Voting Station

Nicholas Murray Butler

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Educator

The Resume

    (April 2, 1862-December 7, 1947)
    Born in Elizabeth, New Jersey
    Co-founder of the New York School for the Training of Teachers (1887; later became Teachers College, Columbia University)
    Founding member of the College Entrance Examination Board (1899)
    President of Columbia University (1902-45)
    President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1928-41)
    Delegate to thirteen Republican National Conventions (1888-1936)
    President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (1925-45)
    Co-recipient, with Jane Addams, of the Nobel Peace Prize (1931)

Why he might be annoying:

    He changed the admissions process at Columbia to reduce the number of Jewish students (1919).
    He gladly took donations from Jewish philanthropist Adolph Lewisohn, but refused to put Lewisohn’s name on any of the buildings he paid for.
    He twice personally intervened with the Pulitzer Board to prevent the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction from going to novels he disliked – ‘Main Street’ by Sinclair Lewis (1921) and ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ by Ernest Hemingway (1941).
    He often came off as arrogant and pompous.
    He suggested more than once that every New Yorker should acknowledge Columbia’s importance to the city by including a donation to the University in their will.
    One of his former students, Rolfe Humphries, submitted an ode to ‘Poetry’ magazine in which the first letter of each line spelled out the message ‘Nicholas Murray Butler is a horse’s ass.’ (The magazine ran an apology in the next issue, along with a note that the editors were not accustomed to checking poems for hidden insults.)

Why he might not be annoying:

    He graduated high school at age thirteen and earned a PhD at age 22.
    Under his leadership, Columbia changed from a minor college (Butler’s main reason for attending had been that it had no dorms and thus did not charge for room and board) into one of the nation’s leading institutions for teaching and research.
    He convinced Andrew Carnegie to provide the initial $10 million to fund the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
    He so well-known and respected in his heyday that the New York Times printed his annual Christmas message to the nation.
    He resigned from Columbia and most of his other positions two years before his death, having gone almost completely blind and deaf.

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 1 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 4 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 6 Votes: 66.67% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 6 Votes: 83.33% Annoying