Columbia's longest-serving president won a Nobel and blocked Hemingway's Pulitzer
Nicholas Murray Butler ran Columbia University for 43 years, the longest tenure in its history, shared the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize and even stood in as a vice-presidential candidate. He also imposed a quota on Jewish students, praised Mussolini, and personally talked the Pulitzer board out of honouring Ernest Hemingway.
Born on April 2, 1862, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the son of a manufacturing worker, Butler collected three Columbia degrees by 1884, and Theodore Roosevelt nicknamed him Nicholas Miraculous. He co-founded the teacher-training school that became Teachers College and helped create the College Entrance Examination Board. He became Columbia's president in 1902 and greatly expanded it, adding Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, the world's first academic medical centre.
A delegate to every Republican National Convention from 1888 to 1936, he was named to receive Vice President James S. Sherman's electoral votes after Sherman died six days before the 1912 election; the Republican ticket won just 8, from Utah and Vermont. He opposed Prohibition and campaigned for its repeal in 1933. He also persuaded Andrew Carnegie to put up the initial $10 million for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which he led from 1925 to 1945, and his Nobel recognised his promotion of the Kellogg-Briand pact.
In 1919 he changed Columbia's admissions to limit Jewish students, making it the first American university with such a quota, and New York City students fell from 54 to 23 percent of the intake. He admired Mussolini, told freshmen in 1931 that totalitarian systems produced more capable men than elections, and in 1936 expelled a student who led an anti-Nazi mock book burning. He condemned Nazi Germany unambiguously only after Kristallnacht.
In 1941 the Pulitzer fiction jury picked For Whom the Bell Tolls, but Butler, head of the board, found it offensive and got the decision reversed, so no novel won that year; Hemingway's Pulitzer came only in 1952, after Butler's death on December 7, 1947. Columbia's main library still bears his name.
Source: Nicholas Murray Butler
