February 1914

President Taylor retired. Presidential duties on the business side were assumed by the executive committee of the board of trustees. Administrative offices carried on routine duties. Matters of discipline were assigned to a committee consisting of chairman of the faculty Professor Herbert E. Mills, the dean and the head warden.

In February of 1913 Dr. Taylor had written the board of trustees asking to be retired at the end of the first semester of the next year. “In his administration of twenty-seven and a half years the college expanded from a small institution inadequately equipped to a college for 1,000 students, all housed on the campus. The material expansion in that time included, besides the erection of six dormitories, the building of a recitation hall, laboratories for biology and chemistry, a library, a chapel, an infirmary, a gymnasium and a students building. The library grew from about l2,000 to 80,000 volumes. Five hundred thousand dollars were added to the general endowment, and the inner growth of the college was far more significant since it involved the abolition of a preparatory department and of the admission of poorly prepared special students in music and art; one epochal revision of the curriculum; the establishment of twelve new chairs in the faculty, including those of history, biology, economics, psychology, Biblical literature and political science. With these factual changes, moreover, there was maintained in the college a high ideal of what a liberal education should signify and an inspiring standard of college life and college work.”

Elizabeth Hazelton Haight, The Life and Letters of James Monroe Taylor