Letterhead
Brooklyn, N.Y., April 26, 1904.
Hon. Timothy L. Woodruff,
287 Broadway, New York City.
My dear Woodruff:-
I am sorry that Dr. McKelway is out of reach. I do not feel that I have any better name to suggest than that of Mr. Taylor. If no better name can be discovered, I shall try to see him about it during the coming week. I have already made a tentative suggestion to him and I think that he was not unwilling to entertain the proposition.
I am inclined to believe that the time has come when you, as the President of the Board of Trustees, may, if you think it wise, properly take the lead in some movement looking towards a consolidation of certain Brooklyn institutions of higher education. Personally, I have come to think that such a movement on our part is justified by almost every consideration of policy.
Our increase in numbers and our comparatively narrow limits of space and our small endowments, all combine to compel us in the near future to make a considerable number of appeals, public and private, for assistance of various kinds. We shall probably have to go to Mr. Rockefeller again. We should seize a dramatic moment and in order to get that dramatic moment, we must create it. Our increase in numbers will help us to create such a situation, but in addition to that, I am confident that a rather striking development in local affiliations will give us a very strong support. The Polytechnic is trying to find a new president Undoubtedly no man who is worth his salt will take the office, unless the trustees of the Polytechnic will give him satisfactory guarantees about their debt. That will mean that the election of a new president down there will probably be conincident with a splendid advertisement for that institution caused by the liquidation of their indebtedness, or by a tremendous effort to make a stronger public appeal than
ever made before.
In either case, that institution is likely to hold the center of the stage, unless we can manufacture a stage for ourselves which will be larger than theirs. I think it is our duty to try to put ourselves in such a position that when the Polytechnic manages to get the new president and to provide some reasonable means for removing their indebtedness, the best thing that they can do next will be to come into a local university, which we have already started.
We ought to hold the leading cards, and up to date we are in a position to grasp them. I should advise that if possible you should take the lead in some private meetings, more or less social in character, in which the few men who are most immediately and personally responsible for Adelphi should invite a few men who are most directly responsible for the management of the Long Island College Hospital, the Polhemus Clinic, the Hoagland Laboratory, and perhaps the Brooklyn College of Pharmacy, to confer concerning plans for affiliating or perhaps consolidating, the institutions suggested into a Brooklyn university. If there could be a preliminary agreement, I think that it would be wise to try to draw into the combination the Brooklyn Institute, which would then become one of the biggest systems of university extension in
United States.
If such a scheme were well under way, the Polytechnic, when its hour of action comes, could find nothing better to do than to come right into it. If we do not get it under way, the Polytechnic people themselves may in self-protection be pushed forward to lead off in a similar undertaking. I say this because it is evident that the appeal which we all must soon make for adequate endowments ought to be made and must be made in the name of a corporation big enough to overshadow this end of the city and compel public attention. Otherwise the appeal will fail.
I believe that the conferences suggested would be eminently wise at this time, even though the result of deliberation should take different lines from those which I have here imagined. The main thing just now is to try to get the institutions which are solvent and which belong to the grade of higher education in Brooklyn, to learn how to stand together and begin to think of the needs of one another. Nothing but good can surely come from an object lesson of that kind. There is surely a magnificent possibility in these outlines. Somewhere among them lies the certainty of future progress. Let us try to be in the van.
Yours very sincerely,
Charles H. Levermore