I have chosen some key areas from Cheerful Yesterdays and Confident Tomorrows. In order to make the reading easier, I have taken the liberty of putting in a bulleted list where he uses dashes and semicolons. I have not changed any of his words. (PLM)
Title of the Book: Cheerful Yesterdays and Confident Tomorrows
Author: Carl Gregg Doney
Published: 1942 in Portland Oregon
Chapter 5: West Virginia Wesleyan College
Selection #1: The President (pages 90-91)
There is a glamour about a college presidency, which the president himself may feel for the first month or six weeks. After that he will understand how saints could suffer and like martyrdom, though he knows his work will make no saint of him. There are only six or eight hundred college presidents, big and little, in the United States; yet for a better reason than this, he merits the esteem in which the people hold him. In an unusual degree, he is the responsible shaper of human destinies.
He fixes the policy of the college.
- Shall it stand for a real or a diluted scholarship, for character or its semblance, a gracious type of living or a frivolous?
He selects the professors.
- Shall they be men of teaching power or skilled in research? Shall they be religious men or otherwise? Are their lives to be examples for the student or patterns to be shunned? Is their personality to be strong and pleasing or undecided and displeasing?
He will be concerned with money.
- Can he get large sums, and will he use them wisely? Shall he put the institution into debt, making that condition an appeal for help? Shall he spend for buildings, or shall he store the funds in an endowment?
He will meet his students.
- Shall he be a friend or an autocrat? Will he have an understanding heart or be a chilly brain? Will he have a sense of humor, or does he think the world is saved by dignity? Will he keep an open mind and rarely be an oracle?
The president must give and be the answer to these and a thousand other questions. He will have advisers: trustees, faculty, students, friends, and Sir Oracles. He will judge their counsels, but the decision must be his; certainly it is if he be wrong. He is the shaper of destinies, for he shapes the college that reshapes the student. And there is no formula for the answering of his least important question.
During the two months before our going to Buckhannon, I worked out answers to all problems that could possibly arise. I read books and talked to gifted educators; the course was marked as clearly as a highway. In the first months of the work, I saw that college presidents could have guiding principles and policies, but no answers to be pulled from pigeon-holes. Each problem was a new creation involving persons, circumstances, and conditions. Each was a case before a court of equity. But principles and policies, they were his constitution; and he was the supreme court, unpacked though sometimes under pressure.
Selection #2: Coming to Buckhannon (pages 91-93)
In 1890 West Virginia Wesleyan College was opened by the Methodists as an academy. In 1905 it was chartered as a college that could grant degrees. Education in West Virginia was slow to move up to and beyond the eighth grade. Taxation for more than elementary education was resisted; in 1907 two-thirds of the counties had no high schools. Wheeling and Charleston, in sequence, were the State capitols long before they had high schools. The State University and normal schools, political payrolls, were miserably equipped and meagerly attended. Wesleyan as it was then would not now be ranked a college. Most of these conditions were unknown to me, but had I known them it would have made no difference in my confidence that an appeal for higher education could not be resisted. I had overlooked the inertia of the human mind and the logic of “What has been good, is still good enough.”
We reached Buckhannon September 1, 1907, seeing for the first time on the train from Grafton a woman dipping snuff. She was an expert and could hit the open window from across the aisle; and act like that has quality. The town of four thousand was beautifully situated on a winding river in the mountain foothills. It was well planned and had many attractive homes. A touch of the South was on the people, making them hospitable and charming in manners. Many, especially women, were highly cultured; the quiet of the town allowed them time for reading, reflection, conversation, the practice of some fine art, and gracious living. They had traveled, knowing other lands and cities, and had brought back the best things, not the superficial. Culture had affected character, which is its final value, for this large group had strength and goodness and good manners. They were simple, in the sense of being unaffected; they had no cleverness that puts one forward, nor did they simulate enjoyment. I have wondered if the crashing cheapness now so often seen among the well-advantaged has tinseled the refinement of Buckhannon also. I am not sure that culture is any longer in good standing; that which passes for it seems too bold and sure, too much confused with sensuous satisfaction to be very genuine.
Selection #3: The President’s House and Campus (page 93)
The president’s house was on the forty-acre campus, next to a grove of twenty lordly oaks, and it was warmed by natural gas instead of anthracite. There was a garden with a tall, red stable in the rear. Paul and Hugh, seven and five years old, were wide-eyed and in raptures over this freedom after the limitation of the Washington house and streets. The two of us thought this a matchless place for boys, who soon preferred the hills and trees to monuments. On the campus were the main buildings, a girls’ dormitory, a music building, and a steam-heating plant. The library and laboratories were poorly housed and furnished. The physical features of the main building were good. Evidently the school had not grown like Jack’s beanstalk; so here was all the greater opportunity.
Selection #4: The Students (pages 105-106)
I always liked the West Virginia students. They were strong individualists, not asking favors and being jealous of their rights. Many were unsophisticated mountaineers who in the college unfolded surprisingly. The best college orators and debaters I have ever heard were these youths: they prepared the message, they had the fire of ancient Greeks and Romans. They may have lost it now; the second generation often turns to other ways. These boys have become college presidents, professors, preachers, doctors, farmers—all kinds of people, yet I have not known of any being in the penitentiary. Several are politicians, a few inclining toward statesmanship.
There may be persons knowing schools where wealth has showered down beauty and brought together men made famous by their learning who will ask if it is not wasted effort to maintain a country college. In part, the answer has been given. Youths here multiplied their powers to be and to achieve. For many tis would never have been possible had there been no college near their homes. These youths were sought out and prevailed upon to come; self-sufficient though they seemed, they needed help to make the venture. They were newly-discovered gold to be minted and placed in circulation. To this day they tell us they are grateful for the college, and gratitude from discerning men is evidence of service rendered. One is not certain that this college and others like it that have now grown strong and well-established are producing better citizens than they did a generation ago. Sometimes I think the splendidly equipped college is doing too much for the undergraduate: it does not school him in fortitude, personal inventiveness, and habits of self-reliance; it is too much of a wet nurse; it is soft training for a hard world. I remember a Harvard youth, supposedly preparing himself for useful citizenship, who followed a leashed dog and was himself followed by a valet. I have never thought that even a pedigreed dog was a good leader for a student or that it was not good for him to button his own shirt.
Selection #5: The Doney Family and the College (pages 111-112)
When the trustees of West Virginia Wesleyan, at the time of my resignation, presented resolutions, and friends and students talked to us, we felt that our decision might not be the best. I have heard of houses being taken off the market after the owner had read the advertisement written by the real estate agent. Yet our quiet thoughts about the college made it clear that someone else would give a new dynamic to the work. The loyalty and kindness of the stalwart West Virginians were some compensation for our heaviness and tears. Dennie had at once enjoyed the work, for it was not much different from the pastorate, though it was more with youth. The students pleased her with their hope and eager life; each year a class was graduated and another class came in. Nothing was commonplace or pointless, the campus glowed and every day brought something new and vital. She entered into all that happened and was the busy friend of students and townspeople. What they said of her confirmed my own belief. Paul and Hugh, now fifteen and thirteen, had taken root upon the campus. They were in a world in which they had a part. They had adopted and had been adopted by the teachers and the students. They had carried ball bats and water buckets, cheered the winning teams and wept because of their defeats. They had explored the river and the countryside, climbed the hills and trudged the valleys; had made a garden grow and learned the loveliness of nature. Could we ever find a better people? Was there a better place to live in or a better college?