Perkinsian Age Ends as 'Tippit' Passes in Lowell House

Elliott Perkins '23, stepped up from the Mastership of Lowell House last night into Harvard legend.

Following a high pageantry usually experienced only at Commencement, President Pusey transferred the Lowell tippit, a Master's traditional sash of authority, from Perkins' shoulder to that of his successor, Zeph Stewart, professor of Greek and Latin. With this gesture, the 23 years of the Perkinsian Age ended and Lowell's third Mastership began.

During the night's proceedings, conducted at a formal House dinner, the Lowell Senior Common Room presented an endowment for the Elliot and Mary Perkins Scholarship to the President and Fellows and unveiled a portrait of the retiring Master. When the curtain was drawn from around the painting, a copy of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa was revealed first, and this removed, a still more startling apparition appeared--a likeness of Perkins, painted by Walter Stuempfig.

Having passed the duties of his office on to someone else, Perkins took a while to survey them. "You don't, in this job, do anything big and clean, like washing an elephant," he said; but he could obviously recall accomplishments which satisfied him just as much.

"What we would call standards, a sense of values, have always been a primary part of Harvard's education. It is ... in that sense that the Houses work; it is an that part of Harvard's educational enterprise that the Master works as a teacher.

"That part of our education ... is a consequence of living in an educational community, a community composed of men of varied ages, interests, abilities, and backgrounds. The charm, the excitement, the interest of the Master's job is that he has a part in that community. He is not the boss, the director. Alone he could do nothing; but he isn't alone. He is with the tutors and undergraduates carrying on an essential Harvard enterprise. He has his part--and so he is the luckiest of men."

And earlier he had said that a time when a Master retires isn't "a situation which looses a flood of anecdote; it's just a simple fact." But he knows very well that the flood of anecdote will follow after him.