Manwaring said that, after they felt more secure, "I went to New York and took a graduate course at Columbia University and had a very pleasant and profitable summer." The next few years were perhaps the best of Manwaring's tenure, with old structures being renovated and new ones added. In 1941, a year before his sixty-fifth birthday, Hyrum suggested to school authorities that they should all prepare for his retirement from the presidency on that birthday. They agreed but, of course, events intervened.