Nicholas Murray Butler:
Columbia's "Nicholas Miraculous"

ALBERT iVIARRIN

Y EARLY three-quarters of a century has passed since
that day in April, 1902, when, a few days after his
thirty-ninth birthday, Nicholas Murray Butler became
one of the youngest university presidents in the history of Ameri¬
can higher education. In those halcyon days before the First
World War, the twelfth president of Columbia University was
a personage to be reckoned with in several areas of national life;
indeed few university presidents have ever enjoyed a like promi¬
nence for so long a time. An educational statesman rather than
simply an educator, he had long enjoyed a reputation as a theo¬
rist, a publicist, and a reformer. Virtually single-handed, he had
created Teachers College. It was largely owing to his efforts that,
for better or worse, at the turn of the century a central Board of
Education was created in New York City to replace the multitude
of corruption-ridden local school boards. Butler, moreover, was
the exemplar of what Thorstein Veblen termed the "captain of
erudition," the new type of efficient, businesslike administrator
then beginning to dominate higher education. As Butler once re¬
marked, running Columbia University was exactly like running a
railroad. Although the foundations of Columbia's eminence had
been laid by his predecessor, Seth Low, whose mausoleum-like
monument to his father dominates the campus, it was during the
forty-four years of Butler's stewardship that Columbia grew from
a small university with a local reputation into a national institution
with an international reputation and influence. Well might Theo¬
dore Roosevelt dub him "Nicholas Miraculous Butler," after St.
Nicholas Thaumaturgis, the "iVIiracle Worker."

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