Page:A History of the University of Chicago by Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed.djvu/124

 CHAPTER IV THE FIRST PRESIDENT The first President of the University was William Rainey Harper. He was born at New Concord, Ohio, July 26, 1856, and was of sturdy Scotch-Irish stock. A student from early boyhood, he entered the Freshman class of Muskingum College, New Concord, at ten years of age. Although one of the youngest students ever permitted to pursue a college course, it was characteristic of him that he habitually took more than the required amount of work. His mind was unusually and creatively active from his earliest years to the end of life. He had an insatiable appetite for intellectual exertion. An eminent scholar relates the following conversation with him when he was about twenty-six : "He asked me how many hours a day I could work, and when I told him that I could not do real intellectual work more than seven hours a day on an average, he expressed great surprise and told me he worked seventeen." No wonder he entered college at ten, habitually took extra courses, and graduated at fourteen with the honor of the Hebrew oration. Although on his graduation his father wisely made the boy a clerk in his store, it cannot be doubted that he himself regarded the clerkship as incidental to his real work, for his studies still went forward with such zeal that at seventeen he went to Yale as a graduate student in philology. Before his nineteenth birthday he received from Yale the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. The same year, 1875, he married Ella Paul, daughter of Presi- dent Paul of Muskingum College. He married, as he did every- thing else, early. In the autumn of the same year, 1875, he became principal of Masonic College, Macon, Tennessee. The following year he went to Granville, Ohio, as tutor in the preparatory depart- ment of Denison University. Here his unusual qualities were soon divined by President E. Benjamin Andrews and the preparatory department was made the Granville Academy with the youthful tutor as principal. Let it not be thought that young Harper was