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Abstract

A GREATER GETTYSBURG President, the Board Committee, a number of our older Alumni, and bringing up the rear the whole cheering student body in two divisions marshalled by our younger Alumni. By a route a little circuitous [it included the main streets of town] the column moved to the dear old College grounds .... Never was a man more cordially welcomed to historic Gettysburg. The new president, a man then in his forty-seventh year, was born to Swedish immigrant parents in White Rock, Goodhue county, Minnesota. After attending Gustavus Adolphus College for two years, he went to Lindsborg, Kansas, where, at the young Bethany College, he taught mathematics and served as treasurer from 1886 to 1891. One of his students there later remembered him as a teacher "whose powers to clarify the air of a recitation room might be likened unto the fresh northerly winds of Minnesota, whence he hailed."82 Leaving Kansas, Granville then went to Yale University, which awarded him the degree of bachelor of philosophy in 1893 and of doctor of philosophy in 1897.83 He began a fifteen-year career on the Yale mathematics faculty in 1895, at the end of which the secretary of the university declared that "year after year the graduating class of the Sheffield Scientific School has voted Dr. Granville to be its best as well as its most popular teacher."84 While at Yale he published Elements ofthe Differential and Integral Calculus (1904), Plane and Spherical Trigonometry (1908), Four-Place Tables of Logarithms (1908), and (with Percy F. Smith) Elementary Analysis (1910). All of these works went through several editions and remained in print for many years. The calculus text was the most successful of his publications. An active Lutheran, Granville was the first layman and the first nonalumnus since 1850 elected to the presidency. When he moved to Gettysburg in August 1910, his annual salary dropped from $5,000 to$2,000, plus use of a house.85 The inauguration of the new president on October 20, 1910 was unlike any ceremony the College had ever witnessed. It was held in a large tent designed to seat two thousand persons and erected south of Brua Chapel. The entire campus was elaborately decorated and illuminated for the occasion. For the first time ever there was a formal academic procession, in which more than six hundred persons 82Quoted in Emory Lindquist, Bethany in Kansas: The History of a College (Lindsborg, 1975), p. 268. 83The first degree was awarded by the Sheffield Scientific School, which at the time was one of the main divisions of Yale University. 84Quoted by Anson Phelps Stokes, Jr., in Ceremony of Induction of William Anthony Granville, Ph.D. into the Office of President of Pennsylvania College, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, October Twentieth MCMX (Gettysburg, n. d.), p. 25. Hereafter cited as Granville Inaugural. 85Charles M. Stock to George D. Stahley, Hanover, June 17, 1910, in GCA. 46