James was a happy man when school opened at Normal in the fall of 1910. He began that academic year with a new wife, a home on campus, and a satisfying and busy job to keep him productively occupied. What he probably did not realize when classes reopened was that a major change was about to take place on campus that could significantly affect his appointment and his future. During President Buchanan's first year in office it seemed that the college would carry on under its new leader in exactly the same manner as it had under its founder and first president, William Hooper Councill, and that is precisely what happened during the 1909-1910 school year. James, like the other members of the faculty and staff, must have felt both contented and secure when the classes commenced again in September of 1910, and we can observe that his responsibilities and related activities were indeed similar if not identical to those he had under Councill and, the previous year, under Buchanan. In December, the eighth grade class of the elementary school performed its public rhetorical exercises in the college auditorium, and Wilson had taken responsibility to prepare all the musical offerings on the evening's agenda—individual numbers by the band and chorus, two vocal solos, and a piece by an a cappela quartet of eighth graders to close. The program was just as one might have expected, including the class motto, which could very well have been a quotation of W. H. Councill, “Work is the measure of success.”