Clyde Bowman Furst

Background

He was born at Williamsport, Pennsylvania, but was taken while still a child to Hagerstown, Mdaryland

Education

After preparatory schooling at the Washington County high school, Hagerstown, he entered Dickinson College, where he received the degree of Ph. D. in 1893 and that of A. M. in 1895.

On completing his undergraduate work, he entered Johns Hopkins University, where he remained until 1897, pursuing courses in English, German, and philosophy.

He continued his studies at Oxford (1897) and at Columbia (1899 - 1900).

Career

At Johns Hopkins Furst was assistant in the Young Men's Christian Association from 1894 to 1897, after which time he lectured for two years on English novelists and poets for the American Society for Extension of University Teaching.

During another two years he was educational director of the Mountain Seminary and College Preparatory School for Girls, Birmingham, Pennsylvania.

From 1902 to 1911 he served as secretary of Teachers College, Columbia University, lectured on literature, 1903-10, and in the latter year became associate professor of English. After resigning in 1911, he was for twenty years secretary to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, becoming, also, in 1918, secretary of the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association, which position he held until his death. Beginning in 1925, he lectured on college administration at Teachers College.

During the First World War, he was adviser to the War Department's committee on education.

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching was the theatre of Furst's best-known and most important work.

With Raymond L. Mattocks and Howard J. Savage he was author of Retiring Allowances for Officers and Teachers in Virginia Public Schools (1926). Numerous studies, surveys of education in Vermont and Massachusetts (1913 and 1923, respectively), pension plans for teachers in Colorado, Delaware, and Vermont, and for employees of New York City and of private hospitals there, were produced in collaboration with others between 1913 and 1929.

Furst also contributed to the Cyclopedia of Education and wrote on pensions and philanthropic endowments for the Encyclopedia Britannica.

An abiding love for literature is revealed in A Group of Old Authors (1899), popular versions of excursions into English literature of the sixth to the sixteenth century, including essays on Beowulf, Griselda, and John Donne; and in syllabi of lectures on American literature.

Furst, who served the Carnegie Foundation at a particularly difficult period, was widely known, also, for his achievement in putting pension systems for teachers on a sound basis, in which work he displayed capacity for meticulous detail and an ability to present data in a clear, masterly manner.

Unlike the astronomer who was so busy making calculations that for years he never looked through a telescope, Furst, though acclaimed for his own calculations, was always observant of the life around him.

Glimpses of his personality, his interests and pleasures, literary and gastronomical, shine through The Observations of Professor Maturin (1916)--essays reprinted from the New York Evening Post; Merlin (1930), his Phi Beta Kappa poem, breathes a firm faith in the dignity and worth of the scholar and teacher.

After a brief illness caused by influenza and heart disease, he died in his fifty-eighth year. In Maturin's optimistic phrase, it seems "he saw good growing better, towards the best"; and thought even death not "unaccompanied of pleasure when it is natural. "

Achievements

• Besides these professional posts, he acted as trustee of the Harmon Association for Advancement of Nursing and the Spence School Retirement Fund, and participated in the work of the American Council on Education, the Second Pan American Scientific Congress, the National Conference on Standards of Colleges and Secondary Schools, and of numerous other organizations. In the field of pensions he was recognized by competent judges as an outstanding authority and he was influential in developing the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association.

Works

More photos

• book

  • A Group of Old Authors

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

  • Pensions for Public School Teachers: A Report for the Committee On Salaries, Pensions and Tenure, of the National Education Association

    (This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before ...)

  • Pensions for public school teachers Volume 11-12

    (This historic book may have numerous typos and missing te...)

  • Pensions for public school teachers; a report for the Committee on salaries, pensions and tenure, of the National education association - Primary Source Edition

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

  • Pensions for public school teachers; a report for the Committee on salaries, pensions and tenure, of the National education association

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

  • American poetic theory
  • The Observations of Professor Maturin,

Religion

At Johns Hopkins Furst was assistant in the Young Men's Christian Association from 1894 to 1897, after which time he lectured for two years on English novelists and poets for the American Society for Extension of University Teaching.

Membership

He was a member of the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association.

He was a member of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Personality

His writing, informed by a "keen and penetrating mind, " and spiced with humor, was attractive, also, because of its smoothness and lucidity. His efficiency and "genius for order, " combined with readiness and ease in social contacts, made him an excellent administrator.

Loyalty, wit, industry, capacity for friendship, devotion to literature were some of his conspicuous traits.

Quotes from others about the person

• He has been called a "philosopher of the cheerful mind, " and such is the impression left by reading his Observations (post). With pedantry, masquerading as scholarship, he had no sympathy.
  
  Neither did he approve of that school of education which holds that the world was made this morning.
  
  Man, to be educated, must have freedom of the past and of the present. Furst's teaching is said to have been "interesting, stimulating, and clear. "

Connections

On June 12, 1900, he married Mary Louise O'Neil of Pittsburgh; they had two sons, Lowry and Breading.

Father:

Samuel Furst

mother Alice (Bowman) Furst

Wife:

Mary Louise O'Neil

On June 12, 1900, he married Mary Louise O'Neil of Pittsburgh; they had two sons, Lowry and Breading.

colleague:

I. L. Kandel

He collaborated with I. L. Kandel on Pensions for Public School Teachers (1918)--a study made for the National Education Association.

colleagues:

Raymond L. Mattocks and Howard J. Savage