marsh would still be around as chancellor, cramming his little black notebook full of the things he would still like to do for B.U.

Other presidential news on U.S. campuses last week:

EURJ Robert Clarkson Clothier, 66, president of Rutgers since 1932, announced that he would retire before the end of the school year. Bob Clothier, a reliable idealist, has guided Rutgers to a solid doubling of size and influence and won a front place for himself among U.S. educational spokesmen.

CJ Theodore Paul Wright, 55, president of the Cornell Research Foundation and the university's Aeronautical Laboratory, onetime vice president of the Curtiss-Wright Corp., was named acting president of Cornell, to succeed Acting President Cornelis W. de Kiewiet, now president of the University of Rochester.

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