Page:A History of the University of Chicago by Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed.djvu/227

 STUDENTS AND FACULTY 197 them that were diverting. These served to relieve the tension and add a touch of humor to the situation, which was one of multiplied cares and anxieties. While the President's daily mail was burdened with applications, it must have given him a moment's gaiety to receive the following naive misunderstanding of the situation: At the risk of doing something unprecedented and probably entirely use- less I write to ask and apply for some employment on the teaching force of the Chicago University. The following was written from a wholly different point of view and is interesting because of the modest indirection by which the writer sought directions out: While I am not vain enough to expect a position in Chicago University and shall not be bold enough to apply for one, still, I confess that I, in common, I suppose, with nearly all the college professors in the United States, would be proud of such a position were I deemed qualified for it. Not all the applicants were so modest as this man. The follow- ing application, which, in common with the one just quoted, dis- claimed being an application and sought to assure President Harper that his task of finding a faculty would prove an easy one, does not breathe the same fine air of modesty: As regards the faculty of the new University, the whole country is open to your choice. In the chair of I could do good work for you. You are probably not aware of it. Very likely you never will be As a professor of I am probably the best known man in. I have a good position here. I shall not make any application at Chicago. As I happen to be writing you, will say that if you should tender me the senior professorship, I should accept it. Here was an inconsiderate man who ought to have known better: You once told me how applications for positions came upon you like an avalanche. I am going to ask if it will be any use to file one more. It was not! The following shows the way in which one applicant differ- entiated himself from others: I wish most courteously, but most clearly and emphatically, to distinguish myself from the mob of ordinary applicants, but few of whom have an intel- ligent, definite, and well-crystallized ambition in the line of any advanced and