(An Address By Edward Frederick Lindley Wood, Viscount Hal...)
An Address By Edward Frederick Lindley Wood, Viscount Halifax; The Ultimate Issues Of Life By Robert Gordon Sproul.
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(Excerpt from John Henry Nash Library: San Francisco IF w...)
Excerpt from John Henry Nash Library: San Francisco IF what the Exposition has done for the good of all the arts and sciences may be measured by what it did for Insurance within my own knowledge, then, indeed, has it become the Headlight of Progress of this century. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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Robert was born on May 22, 1891 in San Francisco, California, United States, first of two sons of Robert Sproul and Sarah Elizabeth Moore. The elder Sproul was a graduate of Glasgow University and had taught school in Lanarkshire, Scotland, before emigrating to the United States in 1887. He made his career as an accountant for the Santa Fe Railroad.
Robert Gordon Sproul attended James Lick Grammar School and Mission High School in San Francisco, graduating from the latter in 1908. He enrolled in the University of California in the fall of 1909, majoring in civil engineering. His academic achievements were reflected in his election to Phi Beta Kappa; he belonged to a residential club named Abracadabra and won his letter as a two-miler on the track team. He was elected president of both the junior class and the campus YMCA. He received a B. S. degree in engineering in May 1913.
As a student Sproul sold newspapers, and for a year after high school graduation he worked as a chainman on a survey crew.
After receiving a B. S. in engineering in May 1913, Sproul was employed for a year as an efficiency engineer for the Civil Service Board of the city of Oakland. In 1914 he began his forty-four-year career in the University of California when he was appointed as a cashier.
He was promoted to the position of assistant comptroller in 1918, and on October 1, 1920, the regents made him comptroller, secretary of the regents, and the university's land agent. During the early 1920's Sproul demonstrated his exceptional powers of persuasion as a member of a state commission appointed by Governor William T. Stephens to deal with a campaign to detach the College of Agriculture, in Davis, from the university.
In 1923 Sproul persuaded the commission to decide in the university's favor, and the Davis campus remained in the university system. In 1925 Sproul was made vice-president and comptroller. During this period he declined an invitation to become manager of the California Prune and Apricot Growers' Association, at a salary reported to be five times what he was receiving from the university.
In June 1929 President William Wallace Campbell announced that he would retire the following summer, and the regents offered Sproul the presidency, which he accepted. There were some reservations among the faculty and the regents about appointing a president without a graduate degree, but the academic senate confirmed the regents' vote of confidence.
As one part of this preparation he established an office at UCLA, then in process of moving from its early location on Vermont Street to the present Westwood campus. He spent several months in Westwood seeking to ease tensions between the Southern Branch, which felt that its aspirations were frequently neglected, and the faculty at Berkeley, which had difficulty accepting the ambitious new campus.
On October 22, 1930, Sproul was inaugurated as the university's eleventh president. During the twenty-eight years of his presidency the University of California experienced unprecedented growth: student enrollment increased from 19, 000 to 47, 000, the faculty from 900 to 3, 500, the libraries from one million to four million volumes, and the number of campuses from three to eight.
The growth was not always smooth, however. The Sproul years spanned the Great Depression and World War II and saw explosive growth in California. More immediate difficulties included continuing differences between UCLA and Berkeley faculty and alumni, alumni influence on athletics, and evolution of the state teachers' colleges into a full-curriculum system, offering both bachelors' and masters' degrees.
Sproul's relationship to faculty and students was generally good: they rallied twice to keep him from leaving, in 1939 for a San Francisco bank presidency, and in 1947 for the presidency of Columbia University (later accepted by Dwight Eisenhower). Sproul's student and faculty relations were tested by student pacifists during the late 1930's and more seriously during the ascendancy of State Senator Jack Tenney's Committee on Un-American Activities in the late 1940's.
In 1949 Sproul was persuaded to support a special Loyalty Oath which the Regents adopted when the Tenney Committee charged the University with being Communist. Forty faculty members refused to sign the oath, and their dismissal led to bitter internal division.
In 1956 the California Supreme Court ruled the oath unconstitutional and restored the professions who had been fired, but the wounds were slow to heal. Shortly before he retired, Sproul decided to withdraw from the Pacific Coast Conference, after a long, losing fight to control payments and perquisites for football players.
Sproul retired in 1958. He was recipient of many honorary degrees, belonged at one time to 268 organizations, and to a number of boards of directors.
He died at his home in Berkeley at the age of 84.
Throughout his presidency at University of California, Robert Gordon Sproul resisted the expansion of the state college system and was successful in preserving the University of California's exclusive jurisdiction over doctoral programs. During his admonostration six U. C. faculty members received Nobel prizes and more than forty were elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Sproul's outstanding contribution during his 28-year work was the multiple-campus expansion of the University to meet the demands for higher education in widely separated parts of the state, while maintaining one institution governed by one Board of Regents and one President. He also stopped establishment of separate local colleges in 1931, 1945, and 1953. He was given the Benjamin Ide Wheeler distinguished citizen award by the city of Berkeley, 1934; named "Alumnus of the Year" by the California Alumni Association in 1946.
(Excerpt from John Henry Nash Library: San Francisco IF w...)
(An Address By Edward Frederick Lindley Wood, Viscount Hal...)
A Republican, he nominated his friend Earl Warren for President at the 1948 Republican convention, and President Eisenhower made him a special ambassador to Korea in 1956.
Quotations:
In a 1930 speech, as president-elect he stated:
"The glory of a university is obviously the men who constitute its faculty. It cannot be too often repeated that it is men, and nothing but men, who make education. The reason why the University of California occupies the high position it does throughout the academic world is that there has never been a time when its faculty could not boast of men who were finding their way along rough trails, illuminated only by the spark of genius, to the heights of scholarship. Within a few years after the receipt of its charter from the state there were to be found in the University a goodly number of men whose reputation is even yet undimmed, such men as Daniel Coit Gilman, later president of Johns Hopkins University, Hilgard in agriculture, LeConte in geology, and many others. Nor is the present faculty devoid of men who, in their respective fields, hold high the lamp of learning - Campbell in astronomy, Kofoid in zoology, and G. N. Lewis in chemistry, to pick out a few of the most obvious. In a very real sense, such men are the University of California, and similarly elsewhere, for material development is futile without brains to use and to direct it and personality to irradiate it. Students are getting a gold brick if they go for education to a school where there are no great teachers. "
He was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa and also he belonged to a residential club named Abracadabra. Sproul was also a member of the Zeta Psi fraternity, and the Bohemian Club.
At his university years he was over six feet tall and was for a time drum major of the marching band.
On September 6, 1916, he married Ida Amelia Wittschen, whom he had met while he was working in Oakland. They had three children. Although Sproul was generally known to friends and colleagues as Bob, Ida Sproul called him Gordon, as had his parents, who named him for General Charles G. Gordon, one-time British governor of Sudan.
