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The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. Edited by W.A. Neilson and A.H. Thorndike
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William Allan Neilson was a Scottish-American professor of English and educator, who became one of the most influential college presidents of his time.
Background
William Allan Neilson was born on March 28, 1869 in Doune, Perthshire, Scotland. He was the second son and youngest of four children of David Neilson and Mary (Allan) Neilson. His father was the village schoolmaster, and Will in early childhood sometimes assisted him, standing on a chair to reach the blackboard.
Education
After further study at Montrose Academy, Neilson entered Edinburgh University in 1886. He earned his Master's Degree with second-class honors in philosophy in 1891. He began graduate work at Harvard, where he received the Doctor of Philosophy Degree in English in 1898.
Career
At his father's death, when William was eleven, he became a monitor in the school, and at thirteen, a pupil teacher.
He worked at the University Settlement, teaching the poor of Edinburgh's slums.
In 1891 Neilson immigrated with his family to Canada, where his brother had settled.
After brief periods of teaching at Bryn Mawr College (1898 - 1900), Harvard (1900 - 1904), and Columbia (1904 - 1906), he was in 1906 appointed professor of English at Harvard, where he remained until 1917, when he accepted the presidency of Smith College. In 1904 he spent the summer in Offenburg in the family of Oskar Muser, a lawyer and member of the Landtag of the Duchy of Baden.
Neilson became an American citizen in 1905.
At Harvard, Neilson won distinction as both teacher and scholar. He taught Chaucer, Shakespeare and other Elizabethan dramatists, Milton, and various nineteenth-century authors.
He joined President Charles W. Eliot as associate editor of the Harvard Classics (the 50-volume "Five-Foot Bookshelf, " 1909-1910), writing the notes and introductions. His edition of Shakespeare's Complete Dramatic and Poetic Works, revised with Prof. Charles J. Hill in 1942, is a standard and important one.
During his career at Smith, he served as editor-in-chief of the second edition of Webster's New International Dictionary, which appeared in 1934. Neilson hesitated for some time before accepting the Smith presidency. His two predecessors, L. Clark Seelye and Marion Le Roy Burton, had both been clergymen.
Neilson had no desire to increase the size of the student body of Smith, fixed at 2, 000. He was, however, determined to provide college residences for all students, many of whom were living in private dormitories, a practice felt to be undemocratic. In the course of adding ten new dormitories he greatly enlarged the physical college and built two brick quadrangles on a tract adjacent to the old campus, which preserved the college's tradition of small dormitory units. He beautified the campus by planting and landscaping.
In spite of his insistence that fund raising was not his province, Neilson not only balanced the budget, even during the depression, but through his great personal popularity brought sizable gifts to the college that significantly increased the endowment.
He maintained a balanced faculty of men and women. Himself a teacher during the early years of his presidency, he brought to Smith many distinguished scholars and teachers from abroad as well as from the United States, with the result that he left the college well on a par with leading universities. He won the respect and loyalty of the faculty for his fairmindedness and devotion to academic freedom. Always a fighter for liberal causes, Neilson was violently opposed by the local community and by some of the Smith faculty for his defense of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
His compassion for the victims of Nazism led him to become a director of the National Refugee Service and co-chairman of the Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born.
As the national and international situation grew more tense through the 1930's, he devoted his Monday chapel talks to attempts to make students more aware of the issues in national and international affairs.
After his retirement in 1939, Neilson settled in Falls Village, Connecticut, where he had bought a remodeled farmhouse. He continued to spend part of the winters in Northampton, working on a history of Smith College, and he died there in 1946 of a coronary thrombosis. His ashes were buried on the Smith campus, appropriately in the midst of a natural garden he had planned on a hillside.
Neilson, although reared in the Scottish Kirk, became a liberal in religion; as he wrote the trustees, he could not promise "to offer supplication aloud in Chapel. "
Views
Neilson opposed the growing tendency of the times toward practical and vocational education, and insisted that the best training for women, as for men, was that in the liberal arts.
Particularly concerned with foreign relations, he maintained through the isolationism of the 1930's a strong internationalist viewpoint and early warned of the danger in the rise of fascist states.
Membership
Neilson was an active board member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, originating in 1943 and heading the Committee of 100, which raised funds for its legal defense work.
Personality
One of the great public speakers of his time, Neilson had a remarkable range from light to solemn. Speaking usually without a manuscript and even without notes, he had an extraordinary facility for adapting himself to the occasion and the audience. Smith College students long remembered his chapel talks. He could tease and cajole, he could scold, admonish, and warn.
Connections
He married Elisabeth Muser on June 25, 1906. They had three children: Margaret, Caroline, and a son, Allan, who died of rheumatic fever at the age of seventeen.