Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 27.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

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[300] Johnston assumed charge under auspicious conditions, but conditions which might easily have been negatived and nullified by incapable management. Instead, following Colonel Johnston's suggestions, carrying out his general ideas, expanding on the lines that his mind recognized as the ones of permanent expediency, the academy grew into a college, and the college into a system of colleges, crowded with fine university facilities for post-graduate studies.

While never radical, Colonel Johnston was always progressive in educational matters. His advanced ideas and his foresight, however, were always tempered by enough conservatism to avoid such tentative efforts as come to naught. No departure that he instituted proved a failure. Here and there details of original plans were modified, sometimes by expansion, sometimes by contraction, but the rule was that his mind foresaw well, and his counsel proved always to be that of one who was wise in his own vocation.

A broadly and thoroughly educated man, he was especially a literary scholar, a critic of great ability, a writer of force, elegance and clearness. His prose and poetry both commend themselves to capable judges, and have been widely read with much of both pleasure and profit to the readers.

It is often the case that men of particular bent deem that in which they themselves excel as the thing, the vocation or the faculty of highest importance. With Colonel Johnston, however, this rule did not hold true. He recognized literature as his particular forte, but he was free from narrowing, hampering hobbies, and he knew that literature was but one of the arches in the magnificent temples of learning. Less ornate branches of knowledge, he knew, were equally valuable, in many ways of more direct present importance; and being an educator, not a book-worm, a teacher as well as a scholar, a leader in his own day as well as a follower through the delightful roads cut for the human mind by the master intellects of past generations, he kept his mind fixed always on the standard of practical utility as well as that of finish and elegance, and from the day that he assumed the chair of president of Tulane, he put forth his every effort to make the institution one of value in every way.

Not only should the law and medical colleges maintain the unexcelled reputation that their graduates for many years had given them, but the classical proclivities of the youth of the South, so far as Tulane could affect them, should have every encouragement to grow and every facility for growth. Science should be brought from the upper realms, and, by means of practical application, chained to the