This Arch Merrill article came at a time when the University of Rochester was looking for their sixth President. He describes the first 4 college Presidents in this article.

---

Presidents of the U. of R.

By Arch Merrill

Originally published: Feb. 18, 1962

IN ITS 111 YEARS, the University of Rochester has had only five presidents. Now it is shopping around for No. 6.

The other night the alumni bade formal farewell to “prexy No. 5,” Dr. Cornelis W. de Kiewiet, who resigned last August after years at the UR helm. Since then Provost McCrea Hazlett has been acting president, a role filled by several others during past “manhunts.”

What manner of men were the first four UR presidents, who ruled successively in a one-time tavern, on a cow pasture and on a former golf course? The four:

Martin B. Anderson
(1853-1888)
David Jayne Hill (1889-1896)
Rush Rhees (1900-1935)
Alan Valentine (1935-1950)

FOR THREE YEARS after it opened its doors in the old United States Hotel, a rambling brick relic which still stands on West Main Street a few doors east of the abandoned Erie Canal, the tiny college had no president. Ira Harris of Albany, who as a U.S. senator was to badger Abe Lincoln for patronage, held the title of chancellor.

In 1853 the first president of the University of Rochester arrived from New York where he had edited a Baptist publication. He was 38-year-old Martin Brewer Anderson, a six-footer of commanding presence, with a flowing beard and a thundering voice. In his youth he had worked in a shipyard in his native Maine.

He was to direct the Baptist-controlled school for 35 years. In 1861 he moved his young college to a 23-acre farm along Riley Street (University Avenue) and Prince Street, which had been donated by railroad contractor Azariah Boody—with the stipulation that he be allowed to pasture his cows there. That first year of the Civil War the first building rose on the new campus. It was named Anderson Hall.

WHEN ANDERSON took charge, the UR had 70 students. The enrollment never exceeded 175 in his tenure. Dedicated to classical learning, he was not sympathetic to scientific courses or to most new trends. He was too unbending to be a successful fund-gatherer. But he gathered an exceptional faculty and, with a sure, autocratic hand, kept the little college going during “parlous” years. He never won the affection of his students but he held their respect.

In his old age he hobbled around on two canes. Two years after his retirement in 1888, Dr. Anderson and his wife died the same week in a Florida resort. The granite statue of the University’s first president, after 47 years on the old Prince Street campus, now stands in a less conspicuous spot “beside the Genesee.”

“PREXY NO. 2,” David Jayne Hill, 39-year-old son of a Baptist clergyman, came to UR from the faculty of his Alma Mater, Bucknell, in 1889.

A mustached scholar with liberal tendencies — for his time—Dr. Hill served seven none-too-happy years on Prince Street. The strong sectarian control of the college stymied his efforts to introduce elective courses and scientific training.

Unlike his predecessor, he encouraged athletics and it was during his regime that the long football rivalry with Hobart College began, in 1892. He was criticized by the Baptists for holding commencement exercises in a Presbyterian church. But he resisted the trend toward co-education.

He tried to gain greater financial support from the community and, disenchanted after the failure of a $100,000 endowment drive, he resigned in 1898.

David Jayne Hill’s later career was a distinguished one. He was in turn assistant secretary of state, minister to Switzerland and Holland and ambassador to Germany. He returned to Rochester in 1918 to address a rally on behalf of GOP presidential candidate Charles Evans Hughes.

After Dr. Hill’s departure. Samuel A. Lattimore was interim president from 1896 to 1898 and Henry F. Burton from 1898 to 1900.

IN 1909 the University of Rochester found its third president — the one who has made the greatest impact on its life. He was a 40-year-old Baptist minister-teacher of Welsh descent, short and stout, with inscrutable blue eyes, a little mustache that whitened with the years and an air of dignified reserve. His name was Rush Rhees. He was not only a sound scholar and an impressive speaker. He also
was an able business man and administrator.

In 1900 he left a professorship at the Newton (Mass.) Theological Institution to head a four-building liberal arts college with an endowment of $700,000.

In 1935 he retired from the presidency of an internationally-known two-campus university with an endowment of $51 million.

It is true that much of the largess came from George Eastman, the Kodak magnate, who had begun by refusing to give the University a cent and in the end gave it about all he had. What changed Eastman’s mind? It was a quietly persistent, persuasive, hard-headed educator named Rush Rhees.

BUT IT MUST BE remembered that before the Eastman millions poured in, it was Dr. Rhees who directed the slow, steady growth of v the University through difficult years.

He admitted the first women students; he shook off the sectarian shackles; he resisted, as best he could, the anti-German World War I hysteria: he never lowered the UR’s scholastic standards and he blazed new trails in technological training.

The stocky Welshman was in command during the historic era of UR expansion, which saw the successful million dollar endowment drive for an enlarged faculty and a co-ordinated women’s college; Eastman’s magnificent gift of a school of music and theater; the establishment of the million dollar Medical Center and the $10 million community campaign which made possible the new Men’s College on the River Campus, the former home of the Oak Hill Country Club.

Many thought Rhees cold and austere. No bright campus legends enshrine his memory like Martin Anderson, he inspired respect rather than affection. Only a few intimates knew the inner warmth of this inherently shy man and the many kindly deeds he performed so quietly.

Rush Rhees died on Jan. 5. 1939 in the 79th year of his life and the third year of his retirement. His name lives in the library with the imposing tower which dominates the River Campus. The Greater University around it is his monument.

AS SUCCESSOR to the venerable Dr. Rhees, the University chose one of the youngest men ever to assume the presidency of an institution of higher learning, 34-year-old Alan Valentine, master of Yale’s Pierson College.

The tall, sometimes impulsive and, when necessary, ingratiating former Olympic Rugby star and Rhodes Scholar was inaugurated UR’s fourth president late in 1935. He remained for 15 eventful years.

World War II brought a new era to the university. It flooded the campus with Navy V-12 students and it made UR a major center of research. UR scientists worked on the top secret atomic bomb project.

Valentine had imagination and boundless energy. He left the cloister to lead the “Democrats for Willkie” in 1940. Ha brought the nation’s business leaders to UR for “A New Frontiers Conference,” some 20 years before the phrase became a Kennedy slogan. He awarded an honorary degree to Winston Churchill via the radio. He spent a year in the Netherlands helping to implement the Marshall Plan.

In a petulant moment after a football game—which the Yellowjackets lost—he broke off UR’s long-standing athletic relations with Hobart, since happily resumed. He moved from the mansion, which Eastman had bequeathed the University as a residence for its president, because he considered it too pretentious a place in which to rear his children.

Alan Valentine was not always predictable. Inevitably he resigned, in 1950. In his next job, that of administrator of the Economic Stabilization Agency, he made no dent on national history. After forays in the business and foundation fields, he turned to writing, as a resident of the Pacific Coast. His literary output in general has done him credit.

THE 16-YEAR  reign of Netherlands-born and Africa-trained Dr. de Kiewiet saw an accelerated expansion of UR, highlighted by the 1962 abandonment of the memory haunted Prince Street campus and the merger of the Men’s and Women’s Colleges along the river of the University’s anthem. The de Kiewiet record, an impressive  one, has been too recently chronicled to need rehashing here.