COLUMBIA   LIBRARY  COLUMNS
The Autumn  1997 Issct.   |   Michael Seoller, Editor
 

T
 

his fall issue of Library Columns
features two articles about two
very different personalities, each
of whom was briefly associated with Columbia. Rockwell Kent studied in the
School of Architecture for several years in the early years of the century and
then went on to an important career as a painter, engraver, lithographer,
and illustrator. But his success as an artist was only one dimension of this
unique individual, who worked as a lobster man on the Maine coast, sailed
the waters of Tierra del Fuego, lived in Greenland, and went through three
wives. Jake Wien, who has written widely on Kent's life and art, has drawn
upon the artist's "letters of desire" in Columbia's Rare Book and Manuscript
Library, providing us with an extraordinary glimpse into Kent's "daily life
and intellectual sustenance," what Wien calls "a map of his shifting
emotional terrain." Like Rockwell Kent, Dwight Eisenhower was only at
Columbia for a short time, serving as the University's president from the
end of 1948 until he left for the White House in January of 1953. It was a
moment in Columbia's history some contemporaries hoped would be the
beginning a new, golden era for the University. It was also a presidency many
in later generations would look back on as a colossal error, an inexplicable
interlude, when the Trustees chose a leader who knew little of the institu¬
tion, its faculty, its mission, and its needs following the disastrous last years
of Nicholas Murray Butler's reign. Travis Jacobs, whose youth was intimately
associated with the University and its leaders during those years, provides a
fascinating account of the little-known circumstances that led to the
Trustees' choice of a retired army commander as Columbia's thirteenth
president.