Word: neilsons
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When wise and tolerant President William Allan Neilson kissed his "2,000 daughters" goodbye and retired after 22 years, Smith College searched hard for a successor (TIME, Oct. 30, 1939). British-born, Oxford-educated Herbert John Davis took the job with misgivings: "What can the man do that cometh after the king?" Like Neilson, Davis had been an English professor (his specialty: Jonathan Swift); Smith trustees hoped to see the Neilson miracle reworked. But in eight years as president, Davis proved more distinguished for his prose style than his administrative tact. Last week, at 55, Herbert John Davis announced from...
...William G. Saltonstall '28, Exeter, N. H., newly-named principal of Phillips Exeter Academy. The sixth Overseer, Rev. Charles W. Gilkey '03, Chicago, associate dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School, will serve for two years, filling the unexpired term of the late President-emeritus William Allan Neilson of Smith College...
...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...
...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...