THE MEDFORD CAMPUS OF TUFTS COLLEGE was the usual beehive of activity as school opened in September 1952 and the institution welcomed more than 750 first-year students to its three undergraduate divisions. As usual, the Tufts Weekly, the campus newspaper since 1895, distributed a special Freshman edition welcoming the new class. The issue was prepared under the supervision of Richard Goodwin, the outgoing editor-in-chief. Robert Zinman, the new editor, as well as Tufts President Leonard Carmichael, offered in its columns the customary words of wisdom for the new students. There was also a welcome from Steve Toadvine, elected the previous spring as the student mayor of Tufts; he was symbolic keeper of the college spirit, a tradition which had begun in 1937 and was to last until 1959. He had been the winner in a three-day contest of "madness and mayhem," running against two other contestants as "Bo Jest of the French Foreign Legion."

Following the rules laid down many years before by the Sword and Shield Society, the sophomore organization charged with enforcing Tufts student traditions, the new arrivals in the Colleges of Liberal Arts and Engineering promptly decked themselves out with brown and blue "beanies" purchased at the bookstore, and the Jackson women appeared with green ribbons on their attire to signify their status as newcomers to the college.

But there was something special about the Tufts campus in the fall of 1952. It was the scene of a series of events marking the centennial of the chartering of the institution. For three days in October the l00th anniversary was celebrated by a series of both regular and special events, both academic and social.

The first activity was the annual trustee-faculty dinner, a formal affair held in Jackson Gymnasium. Dean George S. Miller, retired vice-president, alumnus of the Class of 1906, and member of the Tufts staff in many capacities for more than half a century, reminisced about his experiences at the college. A formal Centennial Ball,

The first Centennial Assembly took place the next day in the Cousens Gymnasium, preceded by an academic procession which walked from the top of the hill. Eleven honorary degrees were bestowed in the presence of hundreds of guests and the assemblage was addressed by an impressive group of notables. The usual Saturday classes were suspended to allow students to attend. The religious origins of Tufts were recognized in the person of the Reverend William Wallace Rose, pastor of the Universalist Church in Lynn, Massachusetts, who closed the ceremonies with a benediction. He had been one of the honorary degree recipients. The centennial weekend celebrations were concluded with services on Sunday afternoon in Goddard Chapel, where Parker McCollester, an alumnus of the Class of 1911, a life trustee, and son of a former dean of the Tufts School of Religion, delivered the annual Russell Lecture.

Another event in the fall of 1952 made that year a particularly memorable one for the Tufts community. President Carmichael was

When news of his resignation became known, rumors had immediately begun to circulate about his successor. Parker McCollester, who had participated in the centennial observance and was a prominent New York lawyer, seemed, at least to some students, to be a likely candidate. However, this possibility was ruled out after McCollester was contacted by a member of the Weekly staff and was told categorically that he was not being considered. There was also a rumor (started by the Harvard Crimson) that William Saltonstall, headmaster of Exeter Academy and on the Tufts campus in the fall of 1952 to preside over a meeting of the New England Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, was the "definite successor" to Carmichael. That speculation was likewise without foundation. During the meeting at which Carmichael had submitted his resignation a committee had been appointed "to study the matter of the Presidency of the College and to recommend a successor." Nils Yngve Wessell, vice-president of the institution since 1951, was appointed acting president, effective 1 January 1953, and on 29 October was unanimously elected as the eighth president of Tufts. The announcement was made at the annual trustee-faculty dinner on the evening of the very day that the trustees had voted. Inauguration ceremonies were held on 9 December, on which day Wessell was also elected a life trustee. The news of his election was greeted enthusiastically by the entire Tufts community.

The presidential transition could not have proceeded more smoothly. Wessell had been associated with Tufts for fourteen years, his name was familiar to all, and he probably knew more about the day-to-day workings of the institution than any other person. By the time he had been elected president he had held no less than ten teaching and administrative positions at Tufts at one time or another, some of them simultaneously.

A native of Pennsylvania and of Swedish heritage, Wessell had earned a BS degree at Lafayette College. His first interest as an undergraduate had been government and law but he had switched to psychology his senior year. He earned a Master of Science in psychology at Brown University, and a PhD at the University of Rochester. As a student he had worked under Carmichael, prominent in the field, at both Brown, where Carmichael was department chairman, and at Rochester, where he was Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. After Wessell received his advanced degree he served for one year at the University of Michigan as director of the Mobile Child Guidance Center. It was from that position that Carmichael had recruited him in 1939 as a Tufts staff member after Wessell's mentor had become president of Tufts the previous year.

The young PhD was assigned administrative as well as teaching duties from the very beginning. He was made Director of Admissions and Dean of Men as well as Assistant Professor of Psychology. Coming to Tufts at the age of twenty-five, Wessell was dubbed "the boy dean" by newspapermen and was reputed to have been the youngest person to hold such an office at the time. Carmichael preferred to refer to him in more dignified language as "under thirty." In 1949 Wessell had also added the directorship of counseling for men to his list of assignments, a responsibility he relinquished when Clifton W. Emery, as Assistant Dean of Liberal Arts, became Acting Director of Counseling. Meanwhile, Wessell rose in the Psychology Department to the rank of full professor (1947). Beginning in 1949, he served also as Dean of Liberal Arts, a position he held until assuming the presidency in 1953. He had taken on the additional responsibility of the vice-presidency upon the retirement of George Miller. The young teacher and administrator was already an officer or member of a host of academic and professional organizations, with many more to be added.

Personable, outgoing, and liked by all with whom he came into contact, Wessell was one of the most popular presidents in Tufts' history. His quick wit and his penchant for using apt phraseology were part of the secret of his success as a personality. In 1959, at the

President Wessell had a firm foundation on which to build. He inherited, as he described it, a "thriving educational enterprise." It consisted of nine schools, colleges, and divisions. Carmichael, as the seventh president of Tufts, had followed the eighteen-year incumbency of John Albert Cousens and the one-year acting presidency of George Stewart Miller. Under Carmichael's fourteen years of leadership the institution had made phenomenal progress in almost every respect.

Between 1938 and 1952 physical expansion of impressive proportions had taken place on both the Boston and Medford campuses. In Boston the Pratt Diagnostic Hospital had been built in 1938 and in 1939 the building at 136 Harrison Avenue and the Center Building next to the Floating Hospital had been purchased. The medical and dental schools were moved in 1950 from their Huntington Avenue to their Harrison Avenue location in the New England Medical Center complex. Carmichael considered this the most important accomplishment of his administration. Posner Hall, the medical-dental dormitory in Boston, was started in 1952. In Medford, new buildings included the president's house on Packard Avenue (1938); Hamilton Pool attached to Cousens Gymnasium (1946); the Bray Mechanical Engineering Laboratory (1947), faced with brick salvaged from the old reservoir on top of the hill; the bookstore (Taberna) in 1948; Jackson Gymnasium (the same year); and the War Memorial Reading Room, added as a wing on Eaton Library (1950). Over this period the plant value at cost increased by $3 million, from $3.6 million to $6.6 million.

In terms of finance, endowment fund assets rose from $7.5 million in 1938 to $10.8 million in 1952. The annual operating budget rose from $1.3 million to $5 million. The Second Century Fund

Carmichael's own academic and professional interests in sensory psychology and physiology and his predisposition toward scientific research were in large part responsible for promoting government and industry-sponsored research projects throughout the college. In 1941-42, as American involvement in World War II began, Tufts held government contracts totalling $73,000. By 1948-49 the amount had risen to $330,000, with the Physics Department alone carrying on research under three separate contracts. Contract research had reached a dollar value exceeding $1.5 million annually by 1953. Total enrollment had risen from 2,104 in 1938 to 3,365 in 1952, with the greatest increase in the post-war period. There was still a sizeable but declining proportion of veterans of military service in the undergraduate as well as the graduate student body. Some 67 percent of the undergraduate men in 1946 had been veterans. By 1949 the number had declined to less than 40 percent, but by 1953 they were being replaced on a smaller scale by veterans of the Korean conflict. Overall, the returning veterans, with their greater maturity and strong motivation, raised measurably the level of academic achievement. In 1953 a Veterans Counseling Service was still being maintained, as well as a military counseling office to assist students in their dealings with the Selective Service System.

President Carmichael repeatedly affirmed that the institution should limit enrollment and seek high quality in both educational programs and facilities rather than expand the student body. Wessell adhered as best he could to the same policy. Carmichael had, at the same time, believed that the institution should be visible not only in the community but should provide extended educational opportunities beyond those offered directly by its existing colleges and schools. Tufts therefore introduced extension courses on a scale not previously undertaken, administered by the newly formed Division (later College) of Special Studies. This agency soon became the administrative liaison for affiliations with five undergraduate professional schools: The Bouve-Boston School of Physical Therapy and Physical Education (1942); the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (1945); the Boston School of Occupational Therapy (1945); the Forsyth School of Dental Hygienists (1948); and the Boston Nursery Training School (1951), later renamed the Eliot-Pearson School. The addition of these schools made possible the supplementing of inadequate faculty salaries from which all the teaching staff suffered.

Under Carmichael's direction Tufts had begun the long transition from a small, localized, and traditional hilltop college of its first century to the modern university. But it had been a transition rather than a transformation, with much persistence of the old. No better example could be found than the continuation of the historic emphasis on a teaching rather than a research-oriented faculty whose primary responsibility was to serve an undergraduate student body, the core and centerpiece of the entire institution. Under Wessell's leadership the university concept had begun to replace that of the college, but the "collegiate way of life" was still at the heart of the institution although showing distinct signs of modification in the light of new developments and new aspirations.

In 1953, when Wessell became president, thirty-six members of the faculty and administration occupied residences owned by the college on or near the campus proper, which consisted of 120 acres (69 in Medford and 51 in Somerville). Stearns Village, a veterans' housing project located adjacent to Cousens Gymnasium, consisted of twelve two-story barracks-like temporary buildings erected in 1946 and was to have been torn down after five years. But there was so much continuing demand for housing that the structures continued to be filled to their capacity of eighty families until they were razed in 1955. Most of the occupants were medical and dental students and junior faculty. It was reported to have had the highest birthrate in Middlesex County.

On the opposite side of the campus a six-hole golf course adjacent to the football field was still in operation. The course, laid out in 1923 and opened in 1924, was owned and operated by the college. The original headquarters of the old Somerville Golf Club had become a women's gymnasium after it was purchased by Tufts in 1908 and forty years later had become the college theater (still used for that purpose in the 198os). As the student population expanded in the 1950s and 1960s new housing facilities were added, and bit by bit the golf course shrank in size. The last two holes disappeared in the summer of 1958. Traditional golf on the campus had been replaced in the 1980s by "frisbee golf" which used much less terrain.

Undergraduate tuition was $650 a year in 1953, with an annual health and activity fee of $50, with additional fees for laboratory courses and $2.00 for make-up examinations. The minimum annual charge for a dormitory room was $210 and the maximum board charge for men in Curtis Hall was $440. Dining facilities were also provided in most of the nine fraternities then on the campus. Men were housed in East, West, Dean, and Fletcher Halls. Jackson students were housed in a combination of four dormitories (Metcalf, Stratton, Paige, and Richardson) and seven small residences previously owned or occupied by private citizens and acquired by the college. The women boarded separately from the men in their own dormitories, with dining rooms in both Metcalf and Stratton. Estimated personal expenses were $200 a year, making a grand total annual expense for students about $1,500. As to personal expenses for women, the students were assured that "a girl need not fear a loss of social status on the campus if she regulates these expenses intelligently with reference to a limited budget and in accordance with the democratic ideals of the college."

Students in the Bouve-Boston School occupied four former private residences scattered around the periphery of the campus. Students in the Boston School of Occupational Therapy and the Nursery Training School lived in two other former residences. Each of the affiliated schools had its own administration, housing rules, and student organizations.

[] For the text of his inaugural address, see the Tufts Weekly, 9 December 1953, and the Tufts Alumni Review, January 1954, pp. 7-9.