The Days of a Man 1887 



continued before any other honorary degrees had 

 been granted. 1 



Alumnus In 1887 it became my privilege to serve Cornell 

 trustee University in the capacity of alumnus trustee. Mr. 

 White was the first and natural choice of the voting 

 graduates, but it was later arranged that the board 

 should itself elect him to their body, leaving the 

 alumni to fix on some one else for the second vacancy. 

 That honor thereupon fell to me, and I was unani- 

 mously chosen for the term of five years. 



The following June, according to custom, I pre- 

 sented a report on the condition and outlook of the 

 institution. This statement I had prepared with 

 much care; it was received with general favor, 

 especially for its educational philosophy which 

 White strongly approved, as will subsequently 

 appear. 



As a member of the board when the Law School 

 was founded in 1887, I tried to prevent what I felt 

 to be a serious academic error, the adoption of the 

 low standards which unfortunately prevailed for 

 some years. Judge Douglas Boardman, himself a 

 trustee, had been selected as dean, and his ideal 

 seemed to be to reproduce the old Albany Law 

 School, of which he had formerly been head. Conse- 

 quently, the committee engaged in organizing the 

 new department proposed to set up practically no 

 conditions for admission beyond good moral charac- 



1 I still believe that every academic degree should represent work actually 

 done in or under the direction of the institution granting it. At the outset, 

 therefore, I adopted at Stanford University the Cornell rule that no honorary 

 degrees or degrees for studies carried on in absentia should be awarded. This 

 regulation has saved us much pressure from various quarters. It seems to me 

 to give the university a certain dignity as existing for purposes of instruction, 

 not for conferring honors on outside persons. 



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