Almost eighty-five years ago, in November 1935, alumni, students, faculty, and dignitaries came together at the University of Rochester on the occasion of another presidential inauguration, that of the university’s fourth President, Alan Valentine. At the end of his first year in office, Valentine asked for a frank assessment of the Department of Mathematics. The resulting document, housed in the Archives of American Mathematics, gives a remarkable snapshot of a department undergoing growing pains in the depths of the Depression. This talk will explore that department and situate it in the American mathematical landscape of the 1930s.