Samuel P. Capen: University Man

Biography of Samuel Capen: University of Buffalo, 1922-1950

Capen and his wife, Grace Wright Capen, c. 1922

There has always been a governing board known as the Council at the University at Buffalo since its inception in 1846, but the first Chancellors were not appointed from the university community. They were distinguished citizens of Buffalo, lawyers and politicians, whose official function was to represent the University before the public. The deans of the individual schools were separately responsible for their departments' educational and financial affairs. Then in 1920, Chairman of the Council, Walter P. Cooke organized a city-wide financial campaign that enabled them to hire a Chancellor that could bring the University into a new era. The Council looked to Samuel Capen to help them establish a central and solid administration for the University. In 1922 Capen left the American Council on Education to become the first full-time Chancellor at the University of Buffalo.

Until the establishment of the College of Arts and Sciences in 1913, the University of Buffalo had been merely a "collection of professional schools, going their separate ways with little central administration."

In 1922 the institution was still fractured between the liberal arts and the professional schools. Capen, however, recognized the opportunities the Council had envisioned for the future of the University and for Buffalo itself. He shared their vision to build "a university that should provide complete opportunities for higher education equal to the best anywhere obtainable, that should be a focus for the city's idealism, that should change the current of the city's life."

In his inaugural speech on October 28, 1922 Capen detailed his philosophy on the role of a university administrator:

I do not hold with those who would limit the number of college students on the basis of any distinctions of race or sex or creed or social standing. There is but one justifiable basis on which a university in a democratic community such as this can choose those who are to become members of it, the basis of ability. But a university is a place maintained at great expense to foster the philosophic point of view, to stimulate constructive thinking, because this point-of-view and this mode of thinking have been found necessary to the progress of civilized society.

During his twenty-eight years at the University of Buffalo, Capen established many University programs and educational experiments that helped to further the expansion of higher education. He helped to broaden the education of the professional schools, developed standardized curriculums, and personally hand-picked a first-class faculty of full-time, academically trained professors. He also established the Millard Fillmore College for adult education and created the Bureau of Personnel Research, a counseling office, to administer programs that tested the achievements and personalities of students in order to provide better guidance for career choices and help them obtain employment. And the numbers attest to his role as administrator: student enrollment rose from 1,687 in 1922 to over 10,000 by the time of his retirement in 1950.

Capen's experience working on the Bureau of Education and the ACE helped him establish a central and solid administration for the University. He often addressed conferences, commencements, and social clubs on the subject of educational administration and the topic of academic freedom. "I foresee," he once wrote, "the coming of a storm perhaps more severe than any to which our higher institutions have been subjected for years. The forces bent on challenging the intellectual integrity of colleges and universities are gathering."

Samuel P. Capen made an impact on the history of the University at Buffalo and brought it into a new era. Louis Jaffe, a former faculty member in the School of Law, best summarized Capen's tenure as Chancellor in a memorial written after Capen's death in 1956:

[He was] a man whose ideal was the best in education and he set out to build a university and to run it over the years on first class principles with almost no money. This would have been more than most men could stand up to... But Capen, with his stern sense of a duty undertaken and his courage in the face of towering difficulties, not only escaped panic or a settled sense of defeat, but for the most part maintained an attitude of positive confidence in the doing of the job.