Mr. Thurber announced that he had a new president for Clark College and Clark University; he announced it at the commencement dinner, and there was consternation on the faces of everybody present, because nobody had ever heard of Wallace Walter Atwood, professor of physiography at Harvard University, and author of “The Mineral Resources of Southwestern Alaska,” and “The Glaciation of the Uinta and Wasatch Mountains.” I am told that one of Professor Atwood’s colleagues at Harvard, hearing the news, remarked: “I suppose Clark thinks it is getting a geographer and an educator; Clark will find it has neither.” And Clark did! President Atwood may be a well-informed man in his narrow specialty; certainly he fulfils the ideal of the interlocking trustees, in that he is a hundred percent pious and a hundred percent patriotic and a hundred percent plutocratic. But when it comes to the administration of a university, and to broad questions of public welfare—I have cast about and tested all the terms in my vocabulary, but I have been unable to find any one word to describe the ignorant crudity and childish absurdity of this former Harvard physiographer. He announced at the very beginning that he had no interest in being the president of a poor man’s university; he was going to start a “drive” for funds, and make Clark a normal and respectable place. In an address to the students he set forth the advantages of a technical education, using the standard phrases of the “go-getters”: “As an expert witness you can sometimes get as much as a hundred dollars a day.” This to a group of men whose chief pride was that they had a real understanding of the intellectual life! One student came to him to ask for time to pay his tuition fee. “Why do you come here if you can’t pay what you owe?” asked the president, sharply. On the other hand, to a famous athlete, member of a wealthy family, who had found it impossible to pass his examinations, he said: “Don’t worry too much about that; we all get by in the end; it took me five years to get through myself.”