Page:A History of the University of Chicago by Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed.djvu/17



The following pages will indicate that my connection with the movement resulting in the founding of The University of Chicago began in 1886. My official relation to it began in June, 1889. In 1912, when I had passed the age of seventy, the Board of Trustees, at my request, placed me on the retired list. At the same time, quite unexpectedly to me, they appointed me corresponding secretary with no specific duties. My dream of leisure, however, was soon dissipated by President Judson, who assigned to me, as the first task of my new office, the writing of this history. As I had been a student in the first University of Chicago from 1859 to 1862, and trustee or financial secretary of the Theological Seminary, which became the Divinity School of the new University, from 1873 to 1889, and thereafter had been uninterruptedly connected with the University, many persons had urged this task upon me. My life had been devoted for the most part to executive and not literary work. I did not consider myself a scholar, and the writing of a book had never entered my mind. However, taking the assignment of the President as a command to be obeyed, I entered upon the task at the beginning of 1913. It was begun in my seventy-first year and completed in my seventy-fourth. So much is said by way of apology for breaking into literature after the heavier burdens of life had supposedly been laid down.

This is not an official history. President Judson has given me absolute freedom. The Trustees know nothing of the contents of the book, and will never know, unless some of them happen to read it. It has been written to present as veracious an historical narrative as can be made. Not to say the things the authorities might be supposed to wish to say to the public, but to tell the true story of events exactly as they occurred has been my one purpose. My long acquaintance with the Trustees assures me that this is the course they would have had me pursue. They also have given me