The American Alumni Council

Abstract

r THAT modern invention, the alumni secretary, is of comparatively recent date. Together with his fellows, the alumnifund operator and the full-time alumni magazine editor or business manager, he has come into general vogue only since the beginning of this century, although each of these occupations may be found as soon as the early nineties, usually on a part-time basis. Yet organized alumni work goes back much further than the professional alumni secretary. Since I792 every class at Yale has had a class secretary, but the first general alumni association came thirty years later. Williams College formed such an association in i82i, which seems to be the earliest on record, followed in the next third of a century by Princeton, Miami, Virginia, Oberlin, Denison, Harvard, Amherst, Brown, Yale, and Michigan. The first alumnae association, that of Elmira College, was established in i 867. There are now alumni and alumnae associations in about two hundred and fifty colleges. The Yale Alumni Fund Association, the first of the eighty now existing, was established in i892. It raises a half-million dollars annually for current expenditures. The Yale Alumni Weekly was first published in I 890. It was the pioneer magazine to be published by alumni for alumni, although it was antedated by several publications originally operated by the students, which have since been taken over by the alumni organizations. There are alumni magazines at approximately one hundred fifty or two hundred colleges. Of these perhaps one-third are sent free, like house organs, to their constituency. The majority are sent to subscribers, who pay anywhere from two to five dollars a year for five or six hundred pages of reading-matter, plus advertising, although many have their subscription prices included in the membership fee of the association. Organized alumni work is peculiar to the American continent. Being native to the United States, it has not yet spread far from this country. The chief Canadian colleges have, of course, undertaken to organize alumni associations, and interest is manifested in Scotland, England, and Australia as well. The entire plan is new to the foreign universities. Even the distant English-speaking countries do not yet quite comprehend the proprietary attitude of the American alumnus or his willingness to give days of work each year and a tithe of his income, and to make his Alma Mater his residuary legatee, at the same time refusing consistently to be caught taking her work seriously in much besides athletics.