Nicholas Miraculous: The Amazing Career of the Redoubtable Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler

By Michael Rosenthal

Book Overview

To those who loved him, like Teddy Roosevelt, he was "Nicholas Miraculous," the fabled educator who had a hand in everything; to those who did not, like Upton Sinclair, he was "the intellectual leader... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374299943
• ISBN13: 9780374299941
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 528 Pages
• Weight: 1.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.7" x 6.4" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

The Butler Did It

Nicholas Miraculous: the Amazing Career of the Redoubtable Dr. Nicholas Michael Rosenthal's biography of Nicholas Murray Butler was fascinating reading for me because of Butler's position as my father's boss and major influence on the social, political and academic world in which he lived during the 1930's and early 1940's (my formative years). It was a world of clubby collegiality for those on the inside, formal social affairs, conservative politics, anti-Semitism, and class and cultural snobbery. Attitudes towards Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Fascism and Hitler's Nazis ranged from admiration to toleration - at least up to the time of the invasion of Poland in 1939. The issue of Negroes on the faculty or in the student body was so far from Butler's concern or concept of the way things should be that it is not even mentioned in his biography. Faculty members were free to exercise academic freedom so long as they did not publicly challenge any of the basic principles of the world of Butler and his colleagues. Those who did, were dismissed or passed over for promotion. My father often complained about the internal politics he had to deal with at Columbia and I had assumed that this was a problem endemic to all academic institutions, but after reading this book I get the impression that it was worse at Columbia than other places because of the personality and policies of Butler himself who was not a very good administrator.

Miraculous Biography of Shaper of Columbia University

Professor Rosenthal has done a superb job of evoking the persona of the man who built Columbia, using his 44-year tenure as university president. The author has even succeeded in evoking the reader's sympathies for Butler, a powerful leader who, viewed in today's lights, was an autocratic megalomaniac who missed many opportunities to build an even greater educational institution on Morningside Heights. This biography will be of great interest to anyone who spent time at Columbia (or its sister institutions) during the 20th century -- the years during which Butler's influence was at its zenith. It provides, perhaps for the first time, a background for some of the University's admirable traditions, balanced, wisely, by a few rather embarassing episodes in its history.