Picked for a Winner

Picked For a Winner By Frank R. Arnold In the selection of Dr. F. S. Harris as president of the Brig- ham Young University, the trustees have made the wisest choice within their power. They know he will make good in the fu- ture, just as he has done in the past, because this is the second time he has been picked for a winner. He is one of the first fruits of that admirable system, inaugurated by Dr. Widtsoe, many years ago, to which the state of Utah owes so many of its leading teachers and scholars. In order to supply the State Ag- ricultural College with a strong, permanent faculty he used to advise young men of parts to do graduate work at some eastern university and at the same time he would promise them a col- lege position when they had attained the necessary scholarship. His ability to recognize merit was quick to see that these men had the qualities that make for success, and he knew that since they were Utah men their native state would reap the permanent benefit of their advanced training. This is one reason why Utah colleges are perhaps the most inbred in the land, but it is also a reason why the turnover in their teaching force is so small. It was to further this system that Dr. Harris was selected, one might even say set apart, to become the leading agronomist of the state and his later work has justified the wise choice, for he has steadily shown himself of increasing usefulness to the state as a writer, educator, and agronomist, during his long service at the Agricultural College. The position of college president is one of the most diffi- cult to fill that is to be found in modern society. A college president must be a high type of business man, a man of char- acter and spiritual force, a man of broad and varied scholar- ship, a man of ideas who can express them easily in public, a writer, a man of the world with pronounced social gifts and a man who is quick to recognize merit in others. It is because a college president needs all these qualities and because so few men possess them all, that so many presidential chairs are to- day filled with second-rate men and that at the present moment more than twenty American colleges are seeking leaders. Dr. Harris possesses many of these qualities and he will acquire others, for he is still young, and is an untiring, intelligent worker. Perhaps his greatest quality, as an educator is his

DR. FRANKLIN STEWART HARRIS The new President of the Brighton Young University, who succeeds Dr. George H. Brimhall who was chosen President-Emeritus, and will have charge of the seminary work of the Church Schools.

918 IMPROVEMENT ERA broad interest in the entire field of scholarship. For him Cornell was a true university, not alone a place in which to do graduate work in agronomy, but also a place to come in contact with all the departments of learning. For years he has taken a keen interest in language work as well as in agronomy. He has even been known to drop into a Latin class once or twice a week just for the pleasure he took in the subject. He has prob- ably the largest private library in the state of Utah. It con- tains over 5,000 volumes and is especially rich in works on travel and science. The distinguished visitor to Utah always gets a warm welcome from Dr. Harris, because, like Emerson, he looks on every meeting with a stranger as an event in his life. Dr. Harris is a poor society man and a good cosmopolitan in the fact that he would infinitely rather talk with his friends than dance or play cards with them. Not that he condemns dancing or any other legitimate social pleasure, but simply for him, as for the French, conversation is the most interesting of all games and there is more pleasure for him in sharpening his wits on those of his friends, in getting their point of view, in sitting at the feet of others and learning from them, than there is in the rather brainless and facile pastimes of ordinary society. And yet, in spite of these purely personal preferences, which a never disagreeably obtruded, Dr. Harris has probably more warm friends and interested acquaintances in all strata of Utah society than any man in the state. Being human he is naturally far from omniscient and yet there is no course offered at col- lege which he could not conduct, for a few days if necessary, with great pleasure to himself and profit to those taught. It is this universality of scholarly interest, this freedom from a narrow point of view, which has been the basis of Dr. Harris' success as an intellectual human being and which will be the very foundation stone of his success as a college presi- dent. Even without the gift of prophecy it is easy to see how he will go to work to make the Brigham Young University the leading religious university west of the Mississippi. First will come the urgent necessity of gathering around him the strong- est faculty possible, and in this faculty he will require that the librarian be just as well trained and educated as the professor of English, the professor of history will be esteemed as highly as the professor of chemistry, and no man will be professor of music unless he knows something besides music. That same universality of knowledge which is his own greatest strength and glory will be the first requisite which he will demand of his co-workers. His whole career will be to show that the interre- lation of all knowledge is the greatest of all knowledge and that the history of civilization is the most embracing, most satis- factory, most helpful of all sciences. It may take many years

PICKED FOR A WINNER 919 of waiting, much putting-up with second and third rate teach- ers, much training and stimulating of ambitious young men, to gather this faculty together, but it is the goal that Dr. Harris will finally arrive at, if he is given a free hand, for he more than most knows that a true college is made up of teachers rather than of buildings and athletic fields. It is also devoutly to be hoped that Dr. Harris will cause the same obsession for good teaching to pervade his normal school and characterize the high school teachers as well as those in the grades. Utah education in common with many other western states has always been weakest in the high school. The grades have done worthy foundation work and the colleges have often fittingly capped the educational structure, but in be- tween is a stratum of far from solid rock. This is due mainly to the fact that too many teachers now-a-days are trained more in method than in subject matter, that few high school teachers have the broad grasp of their subject which comes from grad- uate work, and above all the high school has grown mushy and fiberless through a desire to establish a royal road to learn- ing, based on athletics, manual training and courses from which all hard thinking, concentration, and need of memorizing have been removed. The training of the body and the acquiring of even a spongelike mind are admirable qualities, it is true, but they are not the only possible ones to be gained in a high school course, and the most valuable gift that the Brigham Young Uni- versity normal school could bestow on the state is a model high school in which the teachers were masters of their subjects and the object of which would be to form alert, well informed citi- zens rather than bread winners. If all high schools are to be- come technical schools, why not call them so and do away with the hypocrisy of pretending that they stand for so-called higher education! It is this freedom from hypocrisy which should be the main glory of every religious school. Church schools have no rea- son for existence unless they stand first and foremost for char- acter, and all college character is based on intellectual honesty and the search for truth. In the ever changing, never ending educational struggle toward truth, Dr. Harris in his new po- sition will be more of a leader than ever. As president of the B. Y. U. he will make the institution a worthy colleague of the State Agricultural College and the State University. Thus the state will be blest with the three most necessary types of higher learning; the college of the people, the university with its professional schools, and the small literary college which has ever been distinguished by its fostering care of the individual rather than of the masses, and thus has become the most de- voted of alma maters.