2110-5-5-8

[Butler] [Nicholas Murray Butler]

Columbia University in the City of New York President's Room

November 25, 1929

John Buchan, Esq. 35, Paternoster Row London, E. C. , England

My dear Sir:

As one who has long followed your printed word and who has recently finished reading your Montrose with great satisfaction and admiration, I am moved to ask whether your personal arrangements and commitments would make it possible for you to visit Columbia University as its guest at some time during the academic year 1930-31?

Your presence here for several weeks, if it might be had, would arouse great interest among our teaching scholars and also among the great body of our advanced, what we call, graduate students. To my thinking it would not be necessary, perhaps not even important, for you to deliver more than a few stated public lectures. What we should much more emphasize would be the intimate personal contacts, academic and social, that you would have opportunity to form, and the informal discussions and conversations which would grow out of these readily and quickly in one way or another.

A scholar and author of your prestige and repute would be most welcome among us just now, and would be received with a heartiness of welcome which you would I know find comforting and grateful.

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If you should find it possible even to take into consideration the suggestion which I am now making, and would ask me any questions concerning its details which occur to you, I should be happy to go more fully into the matter in the hope that such a visit might be arranged.

With high regard, I am,

Faithfully yours, Nicholson Murray Butler

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