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Minor changes were effected in the organization of the College of Liberal Arts. Speech, which had been merged briefly with English, regained departmental independence. History and political science, which had been under a single head in the Oxnam years, were granted separate leadership. A similar development took place in the psychology and education departments. The latter greatly expanded its academic mandate in 1936 by initiating a program of training elementary school teachers in addition to its traditional role in the preparation of secondary school teachers and administrators. This return to the practice of the former DePauw Normal School resulted in large increases in enrollment, chiefly young women looking for careers in elementary school teaching. When Professor Francis Tilden retired in 1940, his department of comparative literature was discontinued and some of its subject matter taught in the English department.

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With President Wildman are students
Maurine and Helen Keller, Sam Thompson,
Park Wiseman.
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A short-lived but very significant innovation was the creation of a department of anthropology in the fall of 1936. Eli Lilly, grandson of the founder and chairman of the board of the Indianapolis pharmaceutical firm bearing the family name, who was himself an enthusiastic amateur archaeologist, agreed to underwrite the expenses of such a department on a trial basis for five years. Named to conduct the work of the department was Charles F. Voegelin, a young anthropologist educated at Stanford and the University of California. He instituted courses in native American language and culture. With his wife, Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin, a trained ethnologist, he carried on various research projects on the same subjects. At the expiration of the Lilly grant in 1941, however, the
department was discontinued for lack of funds, and the Voegelins transferred their activities to Indiana University.

DePauw University also pioneered in the development of a systematic student foreign exchange program. Drawing in part upon educational contacts in his native Germany, Professor Hans Grueninger of the German department inaugurated a series of annual exchanges of students between DePauw and various European universities in 1935-36.
Over the next several years a few DePauw students spent their junior year in Berlin, Cologne, or Freiburg, while students from those institutions enrolled at DePauw. Some Greek-letter living units cooperated with the program by providing board and room to foreign exchange students, and the Rector Scholarship Fund made scholarship funds available. Eventually the program was expanded to include universities in France, Switzerland, Austria, the Scandinavian countries, and South America, though the outbreak of the Second World War brought about a temporary interruption of student exchanges in the years after 1939.

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Some members of the English faculty, including
(top) Fred L. Bergmann, Jarvis Davis, Jerome
Hixson: (bottom) Elizabeth Mullins, Ermina Mills,
Edna Taylor, Virginia Harlow, and Mary Fraley.
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By the end of President Wildman's first five years in office-just one-third of his 15-year tenure-DePauw University was well on its way toward recovery from the economic crises and academic controversies of the preceeding era. Wildman's administrative skills, tact, and geniality had won over both faculty and students and created an atmosphere of confidence and optimism within the entire university constituency. But ahead lay a new disruption of normal college life brought about by four long years of U.S. involvement in an unprecedentedly destructive world war.

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