One Hundred Seventy-fifth Anniversary Celebration: Addresses by William J. Ellis, Harold Stonier, Charles Edison [Reprint 2022 ed.] 9781978811218

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Rutgers

University—PUBLICATIONS

OF T H E ONE H U N D R E D

SEVENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY

CELEBRATION

Number Six

One H u n d r e d Seventy-fifth Anniversary Celebration

ONE H U N D R E D S E V E N T Y - F I F T H

Anniversary Celebration cAddresses by WILLIAM J. ELLIS • HAROLD STONIER CHARLES EDISON ERNEST M. HOPKINS • WILLIAM MATHER LEWIS JOHN STEWART BRYAN WILLIAM HENRY STEELE DEMAREST CLEMENT C. WILLIAMS • ROSAMOND S. MOXON ROBERT W. SEARLE ROBERT R. WICKS

r

Brunscwick

R U T G E R S U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS 1942

COPYRIGHT I 9 4 2 BY T H E T R U S T E E S OF RUTGERS COLLEGE IN NEW JERSEY

Printed in the United States of America

Contents Introduction

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Education and Social Progress in New Jersey

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By

WILLIAM J . ELLIS

Rutgers' Contribution to the Economic Life of New Jersey By

HAROLD STONIER

The University and Civic Responsibility By Governor

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CHARLES EDISON

Our Colleges in the Emergency By

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ERNEST MARTIN HOPKINS

T o Keep and Teach This Tradition By

JOHN STEWART B R Y A N

The Responsibilities of Freedom By

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WILLIAM MATHER LEWIS

"Certain Pictures as They Lie in My M i n d . . 6 7 By

WILLIAM H . S. DEMAREST

"Past 2 1 , and Large For Her By

M r s . JOHN W . N

A g e . . 7 7 MOXON

T h e Guardian of Truth By

CLEMENT C .

WILLIAMS

Universities and the Individual Student By

ROBERT W .

SEARLE

Pioneers and Trustees By

ROBERT R .

WICKS

Illustrations Harold Stonier

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William J. Ellis

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Governor Charles Edison Signing the Guest Book at 175th Anniversary Celebration

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William Mather Lewis and John Stewart Bryan

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Alexander Loudon, Mrs. Robert C. Clothier and Ernest M. Hopkins

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Robert C. Clothier, William H. S. Demarest and Carl R. Woodward

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Introduction Number VI of the publications of the One Hundred Seventy-fifth Anniversary Celebration reproduces in a single volume the addresses which were delivered at several special events during the four days of ceremony. The addresses by Governor Charles Edison, Harold Stonier, and Commissioner William f . Ellis were given at the New Jersey Dinner in the Gymnasium on the evening of October ninth. This dinner was attended by officials of those organizations in the State which are actively contributing to strengthening the educational resources of New Jersey in cooperation with Rutgers University. The addresses by John Stewart Bryan, President of the College of William and Mary; Ernest M. Hopkins, President of Dartmouth College; and William Mather Lewis, President of Lafayette College, were delivered at a dinner for delegates from other institutions and learned societies in the Gymnasium on the evening of October tenth. Alumnae and alumni of the University held a dinner in the Gymnasium on the evening of October eleventh. William H. S. Demurest, President of Rutgers College from 1906 to 1924, was toastmaster. The honorary degree of Doctor of Letters was conferred upon Carl R. Woodward of the Class of 1914, now President of Rhode Island State College; and Rutgers awards were presented to Ezra F.

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Scatter good of the Class of 1893, Hazel Coddington Gosling of the Class of 1922, John Scudder of the Class of 1923, Elizabeth Craig Clark and F. Raymond Daniell of the Class of 1924. The addresses at this dinner were by Clement C. Williams, President of Lehigh University; Mrs. John JV. Moxon of the Class of 1929, and Robert W. Searle of the Class of 191 5. The One Hundred Seventy-fifth Anniversary Celebration was concluded with a Service of Thanksgiving and Consecration in Kirkpatrick Chapel on Sunday morning,( October twelfth. Dean Robert R. Wicks of Princeton University preached the sermon.

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One Hundred Seventy-fifth Anniversary Celebration

Education and Social Progress in New Jersey WILLIAM J. ELLIS A S the first speaker, I think it may be appropriate l \ for me to be the first to remark that I have never been before to a 175th birthday anniversary and, with the Governor, I would like to come back at the next 175th anniversary. In observing this 175th anniversary of the founding of Queen's College in 1766, now Rutgers University, we mark the development of a frontier British colony with a population of about 200,000 into a State of more than four millions enjoying the benefits of balanced agriculture, manufacturing and trade. It is really significant that New Jersey is receiving and has received in the past two years the largest aggregate of orders for defense equipment of any state in the Union. These orders have come here because New Jersey manufacturing and shipbuilding plants are well equipped and skilfully manned, ready to produce quickly and effectively those things which would supply the dire need of a practically unarmed nation on the brink of world war. It is no accident that New Jersey stood ready for this flood of defense orders. This State has contributed year

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in and year out to the steady upbuilding of productive enterprise. In the doing of this it has freely drawn upon its two Colonial-chartered universities for initiative, for guidance, and for the skilled personnel and leadership needed for this development. As early as 1766, it was apparent that a great destiny in agriculture, in trade, and in manufacture would arise within this area which lay between the two great ports, the section that was blessed with a fertile soil and a healthy climate, referred to by former President Thomas of this University in his article in the Alumni Monthly as a bridge between those two great ports. The promise of that day has been fulfilled and the struggling college that was Queen's has lived to become a great and effective University, serving its State even as that State has contributed to the material and intellectual upbuilding of the most productive nation in the modern world. It seems to me that an occasion of this kind has two major purposes: First, it commemorates the achievements of the past; and second, it proclaims the purpose of continued contribution and even greater achievement. When Queen's College was established, Jacob Hardenbergh, Samuel Verbryck, Hendrick Fisher, and their associates, recognized that the day was at hand when an emerging nation could no longer send its sons abroad for essential education or await the importing of leaders born and trained abroad. That broad purpose, expressed at first in terms of education essentially for the ministry of the Dutch Reformed Church, has been defined in terms almost as numerous as the techniques C O

of community leadership and enterprise of our highly organized civic life. Rutgers University, in a peculiarly intimate way, has become the State University of New Jersey. Its mark may be found in terms of organization, leadership, and results in every region of the State and numerous of its services. A State University, by virtue of its very being, has a special scope of service and owes the Commonwealth in which it is organized a service beyond that of any other type of educational institution. Its first duty is the development of an informed community and the training of young men and young women who may be expected to assume the responsibilities and duties of intelligent citizenship in their communities. Some will become important figures in the political life of the State. Others will take their places as educators, or will go into the ministry, or into manufacturing, agriculture, and commerce. They become technicians, administrators, and professional men and women. However, back of that and more general than that is the fact that all of them should be imbued with the ideals of a democratic faith and ready to serve as practitioners of the democratic way of life. Its second duty is to provide from within its staff a nucleus of men and women trained in the arts and sciences and in the humanities who, from their stations, are able to contribute effectively to the application of practical knowledge to community organization, government, and economic activities of many kinds. That Rutgers has recognized these special responsiUS]

bilities and served them well is indicated in the record of its services to State and local governments and their personnel, is indicated by the achievements of the Agricultural College and Experiment Station in the enrichment of our farms and dairies and the improvement of rural life; through its leadership in developing sanitation, protected public water supplies, and public health; through the research and direction extended to industry in the conservation and development of natural resources. Again, it has given special and outstanding contributions through the School of Ceramics and the School of Journalism, some of whose graduates have made an impressive mark in the work of the State and in the broader work of the world. It has developed extension courses for employees of government; both State departments and local departments of government have benefited by this liaison. The American Banking Institute and various professional groups have called upon the University for help and have found it here. Then, one of the most recent in point of time of this 175 years, it has brought into being the College for Women, which has contributed so largely to the opportunities for development of the citizenship of this State. These are a few illustrations culled from a long catalogue of the services of this University as a center devoted to education as the companion and guide of the citizenry. While New Jersey has no undergraduate medical college, Rutgers, in cooperation with the State Medical Society, has created a series of graduate courses in medicine and surgery, which are serving an important C

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purpose for the members of the profession and, through them, the public. One of the Rutgers alumni, and a trustee of the University, Lansing P. Shield, has emphasized this contribution in this idea in the October issue of the Rutgers Alumni Monthly. He says, "There is another equally important job that Rutgers must do. It must train men in such a way that their primary objective is to render service. This is a large order. However, unless the motives of the leaders of tomorrow are based on a desire for service, the training which they will receive will simply make them more efficient tyrants in the field in which they operate, whether it be in industry or government. Unless the spirit of service is a common one among our leaders, we shall always be dominated and preyed upon by pressure groups, politically minded administrators, unscrupulous professional men, and economic royalists. The leaders of tomorrow must be more than clever - they must be wise. Clever men endeavor to solve a problem by setting aside the laws of economics - wise men solve these problems by applying the same laws. Clever, selfish men use their abilities and training to build personal power and fortunes - wise men build something enduring and a measure of personal power and fortune comes unsolicited." As administrator of a State department, I understand something about the numerous and valuable direct services of Rutgers to the departments of the State and local government. In a recent report to his board, the superintendent of one of our institutions cited by name some fourteen members of the Rutgers faculty, each of C7 1

whom had helped him in a material way within the period of a few months. Every one of the public institutional and agency heads of this State could render a a report of varied, effective, and frequent service from the University staff and its alumni. I feel a sense of grateful appreciation for the work of Dean Metzger, of the late beloved Dean Jacob Lipman, and of Professor William Martin, who have rendered outstanding service as members of boards of managers of many State institutions and agencies. Many of us here, who know intimately of the work, join especially in acclaiming the service that was rendered by President Clothier over a period of nearly two years, when he carried forward the chairmanship of the Governor's Commission on Health and Welfare, and made New Jersey the first State in the Union to study in a broad, comprehensive way the challenge that was set up for us by the National Health Conference. Rutgers has been represented on our State Board of Education over many years now by Dr. Woodward, but always there have been men and women from this faculty ready to give of themselves to the work of the State. Rutgers is fortunate in the environment that is available for its work. It is inconceivable that anyone associated with this University could demand the discharge of a professor or administrative officer on the ground that he had shown his students a published study of social and economic conditions, a situation which unhappily has arisen in one of our sister States. New Jersey has developed to a point where any such

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arbitrary use of executive authority simply could not be tolerated. One essential factor appearing in the development of public welfare services in New Jersey is the initiative and leadership of citizens in furthering the general welfare, both by voluntary and governmental organization. This is really a precious right which belongs to us in a democracy, the right of the individual freely to cooperate with government. While the obligation of government to insure security and comfort consistent with the general means is an inheritance brought to this continent from England, the development and direction of this concept, since 1789, have rested on the plain citizens who, when moved by compassion for erring and suffering humanity, resolved to contribute as best they could towards alleviation of those ills. The initiative for new community action designed to alleviate a particular situation has come, almost invariably, from the private citizen. When a critical need arose, volunteers appeared to play the part of good neighbor, and presently, if the condition persisted, the citizens very properly turned to their government for the organization, staffing and financing that were necessary to carry on. One of the earliest examples of this kind of citizen action took place in New York in 1787, when Matthew Clarkson organized a Society for the Relief of Distressed Debtors. Its first purpose was to collect contributions for the comfort of imprisoned debtors who were allowed

to starve and freeze if their families or friends or charitably inclined individuals did not furnish the cost of food and fuel. This society, in the course of only two years, was able to procure the passage of remedial legislation. From this beginning it went on to procure liberalization of the penal code. Thomas Eddy, a prominent Quaker merchant, took a prominent part in the movement which succeeded in 1796 in abolishing the whipping post and capital punishment for all crimes other than murder, treason, and theft of church property. This activity in New York was followed with interest and attention by similar groups of New Jersey citizens and we find that our legislature of 1796 also adopted a criminal code which had a parallel ameliorative effect. In like manner, societies for other purposes deemed to be in the public interest were started from time to time, and such voluntary associations were instrumental in the founding of public hospitals, in establishing free schools, in initiating institutions for the care and protection of the deaf and blind, orphaned and abused children, and of course for the mentally defective and the insane. In more recent years this type of voluntary citizen activity has been focused on the work of our organized welfare federations and our community chests. New Jersey has benefited throughout the period of its statehood from the voluntary and salutary efforts of private citizens. The exchanges between these volunteers and the elected or appointed officials have not always been marked with humility and respect. One such occasion arose in 1845 when Dorothea Dix was in process of conC

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vincing our New Jersey legislature of the need for the mental hospital later erected in Trenton. One Senator expressed his views when he introduced a resolution to pay Miss Dix $1,000 on condition she remove herself immediately from New Jersey and agree never to come closer than Philadelphia. In spite of this gentleman's choler, the facts which Miss Dix had gathered in a personal tour of the State's almshouses and jails in her quest for abused, abased, and neglected victims of mental disease, won her case and resulted in the establishment of public responsibility for the proper treatment and care of this class of patient - a victory, incidentally, which was repeated some thirty-four times in other States and nations. However, New Jersey was the first State even in 1845 to respond to the convincing plea of this great woman. It is really needless to review the detailed steps by which, through citizen interest and official cooperation, New Jersey has aided the needy and dependent formerly condemned to almshouses and jails and provided for them special types of institutions, representing steady social progress. We have the record of the New Jersey State Charities Aid Society, which worked for improved standards in the management and equipment of State institutions. This work was led for a long period by an honored daughter of a distinguished family, the Stevens family, Mrs. H. Otto Wittpenn. Her work and the work of that organization led to the citizen-legislative inquiries of 1917 and 1918 under the leadership of Dwight Morrow and Ellis P. Earle, which brought about the creation

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of a unique partnership between lay board members and administrators, because they deemed that the continuing cooperation was more effective and constructive than the earlier system of frequent changes in personnel and periodic legislative inquiries to determine why the service was both poor and unduly costly for the results obtained. On the foundation of a non-partisan policy-making agency we have constituted a modern department of public welfare, which has proven flexible to changing requirements of program. In 1931, New Jersey was among the first of the States to provide for old-age assistance. County welfare boards were established as community agencies cooperating in the work of the public welfare department. These have consistently maintained their perspective regarding the whole problem of need in the community and they have won confidence, which has caused them to be called upon for additional responsibilities. About five of those agencies, now those county boards, are undertaking to administer the modern welfare houses, a much-needed type of service in New Jersey. In 1936, when the Federal Security Program was adopted, these boards were charged with further responsibilities for the relief of the blind and for participation in the program for dependent children, and more recently they have cooperated effectively in the enrollment of boys in the Civilian Conservation Corps. Since 1898, New Jersey's orphaned, dependent and neglected children have had the benefit of the services of the State Board of Children's Guardians, another C

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agency of the department which had progressed to a point where the fundamental child-caring principles of the Federal Social Security Act were effective and widespread in their application in New Jersey for years before Congress acted. It is clear that continuing constructive leadership in a developing, progressive State requires an alert and responsible participation on the part of the universities through their faculties and administrations and in the teaching which helps young men and young women to realize that democratic government requires sacrifice and service on the part of all its beneficiaries in proportion to the privileges gained. It is by the instrumentality of its sons and daughters that the university gains status and even fame. It is in the quality of the service that faculty and graduates render primarily as citizen volunteers that the alma mater may measure its true worth. Philip Van Doren Stern, Rutgers '24, in the pamphlet, Rutgers University and the American Way of Life, put this well when he said: " A university's work is never done. Completion is not within its scheme of things. It deals only in terms of continuity." Emerson said that an institution is the lengthening shadow of a man. I would amend that on the basis of practical experience and observation to recognize that, while one man or woman may initiate and inspire a great undertaking, it is only the loyal and frequently obscure service of many men and women which lends substance, breadth, and continuity to it. In the conduct of the affairs of the State, wherein E

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they touch the lives of citizens in trouble, we have found a similar pattern to be fruitful. As government develops more and more the conception of its partnership with the concerns of individuals and groups, it will necessarily expand citizen participation in planning and administering its manifold activities. By means of such partnership between lay board members and professional staffs, basic policies for social progress have been determined. We have been able to substitute early and active treatment leading to more discharges for the deeply rooted custodial and protective care which in past years had characterized institutional programs for the mentally ill, the feeble-minded and epileptic, for the tubercular and the delinquent. It is in the direction of policy that real leadership plays such a vital part. As we have made progress in social welfare, the direction has been toward preventive measures organized within the community and designed to limit or curtail the flow of patients to public institutions. The genius of such a plan arises from the more widespread development of informed and competent citizens in their support of governmental objectives. Leading citizens called into a continuing relationship with their government become familiar with its requirements. They contribute from their experience gained in business and in professions elsewhere to the formulation of policy, help to select and direct the personnel, and they bring to the council table an objectivity which may escape an administrator or professional staff. We need to have more and more men and women ent »4 3

listing in public work, inspired in the belief that their vocation or avocation is a noble one, of the same order of character as participation in the affairs of the university or the college. Young men and women of this college generation face a world of danger and certain change. All our powers will be taxed by the demands of the war itself, but, more than that, they will be taxed by the demands of peace and the reconstruction that will follow. While the war will test our fortitude and our ability as a State and nation to organize defense and produce material in overwhelming quantities and of superlative quality, an even more vital test of the democratic principle awaits the event of peace. Then we shall have to carry on in a prostrate world with productive channels disorganized, distribution completely out of balance, and millions facing extremes of want, instability of mind, and impairment of body. Your obligation as a university and our obligation as public officials require planning and preparation paralleled with the urgent effort required by total war. There will be problems abroad and problems at home. Among them we can see the need for extended social insurances, for extension of decent housing development, for the establishment of minimum standards of health and sustenance. These are developments that we must plan for and look forward to. We have made progress, but more remains to be done. Our citizens, whose energies are not wholly consumed by the defense effort, must be rallied into the service of planning and organization to the end that reasonable

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foresight and a plan for orderly procedure and development may be available when required. I think I may say that in this State some steps already have been taken in that direction. Both university and government have a responsibility here and each may inspire and sustain the other. Administrative agencies are well advised when they continue to turn to the universities for practical assistance and guidance. It is appropriate, therefore, that in joining with the University community in commemorating the 175th anniversary, we express the hope that the tradition of service to the State will be strengthened and broadened. Social progress through education will be assured. Rutgers will continue to give its best and on the basis of past experience we may be assured that its leadership and counsel will be soundly directed towards the continued social progress of the State.

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Harold

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Stonier

1; William J. Ellis

Rutgers' Contribution to the Economic Life of New Jersey HAROLD

STONIER

H I S is the 175th anniversary. Of course, any anniversary brings forth always an association of ideas. This represents the 25th anniversary in my life of a very important event. As President Clothier has said, I was once a member of the faculty in a Far Western institution of higher learning, and it was in October of 1916 that I did my first job of teaching in a class in economics. I am reminded of that class tonight because it met immediately after people had eaten in the middle of the day. I used to have some difficulty in keeping the class awake. However, I was young and vigorous. It was my first job. Of course, you always remember that as you do your first pair of long pants and your first wife and everything of that kind. You just remember some things always. This was my first job of teaching. I was having considerable difficulty particularly with one freshman who had come down from what we called the cow counties of California to be educated in the city university. While in high school, he was probably used to playing a great deal and using up his energy in recreation of one kind or another, but when he came to the C

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city university he had very limited facilities along those lines. He took most of his recreation in the form of sleep. My class met right after luncheon period, three days a week. Well, I went to the dean of the department one day about it and told him about this boy going to sleep on me while I was talking. I spoke of it as a rather unique experience in education. The old man looked at me and said, "Well, I wouldn't worry about it, Stonier. Perhaps you can do more for him in his sleep than you could when he was awake anyhow." I thought that maybe the old man was right. I at least provided a nice sort of lullaby in which he could do his sleeping. However, one rather hot day - I wasn't feeling any good m y s e l f - h e went to sleep and very definitely and audibly could be heard at a considerable distance down the hall, disturbing everyone in the classroom, and here I was trying to give them a very profound philosophy on economics. Finally, I did about all I could do, and I performed a very dirty thing. I asked him a question when he was asleep. He came back with an answer, but the answer had no bearing on the question. I looked at him; in a very stern pedagogical voice, I said, "Mr. Fields, it impresses me that you are better fed than you are educated." I will never forget that that freshman, right in his sound sleep, said, "Why shouldn't I be? I feed myself, and you educate me." So I never had very much luck in talking to people after they had eaten. I know you are all here to listen to the Governor. I am not going to trespass much upon your time, as one young lawyer did down in Washington. I heard about

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it some years ago, when Justice Holmes was on the bench. This young chap had had his first case in the courts. He came from a Southern State, where they took their oratory very seriously. He prepared very elaborately, in fact, too elaborately. He kept on talking and talking. Finally, if you have ever seen the Supreme Court in action, you know when they are through listening to a speaker. They will begin talking to one another, which is generally a cue to the ordinary lawyer that he has said all he should say on the subject. However, this young chap had prepared himself and he was going to have it out. Justice Holmes was talking to one of the other justices. Between one another they were passing notes, with no avail whatever. Finally, he yawned right in this young fellow's face. The young chap stopped suddenly and looked very sternly at the justice and said to him, "I hope I am not trespassing upon the justices' time." Whereupon, the judge came back and said, "Young man, you shall learn in your legal training that there is a fine distinction between trespassing upon time and encroaching upon eternity." I know why you are here, ladies and gentlemen. I shall neither encroach nor trespass upon your time. However, I am anxious to come here to pay tribute to this institution and its service to the banking fraternity, of which I am a member. Twenty-three years after the founding of Rutgers University, the European world burst into flames with the fires of the French Revolution. Many buildings, customs, institutions and traditions were consumed in that

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holocaust from 1789 to 1799. On the eve of September 15, 1793, four years after the Revolution was under way and in the midst of tragic events which were taking place, the Convention of the Revolution solemnly decreed that teaching should cease in the twenty-two universities of France. This edict seemed incredible for French universities had led those of the rest of Europe from the time of the renaissance of learning in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. While it was true that French universities had been outstanding among other institutions of higher learning, they were content, however, with a smugness which made them feel that they were primarily storehouses of knowledge, which was to be transmitted only to the few. From the point of view of the mere academic standards of the day, they were doing a great service, but they were incapable of understanding the surge of the masses for greater consideration at their hands. They tried to stem the tide of expanding democratic forces. They lost. Five years after the Revolution began, they were all closed. This period of university history is recalled in order to introduce one of the oldest arguments in the circles of higher education. That controversy has to do with the nature and the obligation of the university. This subject was of live interest in America for two hundred years after the founding of the first institution of higher learning. This is the issue - Should the university relate itself to the ordinary problems of the people of the State or community, or should it devote itself to advanced research and treasure its knowledge in libraries and labo-

ratories and transmit such knowledge only to carefully selected scholars capable of a high degree of assimilation? For many years, certain universities boasted of how hard it was to gain admittance as a student. I have always felt that that was putting the emphasis in the wrong place. That system is capable of producing the scholastic bookworm who often finds difficulty in relating his learning to the problems of the world in which he must live. I lean to that conception which believes that it ought to be comparatively easy to get in but difficult to graduate. It is my feeling that scholarship should be one test of a university man. Among the other standards should be his social understanding - Can he play games; can he give and take; can he express himself; can he follow directions; and on the other hand has he the vision and sense of proportion which go with leadership ? No university, whatever may be its rules, can always function 100% in the product it turns out as graduates. On the other hand, that university which conceives of itself as something more than a mere store house of knowledge will have a spirit of service which will inevitably impress itself upon its students. We are celebrating here this week the 175th anniversary of the founding of Rutgers. As we meet in these happy surroundings, the world is once again in flames. Revolutionary forces are at large in the world. Every institution is being put to the test of survival just as they were in the period of the French Revolution. We all devoutly hope that the shooting war may soon cease, but even if that should occur, so much destruction has C

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already taken place, so much of our social and economic life has been dislocated or shattered that the Revolution will go on and every institution will be forced to prove its right to that share of the national income which it feels it should have. Already in our own country some institutions of higher learning have closed, others have been merged with stronger units, still others have opened this fall and are trusting that good fortune may see them through the year. No institution can hope to escape that rendezvous with destiny which revolutionary forces now demand. For the past seven years I have had occasion to study this institution. May I say without reservation that Rutgers University, under its present administration, is rendering a service to the people of the State and to the nation which entitles it to the moral and financial support which its far-flung services deserve. Seven years ago we had an idea of a type of advanced education for bank officers. We needed a university home for the idea. We canvassed a number of institutions of higher learning and after due deliberation we asked Rutgers if she would consent to be the home of this enterprise. Rutgers consented. The Graduate School of Banking is now recognized by the academic as well as the business world. But seven years ago it was merely an idea. The facilities, the spirit, and the educational suggestions which came from Rutgers have helped to make it what it is. No institution of higher learning with hide-bound scholastic tradition would have recognized such an idea. Rutgers was impressed with our sincerity, was willing to make adjustments in its busy schedule in the interests of an economic E 22 3

service and as a result the banking fraternity in every part of the nation feels indebted to Rutgers and to President Clothier for the part played in the success of the effort. During the last seven years we have become acquainted with the State as well as this university. Since we have been in a sense outsiders, we have been able to view what is taking place here in a rather detached and objective sort of way. Here we found a geological area known as New Jersey. From a square mile point of view, it is one of the smallest States in the Union. Forty-four States are larger in point of size than New Jersey, but New Jersey is ninth in population. Two hundred different types of industry are found here with over ten thousand plants. More than six hundred thousand people are employed in these plants. New Jersey is located in the heart of a market with a sixty-mile radius and with twenty-three million people. These people receive 3 6 % of the national income. It was Alexander Hamilton who in 1791 prophesied that New Jersey would some day come to be the workshop of the nation. His vision has come true. New Jersey was called the bread basket of the American Revolution. With all its progress in industry, New Jersey has had a remarkable balance, in that its agriculture has kept pace with its industry. The agricultural work of this institution and the State Agricultural Experiment Station have kept this State in the forefront of those devoted to intensive agriculture. New Jersey, as I said a moment ago, is 45th in size but ranks third in gross income per farm among the States of the Union.

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California and Nevada are the two States ahead of New Jersey in gross income per farm but their farms average 200 acres, and those in New Jersey average but 70 acres. I am told that the average farm income per acre in the United States is $8.00. The average income for the Jersey farm is $52.00 per acre, or nearly seven times the national average. For the country as a whole, 9^. of each farm dollar comes from federal subsidy. In New Jersey only ift. per farm dollar comes from this source. In other words, 99^. of every farm dollar in Jersey is made in the typical American way. The work of Rutgers in agriculture is known the length and breadth of this country because of its fine contribution to the rural life of this section. These are days when we are thinking of defense primarily. I am told that there are now five hundred companies as prime contractors in New Jersey working on defense contracts, and that for each prime contractor there are some eight to ten subcontractors among the smaller plants of the State. It has been said that New Jersey is making everything for defense from bandages to bombs, from tent poles to battleships. One of the great bottlenecks of our defense effort is trained men. These men must be trained while on the job, for new jobs, or to learn old jobs along modern lines. Last summer when I was here at the campus, I was impressed with the fact that this university had been among the first to offer its services to the country for this service in training program for the nation's workers on defense contracts. Thousands of people are being made aware of Rutgers' service through this cooperation. B y next year,

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we will probably have thirty thousand people in this training program in New Jersey. Rutgers has worked for better industrial relations with its educational offerings for three thousand plant executives; for better public health through its meetings with two thousand five hundred physicians in the State; for better labor relations through its annual Labor Institutes; for better safety through its educational work with police officials. Beyond that its extension division carries on its work in over one hundred different localities offering educational service to as many as fifty thousand students. We have observed in the last seven years that the university has been able to do all this for the State and its people and its industries, and still maintain high standards in its undergraduate and graduate work through its courses in the arts and sciences. Rutgers is proving that a well-organized university can at the same time be both scholarly and serviceable, and that high standards can be achieved and still be human. Rutgers, I believe, is right in its approach to its task. However, ladies and gentlemen, may I remind you finally that to be right in days of revolution is not enough. To be right is not enough. You must have advocates. You must have people who believe in you - your friends, your alumni, your students, your board of regents, and your trustees. They must believe in you, and they must be your advocates, if an institution is to survive. Simply to be right is not enough. You must have your friends who will work for you, give to you and, if necessary, fight for your interests.

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In this connection I am always reminded of that beautiful story of Hugh Walpole that he wrote twentyfive or thirty years ago, you will remember, that little story of "Jeremy at Crale." Crale was an old English school. It had been there for centuries. Jeremy was a little youngster sent up to this school because his father had gone there before him, before that his grandfather, and so on for generations. When Jeremy got there, like many freshmen, he soon became homesick. The old school had its ivy all over. Its world seemed so complete and set and its traditions so fixed. He couldn't relate himself to it and he wanted to go home. One day, as Hugh Walpole tells this story, the old Head Master was walking down the hall in the afternoon, when all the boys were supposed to be out on the playing field, and he heard sobbing coming from one of the dormitory rooms. He went in, and there was Jeremy, with his face buried in the pillow, sobbing as though his little heart would break. The old man, who had been there for forty years as Head Master, who knew Jeremy's father, turned him over, looked in his eyes and asked, "What is bothering you?" Jeremy told him the story of how he felt that Crale was all built, it was so substantial, so fixed, so solid, so great. He couldn't do anything for it. Then Hugh Walpole put these lines into the mouth of the old Head Master. He said, "Jeremy, Crale hasn't built itself. It has been built by the men who have come here, who have worked for it, who have thought for it and, when they have left here, have given to it and fought for it. Jeremy, men are always trying to be immortal.

Well, here is the finest recipe for immortality that I know: Do something decent for Crale and you will do something decent for yourself, for those who come after you, and for all England." So, ladies and gentlemen, paraphrasing Hugh Walpole, may I say: Do something decent for Rutgers. You will do something decent for yourself, for New Jersey, yes, and for all America.

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T h e University and Civic Responsibility GOVERNOR CHARLES EDISON

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HEN in his old age Thomas Jefferson came to write his epitaph, he thought that only three of his achievements were worthy of note on his monument, that he was the author of the Declaration of Independence, of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, and that he was the father of the University of Virginia. Jefferson had also been the American ambassador to France during a critical period in our history; he had been a member of Washington's cabinet, president of the United States, and founder and leader of a great political party. But none of these triumphs was in his mind equal to the fact that he was the founder of a University. Jefferson may be said to have begun the movement for closer ties between the public and institutions of higher learning when he established the University of Virginia. It is this joint civic responsibility about which I wish to speak tonight. Though colleges continued to be established by churches and by wealthy individuals long after Jefferson's day, their number was soon exceeded by the insti28

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tutions established by public authority, and many private institutions, such as Rutgers, have come to be more and more publicly owned or supported. The immense amounts of money now needed to provide adequate university facilities limit the prospect for most privately endowed colleges. Much of the future of American education lies in the great State Universities, such as the one we meet tonight to honor. We Americans have had greater faith in education than any other people. We have long insisted upon a minimum of education for all, and we have partially attained the ideal of offering a higher education to all who are capable of receiving it. The public, then, has assumed considerable responsibilities for higher education, so far as the public is represented in legislative bodies, State and national. There seems to be no opinion that public support should be reduced or terminated. Rather, the contrary. The American people still believe with Jefferson that an educated citizenship is indispensable to the working of representative government. Public responsibility does not end, however, with the payment of tax money over to the college treasurer. There must be an atmosphere in which education can breathe. The progress of education is not promoted by legislative or private witch hunts that may seek to root out of the colleges those persons whose views do not coincide with some current pattern. Democracy should be too big for that. We Jerseymen have made a pretty good job of protecting our educational institutions from the various

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pressure groups that would confine learning in straitjackets of one design or another. Y e t we must be careful, extra careful at present, least the emotional excitement engendered by the war stir up new persecutions in the educational field. The purpose of a university may be said to be twofold - to advance the frontiers of knowledge and to pass on to successive generations the knowledge and wisdom, old and new, that are a part of the heritage of the civilization of which we are a part. Hence, we may be certain that neither democracy nor education will be advanced by the imposition upon either teacher or student of uniform ways of thought. Rather, both democracy and education will be fostered by the preservation for all citizens of the right to think, write, speak, and teach with freedom from outside restraint. This is the public side of the responsibility for education. There is another side, and that is the responsibility of universities and graduates for the public welfare. Our prospectus for a university of today should hold out more concern for public welfare than was voiced by the first tutor in Old Queen's College, Frederick Frelinghuysen, when he published that historical advertisement of 1772. Y o u remember he was asking for students and he made the following promise: " T h e strictest regard will be paid to every thing which may tend to render them [that is, the studentsj a. pleasure to their friends and an ornament to their species." Well, most of us still want the graduates of Rutgers to be an "ornament to their species." But we also feel CBO]

there is more to higher education than to prepare a few fortunate young men for a life of tasteful leisure. By the way, it should be said for Frelinghuysen that his own conduct was happily out of keeping with his advertisement. He soon left his teaching for Washington's army, and after the war he became a United States Senator from New Jersey. Not the life of leisure for him but the life of public service, which, I can assure you, is anything but leisurely. A college graduate may feel that he has gotten his education on his own work and his father's money, and that therefore when he is graduated he owes no debt to society or to the State to give back anything of his time or his money. Actually, of course, such an attitude is unjustifiable. There is no important college or university supported entirely from tuition; the difference between the costs of the education and the amounts received in tuition is made up either from tax moneys or from the income from endowments. An endowment represents no more than a permission from society that a certain amount of wealth may be diverted from the usual descent to heirs or reversion to the public treasury and be used in a certain way - in this case to subsidize education. The fact is no graduate enters society free from obligation for his education. He may owe his fellowmen for all of it or for part of it - but he owes. Society does not ask that the debt be repaid in money, but the public can expect that the graduate will show a higher civic consciousness than the non-graduate, a better understanding of our common problems, and a

greater willingness to serve the nation, of which he is a part. E v e n though the graduate m a y serve in other directions than b y taking an active part in politics or b y holding office, at the very least he can be expected to cast an independent and an intelligent vote. T h e graduates of Rutgers could honor its 1 7 5 t h Anniversary in no more high minded w a y than to pledge themselves to meet that basic obligation of citizenship. Universities as institutions, I would say, have been more attentive to their civic responsibilities than have their graduates. T h e universities have done a good deal to affect the course of social movement. Almost all the liberal arts colleges offer courses in the social studies - sometimes designated b y the more ambitious term, social sciences. These studies are bound, over the generations, to affect the thing studied, to influence the direction taken b y our public authorities. Our progress, we must admit, often appears to be glacial in speed, about one inch a year. I t is an odd fact, and one that does not yield to logical explanation, that the mass of people are eager to accept the advancements of the physical and biological sciences produced b y the professors, but they are most hesitant to follow the social scientists. A good m a n y N e w Jersey professors, from Woodrow Wilson down to our time, have discoursed on w a y s to improve the State government. Unfortunately, w h i l e effective government is more important to every citizen than, say cellophane, it b y no means wins such ready acceptance.

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Notwithstanding such discouragements, universities have more and more put their facilities at the disposal of government agencies to ascertain by research what should be done. However, the members of such research committees and commissions seldom make an effort to see that their recommendations are carried out, and their institutions never do. I suppose that necessity dictates that course. At the same time, I feel that the civic responsibility of a university calls for a certain degree of daring to stand against influential opinion where the cause is just. For example, if a member of a college faculty is invited to study and to report upon some public problem, at the very least his tenure as a teacher should not be put in jeopardy because his findings do not agree with the interests of some association, party or corporation, however powerful. Social advances will be slow, indeed, unless the college administrators stand squarely behind their men in such respects. In recent years universities have permitted and encouraged men on their faculties to take an active part in public life. They have granted them long leaves of absence to serve the national government. I gather they have been more reluctant to extend the same encouragement to work with State and local governments. In my opinion, all of us, including college faculties, benefit by getting used to what Wilson called the rough ways of democracy. University professors cannot help being better men, better citizens, and better teachers if they learn at first hand about the world of politics. And the world cannot help being at least a little better from

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their contribution of expert knowledge and disinterested service to the common cause. These are the thoughts which came to my mind as I contemplated the Anniversary which we are celebrating tonight. Rutgers has produced many a man who bid his own conscientious part for the well being of his fellowmen. Rutgers has fathered many an idea which contributed to the betterment of New Jersey. No less than did Jefferson, all of us on this occasion must feel a little of the air of immortality that surrounds a university. We are in debt to the men who have gone before us. We can pay our own way only by adding to the enduring trust of highmindedness which such institutions as Rutgers have to pass on. Conscious of the civic responsibility that the public owes to Rutgers, and she to all of us, we join in wishing her, not only 175 years more of useful life, but countless centuries, that she may send forth into our State and into the nation innumerable generations of educated men of whom Rutgers and New Jersey may ever be proud.

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Our Colleges in the Emergency ERNEST MARTIN

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W E N T Y - F I V E Y E A R S A G O , as President Clothier has said, President Demarest presented me with a Rutgers' honorary degree which gave me an early feeling of security. I have always thought that there was a friendly confidence expressed at that time that at least was perhaps less justified at the moment than I could have wished. However, I want at this time to express the pleasure that I have in recollection of that event, to express my appreciation of the stimulus and the inspiration that came from the confidence then shown to me. As a matter of fact, I very nearly lost the degree. I sat beside Mr. Joseph Choate. Just as President Demarest started to call for me, and I was eagerly anxious to go, Mr. Choate leaned over, clamped down on my arm and, as is sometimes the case with men who do not hear well, talking much louder than the President of Rutgers, he said, " Y o u n g man, how many of these degrees have you got?" "Well," I said, still pulling and trying to get away, " I haven't many." He said, " I have sixteen, and I love every one of them." A t the moment I was glad he didn't have any more; but having received the degree and having received the inspiration of the honor which I loved too, I have always

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had happy associations in the privilege of being with that group that day and having been present at that time. Moreover, if it were not for the fact that I wanted to be here under any circumstances with you tonight, and if it were not for the fact that I should have wanted the opportunity again at this date of expressing my gratitude, I should have wanted to be anywhere where Bob Clothier was. If this were other than a serious academic occasion, I should like to go into some reminiscences about our early days together. It would help me out on my speech, but it probably wouldn't do him any good, and I want to be friendly. I want to be kind and I want you to know him as any college president needs to be known - as he is rather than as he was. I don't want you to misunderstand that remark, either. He was always the salt of the earth, but he wasn't always academic. But my mood is one of reminiscence and, as I think back, the twenty-five years have passed very rapidly. I was introduced at that time as the boy president, and now I am introduced as the dean of American college presidents. I am reminded of a story heard on the Dartmouth campus, and I hope it isn't too unacademic for Rutgers. A boy crossing the campus, after a night spent more happily than wisely perhaps, saw a puddle on the campus which had gathered during a heavy rain that day. However, the sky had cleared and the moon had come out. The boy stopped in great curiosity and looked at the puddle. Then he called a friend and said, "Is that the moon?" His friend said, "Yes."

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After due contemplation, in obvious amazement, he asked, "How the hell did I get way up here?" Twenty-five years ago I never expected to be speaking as a senior among college presidents. I don't suppose that I then anticipated living until the 175th anniversary of Rutgers; and yet, here we are, and collectively we are in much the same situation that the country seemed to be in at that time. It was about that time that Henry Ford, inveighing against woman's suffrage in his Dearborn Independent, pontifically remarked that " a woman putting a baby to sleep was infinitely more attractive than a woman putting an audience to sleep." Next day the incomparable Don Marquis came back in his column with the statement that he could testify from personal experience that "putting an audience to sleep was much easier," but he added the qualification, "unless the audience happened to be teething." I think the audiences are teething at the present time; and I think, underneath what sometimes appears as an attitude of casualness and indifference, that America is teething at the present time. I think that perhaps even she is shedding her baby teeth and that she is getting rid of some of the inhibitions that have been disturbing to those who have been intelligently solicitous in her behalf. Early in the World War, somewhere in 1914, Punch came out with a picture of a golf player with a bored expression on his face, and this legend underneath: We were playing golf the day that the Germans landed; All our men had run away, all our ships were stranded: And the thought of England's shame Almost put me off my game.

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That is the attitude that has to be met in a democracy, at least, when the processes of democracy are getting under way and when situations begin to be serious. We are more afraid of having the even tenor of our ways upset than of almost anything else. We are afraid of being put off our game. However, America is going to have to accept being put off its game as it has never been before. Other countries have thought that they wouldn't have to, but they have had to. In this connection, as you think in regard to the College's age, it doesn't make very much difference whether a college is 1,000 years old or 175 years old. Any college that was founded before 1914 is an old college. I was taught when I was in college - and to be specific it was from 1897 to 1901 - in my economic classes that the world had changed more since the beginning of the industrial revolution than it had changed in the whole Christian era before that. I took no exception to the statement at the time and I don't now, but I think the world has changed more in the last twenty-five years than it changed previously from the beginning of the industrial revolution and, consequently, more than it had changed through the whole of the Christian era previously. That is one of the difficulties at the present time - the impact of speed, the congestion of events, the effects on the mind and on the imagination. We aren't geared up to anything of the sort. So I say that in celebrating a 175th anniversary, it might just as well be 250 or 500, or anything else. I think it was Dr. Finley who remarked twenty-five years ago at the celebration here that there was a dis-

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tinction between human beings and institutions in this matter of growing older, because the older an individual became, the shorter became his expectation of life; but that the older an institution became, the longer was its expectation of life. The 175 eventful years which have marked the history of Rutgers University can well be taken as significant of what in the expanse of time is to be the future of this institution, and of the usefulness that is to be available from it. There is in the records a measure of the lapse of time in a trip which Caesar took from Rome to about where Paris is at the present time. We also know how long it took Napoleon more than eighteen centuries later to go from Paris to Rome, and the two times are almost identical. So let us compare that in our minds, at least, without becoming specific in regard to hours and minutes of how long it takes to go from Paris to Rome in a high-powered bomber at the present time. The speed of life is tremendous. The complexity of life, due to scientific invention, is tremendous. I doubt very much if there is any one human being who has the imagination to think of the scope of things as they appear in the life at the present time. I have always from early childhood been interested in locomotives in an amateur layman sort of way, but there has been something fascinating to me about a locomotive. As I stand at the Grand Central Station and see the motive power of the Twentieth Century Limited, capable of carrying twelve cars and a tender to Chicago at an average rate of fifty miles an hour or thereabouts, it is to me something to fire the imagination, but this spring C 39 3

I became more astonished when I was, in the course of some work that I was doing, called upon to go to an airplane plant and I saw a four-engined bomber capable of going 40,000 feet into the air and learned that it had far greater horsepower than the motive equipment that carries the Twentieth Century Limited from New York to Chicago. That is the type of thing that is happening in this mechanical age. The impact of speed and the impact of might, the impact of force, upon us is something that we aren't oriented to and can't become oriented to, except we make definite attempts for adjustment thereto and then probably insufficiently. Bagehot quotes Pascal as saying that "most of the evils of mankind are due to man's inability to sit still in a room," and he goes on from there to say that " a mark of primitiveness is the immediateness of everything; that the mark of civilization is time and leisure for contemplation." I don't know what Bagehot would say of the present day, but at least our periods available for contemplation have been greatly reduced. We have to recognize the fact that there is a tremendous advantage in early effectiveness in war in the type of government which we call totalitarian, which can secretly and covertly over a period of seven or eight years plan a destructive attack upon the world as compared with the necessities that prevail in a democracy for verbose discussion and long consideration before decision is made. It behooves us, under those circumstances, that eventually when we get to making our decisions, we make them positively and that we make them, above all, accurately. n 40 3

Percy Hammond, the dramatic critic, said years ago in regard to a vaudeville duo, whose act he was reviewing, something to the effect that the smaller and softer voiced member of the duo sang a battle song in the manner of a microbe going to war. Sometimes I have thought that such characterization could be applied to others. I t seems to me that it is perfectly evident - and here is where it seems to me that the colleges and the universities can come in - that planning must be done; that it must be done speedily; that it must be done accurately; and that it must be done with a greater concentration of thought than has ever been prevalent in any academic institution of which I know. Somebody has said that "though the clock strikes when there is a change from hour to hour, there is no hammer in the horologe of time which peals the change from era to era." But we don't need a hammer at the present time to know that a new era has struck. The world isn't going to be in the future as it has been in the past, for it can't be so. A complete readjustment of thinking is imperative, and it is imperative immediately. Nevertheless, there are common denominators between the types of mind and the types of being that contribute accomplishments in one era and in another. I have been interested, in thinking of this anniversary, to go back in consideration of what were the characteristics, as they are represented to us in various ways, of the men who founded these institutions which are the historic colleges of this country and which are older than the nation itself. I think one of the qualifications that you find always among these men is fortitude. Perhaps E4i

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as good a definition of fortitude as any other is in the current phrase "the ability to take it." I have been looking recently over some of the old letters written by the men who founded Dartmouth and who were at Dartmouth in its early days, and in learning of the apprehensions they had. They were at times definitely afraid of an Indian attack. The Indians were milling all around them. The scale of physical danger in reference to populations may be very much greater today than it has ever been in the past, but the hazard to the individual as opposed to the hazards to society has again and again been as great as it can be under any circumstances or at any time, present or future. These men had physical fortitude and they had mental fortitude. They were willing to think hard and they were willing to accept hard reasoning. They didn't yield their positions except under the duress of convincing argument to the contrary. I find that, in taking up the two or three heads on which I want to talk, they are all listed under "F's," and I am reminded of one of the younger members of our own faculty, a long-time friend of mine, who is called upon each year to address the freshmen, and who classifies his topics each year according to successive letters of the alphabet. He started some years ago at "A" and he is down to " G " at the present time. This year he told his freshman audience that his great speculation at the present time was whether a change of administration would come when he got to " K " or whether this would wait upon his getting down to " W , " " X , " or "Y." C42 3

But I am not talking about changes of administration tonight so I will speak next in regard to fervor. These men who founded the colleges and who laid the foundations on which our educational institutions have been established were men with that emotional and evangelistic zeal which we call fervor. They weren't easily diverted. If I were to take more time I could give you some pretty definite illustrations of the steadfastness of these men and of their strength of feeling - hard-headed men with a subconscious emotional urge - but nevertheless an emotional urge which pushed them on to achievement, and pushed them on with good-will and sense of responsibility which made them want to transmit to those who came after them the values which they had found and cultivated. Perhaps most important of all is that they too had faith. I think we are coming to a time when we will have to pay a lot more attention to that thing which we call faith - belief. I have heard a good deal of questioning as to the value of faith in life, as to whether there is any such thing as faith as apart from credulity, as to whether there is any such thing as religion, and in regard to one thing and another. However, we have had an extraordinary illustration in northern New Hampshire just recently of what faith is and of what it can do. I t happens that some of my friends have been involved in it, and I have been very much interested in following it. A little girl, Pamela Hollingworth, strayed away from her parents at a roadside camp. Three days after she wandered off, I had occasion to drive to Boston. C43H

I got up at home in the early morning when the thermometer at the house showed twenty-four above. The young man who was driving my car said, "Well, I guess this finishes the question of whether Pamela can be alive or not," adding, " I t was a lot colder at Conway last night than it is here." I said, "Yes," and I believed that was so. Then, for two days there were driving rains, sleet, and all that made for fatal exposure, but the parents of that little girl never relinquished faith. The searching party at least acquired some semblance of faith from the faith which the parents had. The little girl herself had faith. When after eight days and nights she had been found, long without food, bedraggled, with swollen feet, her first words were, "Daddy, where have you been?" She hadn't had any question at any time. The faith of loving parents, the faith of the little child, and the partial faith at least of the hundreds who kept up the search restored the little girl alive to her family when without the persistent and driving power of faith she would have been left to perish. If some say that there is no such thing as faith, they don't have to look very far to find themselves in error. The illustrations can be multiplied indefinitely. Critical analysis is required in matters for consideration of which education ought to stand and the tenets of which it is called upon to support. Nevertheless, it seems to me that we ought to be very careful, in imposing this spirit of critical analysis on our men in the colleges, that we avoid anything in the way of casual destruction of belief. I want to make this very plain, because I am coming to C 44 ]

believe strongly, very much more strongly even than I ever have in the past, that the foundation of everything in the world is belief. I spent some months this year in Washington. I came into contact with a good many different men down there, hundreds sometimes in a single day, and I can list on the fingers of my hands the number of men in government or among those men in business who came to Washington or among those who are serving in various official capacities at one place or another, such as the representatives of labor, about whom I would have any question in regard to their fundamental integrity. It is very easy to make a case. Politics creates strange situations as well as strange bedfellows. It is pretty difficult to understand the involved operations of this complicated governmental machine that functions so haltingly in a period like this. I think that the thing above all others that we need at the present time is to believe in the good intent of our representatives and to accept the men who are serving us as men of good faith. There is another phase of belief that I believe is very important at the present time. One of the English periodicals said, after Crete, that the English government had been prepared at all times for the obvious and never for the improbable. I think that is one of the dangers that we have in our country at the present time, and I think it is a danger that, to some extent, our educational institutions have cultivated by what has been the type of teaching during the last twenty-five years. I think in the present emergency at least we have to beware of such terms as, "It can't be so," or "That C 45 3

couldn't happen," or what you will in phrase after phrase significant of that type of thinking. I think we have to be willing to accept strange paradoxes. Mr. Walter Lippmann has pointed out what seems to me to be one of the most obvious things in this whole situation at the present time, and that is, that there is no way for the lovers of peace to look forward to securing that which they want except by going to war and destroying those forces which hold to a philosophy the dynamics of which demand an ever-expanding and an ever-continuing state of war. We have had other paradoxes that we have had to accept. We have had the teachings against the acceptance of propaganda, and we have had the teachings that all things which make for peace are good; but nobody has yet explained how you are going to hold to both of those tenets and yield to the fact, which is unquestionably a fact, that the most heavily subsidized propaganda of the last half decade has been for peace. If all propaganda is to be dismissed as evil, which it logically can't be, what are you going to do with the campaign of propaganda against propaganda? I think our colleges, in other words, have the responsibility upon them at the present time as never before for developing a discriminating judgment. I think we have to watch very carefully that our educational processes don't lose their vitamins and their calories, and all of the other things that go to make up a desirable educational diet. Bruno said 300 years ago or more that "ignorance is the pleasantest of the sciences; that it is acquired with[46 3

out labor and without pain and that it keeps the soul from melancholy." I think the thing is true today, as it has always been true, that the absolutely contented and happy man is the man who doesn't know much of anything and doesn't want to know anything. The labor pains of acquiring knowledge and of becoming intelligent are very great. Our colleges and our universities have to recognize that fact and have to be far less concerned in tempering those pains than they have been in the past. Education, it seems to me, must become a far more rigorous thing than it has ever been before, and it must be imposed with an insistence such as has never been existent in the American scheme at any time, not even in the time of the founders. Mallet in his History of Oxford said, "Greater than the traditions gathered round her, wiser than the prejudices she has outgrown, saved ever by the new blood flowing through her veins, . . . she shares her treasures ungrudgingly with those who seek them, her spirit with those who understand." It was a great spirit that was injected into these projects that resulted eventually in the foundation of the American historic colleges. As we offer our treasures to those who seek them and share the spirit of these great foundations with those capable of understanding it, let us also again and again call attention to the fact that always not only the letter but the spirit is the vital thing. Under God's blessing this is my wish for Rutgers tonight, that she may be possessed of many capable of understanding her spirit, and that, I trust, is the significance of this celebration. C 47

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To Keep and Teach This Tradition J O H N S T E W A R T BRYAN H E PRESENCE here tonight of President Ernest M. Hopkins, President William Mather Lewis and myself is impressive evidence of the truth that some achieve honors and some have honors thrust upon them. But with honors comes something even more valuable, and that is the luck of speaking first. I have never been quite happy about public speaking since it was my lot to speak at a banquet in Los Angeles several years ago with Will Rogers. "An ever merciful Providence," as a smuggler recorded in his log after he had escaped the coastguard, "protected me on that occasion," for I spoke first; but I was not wholly panoplied, for when Will Rogers got up to speak he said: "Folks, I have travelled all over the world and I have heard all kinds of languages, but I am here to bet that there is not a man in this room who understood one word that Mr. Bryan said; he is either a Virginian, or an Englishman, and probably both!" This feared or acquired dumbness somewhat limits that gallant freedom with which an after dinner speaker should attack his subject and his victims.

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William Mather Lewis and John Stewart Bryan

Alexander Loudon, Mrs. Robert C. Clothier and Ernest M. Hopkins

When I consider the number of times that I have heard President Hopkins, and when I remember President Lewis as the world's record holder for the best speech before the Alfalfa Club, I know that when I get through at least you will be glad that you have that much behind you. Allen Potts once said: "Any time that Stewart Bryan begins this side of Homer it is that much clear gain for the audience!" I am not going that far back though my bonds with antiquity are recognized subconsciously, but none the less unreservedly, at least by the hostesses at the Williamsburg Restoration. When a visitor asked one of them how Mr. Bryan happened to come to William and Mary as president, one hostess replied - sweetly and simply: "William and Mary thought that they needed a period man, so they just got Mr. Bryan!" Even so, despite my age, I shall go on. I have been asked to speak to you on the question of the Responsibility of the Universities and Colleges in the Present Crisis. The mere use of the word Responsibility is the answer in substance to the question that is propounded. In September Harpers there is an article written about the University of Chicago by Dr. Adler, in which he says: "Darwin had shattered the illusion of a static universe. Evolution made a mockery of the quest for certainty; everything including truth was in flux. Novelty should be prized rather than feared, for with the art of Science the Saviour man could be optimistic about winning the struggle for existence under the most adverse and unforeseen circumstances." C49 3

There is nothing new either in this appraisal of the utter demolition of an intellectual cosmos, or in the wishful - one might almost say wistful - promise of a conquered future. I wonder why men, who go around proclaiming that the struggle for existence has been won, should trouble themselves with anything further. But what can you expect from people who make their living by talking except for them to talk? The Court prophet of the Victorian era, Lord Tennyson, foretold how the world would proceed: . . . Nourishing a youth sublime With the fairy tales of science and the long results of time. Passing by queer metaphors that describe real achievements as fanciful fairy tales, I only pause to remark that a future fed on "results of time" would have a slim waistline; for Time has a low calory content which bookworms would reject. But one must admit that Tennyson had a good hunch when he wrote sixty years later about The pilots of the purple twilight, Dropping down with costly bales. Only we call them "flying fortresses," and the bales are bombs. However, something flew, and that was an idea. Of course, our self-assertive, intruding friend, pragmatism, will try to crash the gates; but that is to be expected, for as William James, its discoverer and public relations man, remarked: "Pragmatism is nothing but a new name for an old way of thinking." You do not have to be a philosopher, or even a Ph.D., to be a pragmatist; the only requisite is to be looking for a way out.

There was a perfect example of an instinctive, but effective pragmatist in Hanover County, Virginia. The man lay dying. He had been raised in the Baptist faith where there was no salvation without immersion. Not being able to find a Baptist preacher, he got the next best — an Episcopal minister, who came in, opened the Prayer Book at "Baptism for Adults," and read: "Wilt thou be baptized?" "Such is my desire," replied the Postulant. Then the minister continued: "Dost thou renounce the Devil and all his works, the vain pomps and glories of this wicked world, and all sinful desires of the same?" "How is that?" said the dying man. The minister began again: "Dost thou renounce the Devil and all his works?" The sick man broke in and said simply, but conclusively: "I ain't in no position to make enemies right now." Many writers today have had a lot to say in favor of the Schoolmen generally and Thomas Aquinas in particular. I am all for the Schoolmen. Their stock argument:

Utrum chimaera in vacuo bombinam ruminate possit? might well inspire college faculties today to lead students to consider likewise whether an empty-headed speedster rushing around in an auto is capable of exercising thought. If not, then, "so what?" For there is this bond between the Dark Ages and our Era of Enlightenment, that while the thousands of deaths by automobiles every year give appalling evidence of how many today either cannot or will not distinguish between green and red traffic signals, all the world, then, from Pope to peasant, stood and lived as if in the light of eternity. W e talk about endowment. Lord Bacon said C5i 3

that the goal of science is " T h e endowment of human life with new inventions and riches." Let us stop right here and inquire: Is it an endowment to give a man a gun and transform him into a murderer? Much less is man's life enriched by enabling 75,000,000 people to use inventions and riches so efficiently as to starve, slaughter, and conquer and seek to enslave Belgium, France, Denmark, Norway and the Balkans. Is it endowment to offer to the world weapons which give the might of overlords to part of mankind and reduce the rest to the rank of slaves ? Are the schools which teach these sciences of destruction collectors and conservators of the public weal, unless with this potential madness of power and this ghastly brew of death the colleges drive home the antidote for this poison by capturing the minds of men for freedom, and the wills of men to maintain liberty? All this leads back to the question, How shall the college humanize and subdue these new-found powers, which are not immoral, but amoral? Let us never forget also that these ghastly perversions are forces created by man, not blind forces of nature like tidal waves and earthquakes. The answer is that the obligation of colleges and universities is to preserve and inculcate those principles out of which the philosophers and seers have woven the fabric of imperishability. To be responsible demands personality. What, then, is a college? It is as far beyond complete definition as is humanity, but it is recognizable that a college possesses something more than buildings and endowment and a C

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student body; a college also has alumni, some of whom are leaders and some of whom still dwell in arrested adolescence; but beyond all other possessions a college has a faculty and, whether they like it or not, that faculty is the inheritor, the cultivator, or the destroyer of traditions, of wisdom, of sensitivities. Perhaps the way to put it is to say that faculty members are offered the opportunity of spiritual oneness with the utmost limits of human thought and human insight. These words take in a lot of territory and leave out a lot, too. Here is what Alfred North Whitehead has said of those who are touched with this perception: There is no parting from your own shadow. To experience this faith is to know that in being ourselves we are more than ourselves; to know that our experience, dim and fragmentary as it is, yet sounds the utmost depths of reality; to know that detached details, merely in order to be themselves, demand that they should find themselves in a system of things; to know that this system includes the harmony of logical rationality, and the harmony of aesthetic achievement; to know that, while the harmony of logic lies upon the universe as an iron necessity, the aesthetic harmony stands before it as a living ideal moulding the general flux in its broken progress towards finer, subtler things. And he added: " T h e main business of universities is to transmit this tradition as a widespread inheritance from generation to generation." I am not expected to speak to you as a Rotarian or Legionnaire, nor even as a tub-thumping politician, but as a member of the blessed confraternity of college men. So speaking it seems to me that above and before all, L 53 3

the colleges must accept the responsibility, cui multum datum est ab illo multum quaeritur. And here we are, we Americans, hoarding and hiding in Kentucky, of all places, gold that surpasses all the fabled riches of Ormus and of Ind, as if Kentucky had ever heard of either of them. Here we are, with our roads, our plastics, our motors, and our aeroplane, with our factories and our foods, and all the ease and power that have sprung from strenuous liberty. And what are the colleges doing about it? When the Harvard Board of Overseers visited William and Mary in Williamsburg last April, oddly enough on Lexington Day, among the sonorities we said: As freedom of movement conquered the Continent, so freedom of thought civilized it. So the very men who cry out today for fear that they may be deprived of one gulp of pie or one drop of thin, pale, attenuated blood, might well recall the profound paradox that the very life in which they luxuriate sprang from the wills of fathers who nobly put life aside. These men who cry "Peace!, Peace!" when there is no peace, instead of plotting for retreat would come nearer the high goal of life if they prayed for and sought for, and, by the grace of manhood, found at last the path to moral indignation. To keep and teach this tradition, then, is one responsibility of colleges. There is also another obligation, the name of which is none other than the suspect word "culture." What culture is, however, brings up another question. : 54 3

There are as many views of culture as there are men or civilizations. Dr. Basil W. Gildersleeve once defined culture as the sum of the things which a gentleman has forgotten. This is the only real tribute that I have ever heard paid to forgetfulness. At any rate, each gentleman will have his own standard in this field, and that is exactly where the college and its responsibility come in, for the college is designed to give that quality of culture which makes all of nature's noblemen peers. Perhaps the reason that some college men are more cultured than others is because having learned more they have more to forget, and certainly in this time of engulfing barbarism the humanizing touch of learning, the strengthening faith in age-old values, the binding strands of gentle fellowship are the vitalizing sources of civilization. This is what Yeats meant when he wrote:

. . . how base at moments of excitement are minds without culture. The responsibility of colleges is to exercise greed and cowardice and torture and baseness; to exalt manhood, patriotism and generous freedom; to be unbound and unafraid before the whirlwind of death and destruction, and to keep the light of culture's altar burning even if it is a lone torch in a ravaged land. So secondly our colleges are responsible for culture. Thirdly and lastly, like patriotism, even culture and tradition are not enough. The honey breath of culture cannot hold out against the wreckful siege of battering machine guns, dive bombers and mass murder. Even the tradition that made Leonidas hold Thermopylae, or

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Hugo Taillefer sing his death song as he led the conquering Normans at Hastings, or Roland as he sounded his horn in the pass of Roncesvalles; even these alone are not enough; there is demanded yet something far tougher than culture, something underlying and infiltrating, on which a great tradition can be surely built. T h a t irreplaceable substance, that rare and powerful distillate of test and travail, is the sense of the call of manhood; it is the instinctive reverence and worship for the dignity of the human person. In this, colleges have a responsibility that cannot be shifted or fudged - that is to teach and to practice the belief in the incomparable value of man. I know the condescension with which the illuminati have looked on the naive childlikeness which believed that there was a problem in the question, What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? But we who watch this kaleidoscopic cataclysm now raging in Europe; we who have seen the generous impulses of millions obtunded and perverted; we who have witnessed the sympathies of youth extirpated, and in their place have noted the development of utter callousness; we who have seen greed made a god, and murder an article of national merchandise; we do well to ponder whether the damage done to the character of the Germans by themselves is not worse than the destruction they have wrought on the bodies of the Allies. We turn to Oliver Cromwell and cry in his words to Germany: By the bowels of Christ, we beseech you to consider that ye may be mistaken!

And so calling we strengthen ourselves for the final test whether we shall fail, helpless, f r u s t r a t e d , p a t h e t i c creatures, As on a darkling plain Swept by confused alarms of struggle and flight. Where ignorant armies clash by night. or whether we will wrest, if need be, from the very jaws of death the right of fellowship with those who in every age have kept burning that light which shone in Greek and Hebrew and Classical literature and life; that light which is the far-shining spirit of man; that radiance whose being it is the duty of colleges to shed abroad by word and by example. There is here no place for retreat and no choice of substitute. I t is not for colleges as abstractions, but for us individually as very members incorporate in this supreme organism of humanity to meet the test and prove, not for some college far away, but for ourselves, right here and now, that we are not blind and timid, but wide-eyed and very valiant.

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The Responsibilities of Freedom W I L L I A M M A T H E R LEWIS

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THOUGHT my dear friend, President Clothier, would be more kindly to me and the others who are speaking tonight than he has been. In his opening remarks he said that the convocation tomorrow would be painless. I am glad you have something to look forward to. But it is somewhat embarrassing to the gentlemen who have been asked to speak this evening. Looking over this program, I think a great mistake has been made in not having this delightful Glee Club appear more frequently. You remember that old and weather-beaten story about Sing Sing, when they put in their athletic program there. They called the prisoners together and asked them what sport they wished to take up and, unanimously, they voted for the cross-country run. I think if in the middle of this speech tonight a vote would be taken, it would be unanimous to have the University Glee Club sing again. In this connection my mind goes back to my inauguration at Lafayette some fourteen years ago. Before that occasion, I was asked to visit a member of the Board of Trustees who had become n 58 3

estranged from the college. I tried to persuade him to come back into the fold by telling him what my philosophy of education was. He agreed with my statement and said, "If you stand back of that, I will back you up." I thought that was simply a courteous expression. But on the morning of my inauguration he came to my office and asked me if I still believed what I had said when he first came to me. I told him I hadn't changed. He then handed me a check for $500,000 as a gift to the college. I had never seen a check larger than $20 up to that time, and of course during the rest of the day we showed him every attention. He was somewhat elderly and his eyesight wasn't too good, so he wasn't in the academic procession. He was taken up into the chancel of the chapel and the ceremonies began. I delivered my inaugural address and, when it was over, he turned to the secretary of the college and said, "Who was that who got up there and talked so long?" The secretary said, "Why, you know him. That is the new president. You gave him that magnificent gift this morning." "Oh, yes," he said, "and what was he talking about?" The secretary replied, "That was his inaugural address." "Well," the old gentleman exclaimed, "that was a great mistake. They should have had the boys sing." I said then - and you who have attended some other inaugurals will appreciate this - that he was the only honest man in the entire audience. C 59 ]

However, I am very happy to be here tonight and to bring the greetings of a sister institution to this great university. As President Clothier has said, there are very close bonds existing between Rutgers and Lafayette. I am glad he referred to the faculty golf contest, which is the high point of our athletic program every year at Lafayette. Although on one or two occasions we have had reason to believe that some of the Rutgers' team have been subsidized, yet because of that sportsmanship which is the very life of Lafayette, we haven't said anything about it. Some of you may know that there is an organization called the Middle Three, consisting of Lehigh, Rutgers and Lafayette. They are to have a preliminary football contest tomorrow, I understand. Well, Lehigh had its 75th anniversary last week. I represented Lafayette there. President Williams in introducing me said that Lafayette had been founded thirty-five years before Lehigh, but that it never amounted to very much till Lehigh was opened. So I feel that it is fair to say that Lafayette is older than the other member of the Middle Three, Rutgers. We had our first board meeting in 1824, and Rutgers didn't open up till 1825. It was Queen's College before that time. Just a year or two may make a great deal of difference. I heard the other day of an old operator on Wall Street who had his 97th birthday. His pastor came to him to congratulate him and said, "Brother, you are going to live to round out a century of life." The old man said, " N o , I don't think I am. Why should the Lord take me at 100 when he can get me at C6o3

97?" I don't know how you can connect that with the present situation, but in any event I am here tonight very seriously and very sincerely to congratulate Rutgers University on behalf of Lafayette College and myself. There is something very fine about this institution which came into being because of the necessity in the colonial days of bringing an intellectual leadership to those little groups of people who had settled in communities along the Atlantic seaboard. Dr. Clothier suggested a thing that I think has a tremendous amount of significance when he spoke of the crises at which different outstanding events in the life of Rutgers have occurred. The date of the first charter, I believe, was 1766. In 1 7 7 1 , the first students came here at a time when the colonists saw creeping across the country the shadow of the Revolution which was about to break. The 100th anniversary was in 1866. The Civil War was just over and the problems of reconstruction were heavy upon the land. And then there came that great celebration of 1916, the chief figure of which is here tonight in the person of Dr. Demarest, with its great educational conference and its dignified and impressive convocation and the pageant representing the background and the forward look in education. That was at a time when the nation was on the brink of the First World War. Here we are again at this 175th anniversary in an equally critical time in the life of our nation, and still as at other great milestones in the life of the University there has been no question as to whether or not the

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occasion should be observed. Tonight I think we are deeply in debt to President Clothier and to his colleagues for giving us this time of inspiration and of uplift when we need it so badly, at a time when depression and discouragement are too much in evidence in this land of ours. I think that this attitude is something which we should all emulate at the present moment. Obviously, there must be an intense realism today. Obviously, "business as usual" is out in education as in every other activity of life; but at the same time, more than ever before, the call comes for the college and for the university to hold fast that which is good. We are never going to get through this critical time with upset nerves, with depressed minds, with a sense of defeatism. There is no other hope, as I see it, that the dark ages which made their blackout over the world in the eighth century will not come again, except that the American college and university and all of our intellectual and spiritual activities be carried on with increased vigor. It has been suggested here tonight that most of the great educational forces of the world, except those of the Western Hemisphere, are at a standstill. Certainly, the great universities of Germany, which furnished so much of the intellectual inspiration for decades, are simply propaganda factories. Certainly, the great institutions of France can be counted on no more, nor can those in Italy, Denmark, Poland. The grip of the oppressor is on the educational activities of those nations. We can't expect anything C6* 3

from them. So the college of the Americas has a tremendous challenge in keeping steady, in keeping serene, in doing the essential things; in leading young people into a life of thoughtfulness, into a life of usefulness, into a life, if necessary, of calm sacrifice. Some great writer referred to the consolations of literature. The consolations of literature are very great today; the consolations of literature and of history that take our minds back to the fact that there have been other cataclysms in this world just as great as these; that there have been other dictators just as menacing as those who stalk the earth today; but that in the long run, because of faith, judgment and courage, those conditions and those dictators have passed out of the picture. So it is for us at this time, it seems to me, to emphasize the humanities, to take the minds of our youth away from the things that are passing and anchor them to the truths which are eternal. There are other great things to guide us in this time of difficulty. We have had tremendous and long-continuing discussions of academic freedom in the days which have gone by. Frankly, I have seen less choking of academic freedom than I have of academic selfishness over a period of years. We have hugged too much our little freedoms to our breasts. We have talked about avoiding anything that would in any way cramp this right and that privilege which we have. However, my friends, today the call comes to you and to me, and to the youth with whom we have something to do, to see that the responsibilities rather than C63]

the privileges of freedom are accepted before it is too late. That is the challenge. Thomas Mann made a great statement when he said that we should never worship freedom to the extent that we will give anyone freedom to tear down American freedom and American liberty. I think he is putting it correctly. I think there is a great need for loyalty of the highest type today. I happen to have something to do at this time with Selective Service in the State of Pennsylvania. As I sit in my office in Harrisburg, I am sometimes distressed by the number of young men who wish to be deferred for this reason or that, not for a sound reason, not for an essential reason, but for reasons of personal comfort and personal safety. I am sometimes discouraged by the number of men in industry and business who ask the deferment of men under them for the same reason. There should be only one test of deferment of college students, of workers in industry and in business, of any group or any individual, and that is, the welfare and the safety of the United States of America. There can be no other standard measurement at this moment if democracy is to prevail. I don't wish to say anything more this evening. I am merely trying to make the point that at this time in the history of our nation and the world, the college, the university, is more essential than it ever has been. If we will look calmly - and as President Hopkins has suggested, with faith - at the situation and realize that, if we stay true to the ideals of education, if we develop men and women well-rounded physically, mentally,

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morally and, above all, spiritually; young men and young women who will meet the challenge of our nation faithfully and heroically, then we needn't fear for the future. The story is told of a little boy who was playing noisily around the room when his father was trying to read a magazine. In order to keep him quiet, the father turned to the last page of the magazine, which was a map of the world, and tore it out. Then he tore it up into little pieces, making a sort of crude jig-saw puzzle. He handed the mass to the boy and said, "Put them together." He thought it would take the little chap about an hour, but in seven or eight minutes the boy said, "Daddy, I am finished." The father looked at the floor and there was the map of the world perfectly done. In amazement he said to the child, "How did you do that?" The little boy said, "Daddy, I looked on the other side and there was a picture of a man. I put the man together and the world was all right." " I put the man together and the world was all right" - I submit to you, my colleagues, there is the challenge to us today, not in panic or in excitement or in fear or with wishful thinking to do something in an emergency which may not be for the well-being of ourselves and our posterity, but to put these youths together in such a way that they will realize the responsibility of life in a democracy, as well as its rights and privileges. I think as I go back over this amazing story of Rutgers for 175 years and the way it has gone on through times of war, through times of peace, and through times of C

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depression, that this institution, which some of the rest of us like to think is a typical American institution, will go on under God to do a greater work than it has before; and that when the next twenty-five years are over and the 200th anniversary is celebrated, it will be celebrated in a world of peace and of understanding, because of what the American college and university have done.

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"Certain Pictures as T h e y L i e in my Mind . . W I L L I A M H . S. D E M A R E S T

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E A R E assembled here on a very distinguished occasion, the 175th anniversary of Rutgers University, the last event or almost the last event of a program that has been, I think, singularly well arranged and carried out up to this point. It is hard to realize that 25 years have passed since the 150th anniversary. Some of us here remember that very well. Perhaps we remember most vividly the pageant given on the afternoon of Friday of that celebration week, a pageant which we think was extraordinarily well conceived and accomplished by Professor Clarence Ward and those associated with him. It was very gratifying to me that Professor Ward was here last night and this morning as the representative of Oberlin College, to which college he went immediately after presiding over, creating in a way, our celebration of the 150th anniversary. The 1 ooth anniversary of Rutgers, you all know perhaps, was in 1870, as if the college had been founded in 1770 and not 1766. It was rather curious and extraordinary that the charter of 1766 was not thought of. In those days, 1870 let us say, there was not so much C67 3

searching of sources. That charter was overlooked until our historian of the Reformed Church came upon the references indicating and proving the existence of the charter of 1766 and meetings of trustees during the years 1766 to 1770. There are very few people who, I think, might be here and tell us something about that celebration of 1870; it was rather a notable one, especially notable for the historical address given by Joseph P. Bradley of the class of 1836, Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. There are three graduates of Rutgers still living who, I suppose, were at that celebration, Herbert A. Drake of the class of 1868, now 96 years of age, Henry S. Rokenbaugh, 90 years of age, of the class of 1872, whom I saw only a month or so ago, having a very pleasant call upon him, and having him give to me his reminiscences of the old days, and William P. Stephens, of the class of 1873. They were undergraduates at that time. This is really in a way the Charter Day dinner sponsored for many years until now by the Rutgers Club of New Brunswick for the men of old Rutgers alone. This year the club surrendered the occasion to the committee, the Anniversary Committee, in order that the ladies of New Jersey College for Women, the ladies of our own faculty here, also might share with us in the occasion. I hesitate to enter into any comparison or description of either element present here tonight. Of course we do hope that the men of Rutgers have been and are " a pleasure to their friends and an ornament to their species" as Frederick Frelinghuysen called upon them to be, Governor Edison calling our attention to that on

Thursday evening. But I would have liked to remind Governor Edison that Frederick Frelinghuysen in that same proclamation of the start of Queen's College added that these men should be men of learning, liberty, and piety. Certain it is that the ladies have one priority anyhow, a priority established 175 years ago by the word of Andrew Burnaby, the English traveler, who was traveling through these Colonies. He said, "The city of New Brunswick is noted for its beauties. In fact," he said, "the handsomest women that I saw in America were in New Brunswick and Philadelphia." (I am very sorry that he had to put in Philadelphia.) So we concede that priority very willingly. It has been suggested that I should prolong a little my remarks as toastmaster along the line of the history of the college. That is an agreeable task to me always, but of course I must not take much time in giving myself to it. I only would call to your attention, speak to you of, certain pictures as they lie in my mind, one and another in the course of the years. The first one is that of the family at Raritan, the family of John Frelinghuysen and his wife, the distinguished Dinah Van Bergh, and the two little children, E v a and Frederick. There in that parsonage at Raritan they have with them Rynier Van Nest, Jacob R . Hardenbergh, William H. Jackson, and others perhaps; they are being taught classics and theology by John Frelinghuysen. In a way there you have a picture of the school or college which is the prelude to Queen's and Rutgers, as the old log college at Neshaminy was the prelude to

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Princeton University. The little boy there, who was very young when his father died, Frederick, was to become the first tutor of Queen's College. He did not have the advantages of the modern progressive education, so he was ready for college at the age of fifteen. He graduated at the age of nineteen and with his stepfather became the faculty of Queen's College. That is my first picture, that family at Raritan. The second picture is of the ministers and elders appearing before the Council and the governor, asking for the charter. They appear once and they are denied. They appear a second time and they are denied. Finally, the third time, they succeed. I suppose that Hardenbergh is there. I suppose Leydt is there, the minister of the Old First of New Brunswick. I suppose David Marinus is there, who, over against the argument that the young men of the church should go either to King's (Columbia) or Princeton, said, " N o , we will have a college of our own." That is the second picture. The third is of that first commencement day, 1774, with one graduate, delivering orations it is said, not as if it were one oration, in Latin, in Dutch and in English. In these more enlightened days we are unable - in these softer days perhaps - to endure even an oration in English on the commencement platform. I am rather sorry for that. I have an idea that your Alma Mater, Dr. Clothier, still endures a couple of graduates on the commencement platform; and what an excellent thing it is! But the Dutch oration, what about that? Anathema, of course. What about the oration in Latin? Far be it from me to throw any stones at that, for I was guilty of C

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that atrocity myself in the year 1883. Although I think that I was not so guilty as was a very benevolent and cooperative professor of Latin. Another picture is the picture of the Revolution, of the boys of Queen's College up there at North Branch. They are carrying on their studies as best they may, and they are training for military service. John Taylor sends to his assistant, John Bogart, the word, " N o w keep Van Harlingen and Stewart at their Greek till they get it, and hurry them up." I don't know why that was, particularly; perhaps that they might the more quickly shoulder the musket and get out into the field. I leap over some years and I see the picture of President Condict, and Abraham Blauvelt, Chairman, and John McComb, Architect - the President Clothier, John Wyckoff Mettler, and Louis Ayres of the present day - sitting at the conference table discussing the plans of Queen's Building, as we have come to call it. And when they had decided and the work was done, I seem to see those three men, not to speak of others, standing in front of the edifice with high satisfaction and in admiration of a building, none finer of that period of American architecture. I like to think of this picture, too: The picture of the first endowment of Queen's College. President Livingston wrote an effectual letter. M y letters were not always effectual. Are yours, Dr. Clothier? President C L O T H I E R : Quite often not. Toastmaster D E M A R E S T : It was my experience. But his letter was effectual. He wrote to old Domine Elias Van Bunschooten. He was a domine, but he was a C 71

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miller, a farmer and a financier, and the word of President Livingston went home to his heart. The day came when he entered the council of the church in session, marched up the aisle, laid on the table at the pulpit bonds to the amount of $14,000, and $800 in cash, the first endowment of Queen's College. I like to think of that picture, the old man going up the aisle and laying this unexpected, certainly very unusual, even munificent gift on the table, casting it into the treasury. I leap over the years and seem to see the picture of men in the '30's, after Philip Milledoler and Henry Rutgers had talked about the change from Queen's to Rutgers, and after the new start of the old college. The talk with Henry Rutgers did not amount to a very great deal, I have to say. Nevertheless, the talk in its way was satisfactory, I suppose, and the college makes its very notable new start, with that very excellent faculty of but few men, but fine men, Theodore Strong, Alexander McClelland, John DeWitt, James Spencer Cannon. Sitting before them in the classroom - I would like to have a picture of them - young Frederick Frelinghuysen, Cortlandt Parker, Joseph Bradley, Talbot Chambers, and others of the same sort. In the life of that day were a dozen young men who came from Yale College for what reason? I will not stop to suggest; in any case they came to Rutgers. Y o u may infer something from the letter of one of them to an old mate at Yale; he says, "The faculty at Rutgers College treat us with kindness and respect. They do not deal with us with any tyrannical authority. You cannot well imagine the difC

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ference between the faculty of Yale and the faculty of Rutgers." I leap over the years again and see President Frelinghuysen raising the flag on the campus when the young men are ready to go to the war; and the ladies are there, for the ladies have made the flag and they have presented the flag. President Frelinghuysen watches it rise on the flagpole. The young men are around him, pledging their service to the nation. I think of the picture in 1917-1918 of our young men again training here for the great World War. I can see them as they stood before me in front of the old gymnasium. They have been in training; they are in their uniforms; they are an army ready to go forth; and the Armistice comes. Another thing of that time: The coming of the Women's College. I want to say a word about that. The picture rises in my mind of the house, the mansion, which we call College Hall - its early days. How well I remember the social life of it when our alumnus and trustee lived there, John N. Carpender. The morning when I went there, John N. Carpender, Jr., on the bed of illness, his last illness, his mother beside him, when we settled that the house was to come into the possession of the college. Another picture, of Mrs. Douglass in that house which was her home and office, classrooms too, even the living place of some students; I see her there, working at the foundation-life and through the early great advancement of the college. The third picture: Of the girls - perhaps it was only the second year of the college - at Christmas time coming down the C 73 ]

stately staircase with their lighted candles, and their service of Scripture, prayer and song, expressing in most telling way the spirit of the college born in that earliest day and living still today. So much for a few pictures here and there from the story of old Queen's-Rutgers. I have taken the timeprivilege which has been offered me. There are one or two things yet in mind before my word is over. There are two portraits to be presented. I have just spoken of the College for Women. There is a portrait to be presented which perhaps has special relation to that college but large relation as well to the whole University. Mr. Voorhees, will you say the word ? Mr. V O O R H E E S : The centennial of the Charter of 1 7 7 0 brought into the list of Rutgers' helpers and heroes the benign countenance of an Elect Lady, Mrs. Kirkpatrick, the donor of the chapel which bears her name. It is fitting that this anniversary of the Charter of 1766 should offer another Elect Lady for perpetual remembrance. Mrs. Elizabeth Nevius Rodman Voorhees made possible the building of the Rutgers Library which her husband, Mr. Ralph Voorhees, who, as you may know, was blind, helped to dedicate on Charter Day, 1903. By many gifts, in which they shared, more than a dozen American colleges, institutes, seminaries, mission boards and religious societies were enriched by buildings or endowments, and also a mission in China, and a college and an institution for the blind in India. Rutgers continued in her thought to the end of her days. She was deeply religious, having been brought up C 74 3

in a church organized by the Reverend Jacob Rutsen Hardenbergh, before he became president of Queen's College, and graduates of Rutgers had been her pastors. That she did not forget, witness a professorship in the Seminary, and a gift of $150,000 for the enlargement of the Library, which was not completed until 1928, after she had passed to her reward. Then it was learned that she had made ample provision for the chapel at New Jersey College for Women, and had made Rutgers her residuary legatee. Over a million and a quarter dollars came to the treasury, the largest single gift Rutgers has received during its long career of educational usefulness. Throughout the generations thousands of students will be benefited. On this centennial year of her birth the Class of 1888, and some relatives who knew and loved her, are pleased to present the portrait of this Elect Lady, assured that she will be deemed worthy to be kept in perpetual remembrance. The portrait will be unveiled by Master Ralph Voorhees, my grandson. Toastmaster D E M A R E S T : Dr. Voorhees, Dr. Clothier permits me to acknowledge for him and for the college this gift so acceptable to us. It was my privilege to know Mrs. Voorhees somewhat, so modest in her character and in her life, so devoted to her faith and to the cause of education. Her benefactions to the University and to the Women's College are indeed to be remembered, and she to be remembered for them. I think the bequest of residuary estate was rather larger than you suggest. I think it amounted to about $2,000,000. C 75 1

There is another portrait to be presented. Toastmaster D E M A R E S T : This is a portrait of Dr. Louis Bevier, graduate of the Class of 1878, from 1883, after graduate study and degree, teacher at Rutgers, from 1893 until his death in 1925 professor of Greek. I could extend far my remarks concerning him, but I would simply say that he was an extraordinary servant of his Alma Mater, devoted to her welfare, incessant in her service, a great scholar and teacher, educated in foreign universities and at Johns Hopkins, Gildersleeve thinking of him as the most promising Greek scholar he had in those early days of Johns Hopkins, scholar in English literature and in French, devoted to the interests of the students, sustaining them in all their activities, and finally, dean of the college. I have known no man surpassing him in his mental resources, versatile, penetrating, a man who could face any problem and master it. Louis Bevier! W e are very happy to have his portrait to add to our distinguished gallery. It is presented by his family. Let me say that there is another gift assured to the University just now that I have been especially interested in as of great importance and significance. T w o days ago, after we had had some conferences, Mr. Peter H. B. Frelinghuysen told me that I could say that he will place a Frelinghuysen Memorial window in the large window-space of our Kirkpatrick Chapel over the entrance opposite the Hardenbergh Memorial window in the chancel. C 76 3

"Past 2 1 , and Large For Her Age . . MRS. J O H N W.

MOXON

5 R U T G E R S was entering on her fourth half-century (and those were mellow years), rather suddenly a new arrival in the family was announced. This youngster, of all things, turned out to be a girl. Although the charge is denied, it must be that the event brought some dismay to the banks of the Raritan. But now we are celebrating the 175th anniversary of the University. Several colleges have come into the family since 1918. New Jersey College for Women is past 21, and large for her age. And here we are, all together, celebrating a kind of family birthday party, because I think of the events this evening as belonging to a family gathering. There are 9,000 alumni of the Men's Colleges, and it may surprise you to know that there are 5,000 alumnae of the College for Women. Those figures are based, of course, on the number of those who have matriculated. If you prefer to speak of the graduates, there are between five and six thousand graduates of Rutgers, and there are very nearly 3,500 graduates of the College for Women. Among the alumni and the alumnae I need hardly tell

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you there has been considerable intermarriage. Some of it is represented here this evening. Women being rather more businesslike than men, as I can say since none will oppose me here, ask when they first come to New Jersey College for Women (I understand this from our field secretary) just what are the opportunities for meeting the men at Rutgers. I doubt very much if the men are quite so frank. It might be that it would be to their advantage if they did prepare in advance. A s it is, I know of many happy intra-university marriages, and I can see nothing against the whole thing. Like any bright child, the College for Women has had the advantage of being in a position to copy what others have perfected beforehand. So that we have been able to progress by copying what you have done and profiting by many of your mistakes. Our Alumnae Association is certainly indebted to the Alumni Association because we could pick up in 1922 right where you were. In fact, we tried to improve on you. W e still do, and of course I am not going to say whether I think we do or not. However, I would like you to know (I think you might like to rejoice at this with the alumnae) that this year for the first time in the history of the Alumnae Association, which, of course, was founded in 1922, we have had a surplus from our Alumnae Fund. All this time, you see, we have been trying to catch up with the expenses of our organization, with the difficulty of just keeping track of ourselves. This past June we succeeded at last in catching up. W e had a small surplus and were able to make a gift of it to the college. Our problems are very different from those of the C 78 3

alumni. I believe I am honest in saying that our percentage of donors to the Alumnae Fund is a little higher than yours, but that our average gift is far, far lower. The reason for this lies, of course, in our technique and in yours and in your rather happy situation. We cannot go into any woman's office and slap her lightly on the back and say, "How about $ 1 0 0 ? " We couldn't do that. We might go to her front door and ask her for a donation, and she might give us what she had left from the food budget. We have these problems, you see, and I must remind you of them. This leads me to a brief presentation of the general problem of the modern woman. I think this is a good opportunity to point out to you a few things. You know, we have all the modern conveniences in the home nowadays, and we have a very much greater opportunity for obtaining an education. Sometimes I wonder what it has brought us in the way of ease, and I know that actually we are not ahead. For instance, a married woman can no longer retire to a flannel wrapper and a dusting cap and curlers. She must wear house coats. She must have becoming aprons, and she must go to the beauty parlor. A single woman may live alone, but she must like it, and that involves a very complicated technique as you know if you have read any of the advice on the subject. Our houses must be attractive, but we must not show the slightest effort in keeping them so. We must never appear to be doing housework. It must all always have been done. We still garden and raise flowers, but we can't bring the flowers into the house and thrust them into any little C79I1

bowl, because anyone who comes in will know that they haven't been arranged. And to be arranged they must be arranged with the greatest care, with a great knowledge of certain formulae, for line, color, mass, and such things. We do no longer make hair wreaths, for instance. That was a very fine art, one I think we might still pick up, but we do string gourds and we do produce petit point chair seats, and hand-made rugs. You must have at least one of those in your house, made by yourself, or you cannot qualify as a really feminine woman. In addition, you must know about football. You may, because most of us grew up in the days when we went to football games and had an opportunity to know something about it. But you must also know something about baseball; you must be able to swim, to skate, perhaps to ski - more than ever nowadays, to ski. Perhaps you hate the cold, as I do, but still you are supposed to understand or be able to do some of those things. You must know something about the various types of radio programs. It may be that you don't like Amos and Andy. But your next door neighbor, when he comes to spend the evening, may want to discuss Amos and Andy. You can't be rude; you must know something about them. And you must also, of course, keep up your own cultural interests. Inevitably, in this endeavor to be all things the modern woman gets herself into some jams. She must take on all comers in the feminine world. If you will permit me to be personal for a moment, let me tell you that very recently my husband and I called on an old girl of his. She did a thing which was fair, but I ask you to

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judge just what you think of it. She took us down into the basement and opened a door, and there she showed us not one or two, but rows and rows of all kinds of preserves. I think she knew without being told that I am not the preserving type of woman. But naturally, being a modern woman, I have now made a note that, even though the defense needs would inspire me to do so, I must take up preserving anyway. Of course, we do too much, and I think that usually shows in the cords of the neck. You may know some modern women who have that tense drawn look. I think we should avoid it. I know we try. Our child-raising is a much more complex and difficult thing in these days. In the Victorian era they were apt to say the child is bad; he must be disciplined. Nowadays we know that, no matter how bad he is, it is our fault, not his. We think sometimes of those happy Salem days when they could say, "The child is possessed of a devil and my neighbor, Mrs. Jones, put it there." We try very hard, however, to work out a useful partnership with our husbands, and into this there goes a great deal of preparation, of information about the outside world. We are expected to know more about it. I think that there we learn a good deal about working with men. For instance, men hate detail. Women love it. We make resolves and stick to them. Men say they do, but they really don't. A good wife will try to overlook this fact and to keep peace in the home in spite of it. In general, the home is not a corner out of the world any more. I t is a refuge, of course, but is also drawn into C 81 3

an attempt to make some of the adjustments for the young people before they are thrown out into the world, and the person who must make those adjustments is the mother; and to make them she must be informed of what is going on in the world. She must read, she must keep up with modern affairs, she must have outside interests. In voluntary work in the community she is usually valuable. She is usually valuable if she can find time for it. Here, incidentally, college training is extremely helpful. She must consciously build up outside interests, which she and her husband can hope to keep alive when the children have hatched and flown off, because many older people have told us that that is one of the problems. If your whole life is your children, when your children leave home the adjustment is very difficult. I think it would be very difficult anyway, but we are trying to build up other interests which may go on. In the present emergency it is important that we slough off many of these things I have mentioned as superfluous. The first thing we must use our intelligence for, it seems to me, is to do some wise picking and choosing among the things we can do and, of course, the most obvious thing isn't always the thing to be eliminated. Occasionally the dressier things are very important. For an example among our abilities, most women are taxi drivers, I think, in this era; they take their husbands to the station; they take their children to school; and they give deference to the old customs in letting the husband drive when he rides although everybody must then get out and shift seats and move around when he C82 3

has left so that the car can be driven away from the station ( a custom which I think is prevalent the country over). Now we can turn our usual taxi-driving to good use, because there are many towns which have defense corps and into those go the efforts of the habitual taxi drivers, who never feel the additional drain. We can improve our knowledge of nutrition and of home nursing. We can do things of that kind. But most important of all, I think, we can cultivate courage and the buoyant spirit. These things, of course, rest on health first. If our health is good, our spirit, our state of mind, is apt to be better. But the buoyant spirit rests a good deal with the women of the world. Perhaps you read Paul Gallico's recent outcry in which he said that the women were falling down on their jobs, and remarked, ". . . dress by Hattie Carnegie, complexion by Liz Arden, hairdo by Antoine, and expression by the Baldwin Locomotive Works." I don't think that that is so very true of the modern woman, but I do know what he means. We must keep our minds open. It is very hard, I think, when you are doing a job which, to some extent, is shut away from the world, to keep your mind open and flexible. We must do that. But on the other hand we must keep firmly to our convictions, and I think, as other speakers have remarked in these last three days, it is time that we began to recognize our convictions and to let them down like anchors. Fires usually start in small corners. Intolerance is that kind of thing, and I think that any woman in her particular small corner in the world has many opportunities to stamp out the nar-

row, bigoted spirit when she finds it around her. It is a great opportunity but a very humble one. In other words, I think that the woman has the job nowadays of integrating the American home with this changing world and of taking up the shocks of adjustment where she can. As I see it, this is the task of the American woman and, of course, her best tools come from whatever opportunity she has had for higher education, for any education, but, most preferable of all, for higher education. Rutgers has seen this and has accepted the importance of the kind of work that women can do today. She is increasingly taking into account the presence of women in this, our family circle. Her whole growth as a university has indicated her willingness to adjust to the present, to broaden her field of service, and I think that these facts, the fact that Rutgers has taken in these many colleges, the fact that she has given women a place in the circle, that she is giving us a position of increasing importance every year, lead us to salute her on this her 175th birthday, not on her age alone, but perhaps more importantly than that, on her youth.

T h e Guardians of Truth CLEMENT

C.

I

WILLIAMS

C O N S I D E R it a very great pleasure and a high privilege to have the honor of bringing greetings, salutations, felicitations, from Lehigh University to Rutgers on this 175th anniversary occasion. There is, of course, some question about who should bring these greetings at this time. The faculty is always a little bit leery of trusting a thing of this sort to the president, but the president having the power of appointment, I was the one who came. As you may know, faculties sometimes are not sure just what a president is going to do under certain circumstances. I can illustrate that by a circumstance which occurred down at the Mayflower Hotel last year at a large convention of educators, including state superintendents, presidents of large charitable foundations, and college presidents, and deans, and professors, and so on. One of the local women's clubs wished to procure a speaker for the afternoon session of their club, and she applied to the secretary of this conference to help her in her difficulty. She said that she would like to have someone not lower than a college president, someone sort of a wit, and this secretary was a college professor, somewhat disillusioned perhaps. He may have been disapC

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pointed in a salary increase, or whatnot; but he said, "Madam, in my opinion there isn't anybody lower than a college president." He added, "And as for a wit, if we send you any of these college presidents, then I know we will be meeting you halfway." On the other hand, it may be that if a professor had brought these greetings, and it would have been very appropriate if a professor had brought them, some of the eminent scholars of our faculty would have appropriately represented that comradeship that exists between university faculties. Yet sometimes a professor can be too erudite, as is illustrated in this incident: I am not going to tell you whether this was a member of our faculty or not. But he was working in his study very vigorously and at his writing, and he noticed the baby on the floor in some distress. On examination he found that the baby had swallowed the point of the fountain pen. He went to the telephone and telephoned the doctor what had happened. The doctor said, " T h a t is very serious. I will come right over. What are you doing in the meantime?" He said, " I am using a lead pencil." College presidents, of course, make speeches on all occasions. M y wife is very reluctant to serve anything more than a three-course dinner at our house lest I get up and make a speech afterwards. And most of these speeches are what President Clothier told me the other day was a short-horn speech. A short-horn speech as defined by President Rainey of the University of Texas is one consisting of two small points with a lot of bull between. I 86 ]

I am very happy indeed to be the one to come from Lehigh to salute Rutgers as she rounds the three-quarter point of the second century lap of her splendid history. This celebration of the 175th anniversary of Rutgers has a great deal of significance because it exemplifies the longevity and vitality of universities. Last year the University of Pennsylvania celebrated the 200th anniversary; five years ago Harvard her tercentenary; in a dozen years or so Princeton will reach 200; Yale will reach 250; University of Mexico and the University of San Marco in Peru will reach 400; Cambridge about 700. New College at Oxford still retains the name of novelty after 562 years. The University of Paris is 800 years old; the University of Padua in Italy about 1100 years old. We have to come to the conclusion, I should say, that the universities are among the most viable, the longestlived of all the institutions of civilization, and this raises two points. These are those two small points that I spoke of. Why and what is the significance? Why is it that universities have such longevity, and what is the significance? It seems to me that there are two reasons why universities are long-lived. In the first place they deal with life, they deal with intellectual life, and intellectual life is just as continuous as organic life. Ideas come to fruition and fade, but not until they have generated a progeny of ideas in the concepts of others. In the second place, universities deal with truth, and truth is enduring. Universities seek truth and truth is of the essence of immortality. They don't always find truth, but the very quest of truth is of the essence of C 87 1

immortality. So because universities deal with life, intellectual life, and seek truth, they are in a sense immortal. Then the second point, just in a word, what is the significance of the long life of universities. In the first place, if universities lived long through the years, and this has been commented upon by others, governments rise and fall and systems of government wax and wane, but universities go on through the years - if they do go on through the years as we observe, then they constitute the best station points and the best beacons for taking reckonings and observations that we have concerning the affairs of men, because there are no other institutions so stable. The University of Oxford, for example, has seen many dynasties rise and fall in England, from the last of the Norman kings down to the Tudors and the Stuarts, down to the present time. The number and character of the universities of the country are a measure of the enlightenment of that country, and of its advance in the ways of freedom. And the universities, because of their stability, offer the best source of unbiased enlightened opinion with regard to the affairs of men as we go along, with regard to political affairs and other social matters. Contrasted to universities, the political institutions of our civilization are perhaps the least stable, the most fickle. We have seen how in our own government within recent years the conditions that we thought had been fairly well fixed have changed quite radically. And that has been true in other countries. So it seems to me that the hope of our civilization lies in an intellectual league, [

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we will say, of universities, because the institutions of higher learning, having this degree of permanence and persistence, offer the best straightedge by which it might be possible to draw that even line of justice in international relations. If the universities and other institutions of higher learning are free from dictation of sectarian or political men who have the control of guns and other influences, are free to work out their own ways, they can form an intellectual league that would be a proper reference with regard to justice and righteousness. So, President Clothier, I want to congratulate Rutgers University, and I want especially to congratulate you, sir, on the very great success of this particular celebration. I think I have seldom been in a gathering so impressive as the one this morning. I think we all felt the majestic presence of a great personality, of a great woman, as she spoke to us from over the water, a woman devoted to her country and to the welfare of the world. And so it seems to me, sir, that you are to be congratulated on the planning of this celebration. You are to be congratulated on the excellent execution of all of your plans. And I think that we can all agree as alumni of Rutgers that Rutgers' future will be worthy of its past. That is my wish, sir, for Rutgers University: That the future of Rutgers will be worthy of its past, that Rutgers will continue to hold valiantly that sector in the advance from a cruel world into a wiser and a more benign humanity.

Universities and the Individual Student ROBERT W. SEARLE > THIS moment has drawn nearer I have been increasingly astounded at my termerity in accepting the invitation to speak to such a gathering in such a day. When that invitation was delivered to me I must confess that against the enthusiasm of a flattered ego something within me tried to oppose a word of warning. It called to memory an occasion nearly fifteen years ago when, following a commencement exercise at which I had been honored with a degree, before a somewhat similar audience I made a speech which surely must have caused those present to believe that an invitation from the Committee on Degrees had been misdirected. Now I can let you in on the secret - as President Thomas placed the certificate in my hand he whispered, "We wanted to give this to you while it would be useful." I have always cherished that degree not only for itself and for its additional bond to Rutgers but for two other reasons. First, because I have believed that at least one of the D's was a tribute of love paid to my father's memory by Phil Brett and others of his friends upon the Board of Trustees. And in the second place because

it elevated me to the rank of a classmate with as kind and patient a teacher as any college ever had, a man who that day belatedly received his Doctorate - Richard Morris. May I suggest that kindness and patience constitute the greatest resource that the average student can find in an instructor. The truths which are transmitted by love dwell the deepest and last the longest. There is a cause of profound comfort as we look out upon the world. For at its heart lies the assurance that the rampant beastliness of today is a transitory thing already condemned, in some tomorrow to be brought to heel. I t is for the hastening of that tomorrow that I make my plea today. I address that plea to our educational system, to our colleges and universities. I address it to you who have in your hands the control of this old and honored and beloved institution. One of life's worst moments is that in which one discovers after having made a supposedly profound and original observation, that someone else has not only made the same observation but has actually expressed it with much more facility than one can hope to achieve. Of course, it is comforting to find another mind profound enough to offer companionship. For some years now there has been developing within my mind a critical thesis on the subject of education. Recently it has been seeking an occasion through which to find release. This explains my prompt acceptance of the invitation to be here today. Two days after that acceptance there was brought to C9»

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my attention the spring issue of a magazine called The American Scholar. That, I may explain to the unenlightened, is the organ of a national collegiate fraternity for which the Registrar keeps all the pledge buttons and the faculty does the electing. I might add that most of us were never even considered for membership. You will remember it as Phi Beta Kappa. Well, in this issue of this enlightened magazine there appeared an article by Walter Lippmann entitled "Education vs. Western Civilization." When I had finished reading it I experienced one of those moments to which I have referred. And then I thought - No, this is not as discouraging as it seems, for after all, the members of Phi Beta Kappa constitute a very small proportion of the alumni. Besides, most of the Phi Betes won't be able to afford to return and I can safely trust the tolerance of those who do. So I am sticking to my intention of giving release to that troublesome thesis. I shall, however, borrow from Walter Lippmann the indictment which comes more appropriately from his pen than from mine. He charges that "the prevailing education is destined, if it continues, to destroy Western civilization and is in fact destroying it." And that "the schools and colleges have been sending out into the world men who do not understand the creative principle of the society in which they live" for "during the past forty or fifty years those who are responsible for education have progressively removed from the curriculum of studies the Western culture which produced the modern democratic state." C9* 3

Those are strong words. They constitute a most serious accusation. For my part I am convinced that they are true. But I do not intend to attempt to prove their truth, for I am anxious to direct the effort of these few moments toward the advancement of two positive suggestions which, if they were to be applied, would, I am certain, provide the corrective. I cannot, however, leave Mr. Lippmann's charges without reminding you that this age has seen its supposed wise men discover too many truths too late. This is no day for leisurely treatment and slow-moving cure. It demands the speed and the ruthlessness of surgery. About ten years ago a young colonel argued with all his fervor before the general staff of the great French army. He bade them recognize the changes that mechanization had introduced and pled with them for drastic reorganization of the army. They spurned his suggestions and continued their complacent confidence in their invincibility until 100,000 men, using the tactics which Charles de Gaulle had advocated in vain, in a few swift days completely routed their proud army of millions and captured their impregnable Maginot Line. Gentlemen, they learned the truth - those ancient military leaders - but they learned the truth too late. Will we ponder such words as Lippmann's and act upon them, or will we continue our leisurely way until circumstance has vindicated prophecy and events have decreed, "Too late." ? I bear within me constantly an ominous dread of a terrible night of reckoning that may be nearer than even the most vigilant of us imagines. Do not misunderC 93 3

stand me - it is not the armed might of totalitarianism that raises this fear. I t is the disintegration of individual character here in America. I t is the weakening of our national morale, the increase of irresponsibility as each seeks his own, mindless of the common good, until we have reached the point where one questions the ability of our society to withstand collapse under the burden which must inevitably be borne. One day last spring I went to Washington to testify before a congressional committee in behalf of a bill which proposed to set up a commission to work upon long range solutions of the problem of unemployment with particular regard to the transition from a war- to a peacetime economy when this strife has ended. T h a t day I heard one of the ablest leaders of American industry tell the committee of lawmakers that if they failed in constructive alternative, the nation would face the probability of a relief bill of at least twenty-five billion dollars yearly. Is our moral and social fibre stout enough for that load? Y o u answer the question. I believe this particular bill is still in committee. Precious time has gone. L e t us remember that when a democratic society fails to produce within itself an amount of vision and of social responsibility adequate to grapple with its major problems, one of two things is inevitable: chaos or dictatorship arising from frustration. And so I plead with you who hold the destiny of at least one institution in your hands to read the signs of the times. I covet for Rutgers the leadership of a movement in the field of education which will reverse the [ 94 ]

process; which instead of sending out into society, as Mr. Lippmann charges, "men who do not understand the creative principle of the society in which they live," will send out men who not only understand that principle, but who will live it and apply it to all phases of our national life. And how shall you begin? In detail I do not know; in principle I am certain. You shall begin with the individual, with each separate student who steps upon the threshold of the college. There are a few who come and they are few - who know what lies within them, what talents they possess, who feel what they ought to be and therefore know what they are. These are fortunate ones. Let us forget them for the moment and remember their less fortunate fellows, the large group who just come to college. They must choose some course and choose they do, for one reason or another, the course for which they have the credits, the course that father wishes he had taken, the course that will offer a chance for the most remunerative occupation, the course that Bill Jones is taking. I knew a girl once who elected Geology because she thought she was in love with a geologist. Before the year was out she passed him up for an embryonic doctor. I am certain that the professor of geology never knew why she slumped so badly. At any rate here are a lot of boys (and girls) who do not know what they want to be, what they ought to be, what they are qualified to be, and therefore who do not know what they are. I suspect, Dr. Williams, that there are even boys who enter Lehigh whom you can't possibly turn into good engineers. At least I knew one once.

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Some tools are fashioned by accident - but most are created by design. There are boys who find themselves in college - some too late to take advantage of it. There are many who do not, many who never find themselves. In view of this, why is it not the primary function of the University to study and to evaluate the individual boy, to estimate him and to help him to appreciate his talents and qualifications, to help him to find himself? I am aware of the fact that vocational guidance has not developed and probably never will develop to the point where it can be precisely accurate. But I also know that it can help profoundly. There used to be a saying that "Mark Hopkins on the end of a log and a student on the other constituted a college." It was said to indicate the importance of the personality of the teacher as over against elaborate equipment. But there was something more there too, something that we mostly forget. There was the individuality of the student, a factor quite unfamiliar to our system of mass education - the individuality of the student. We may be sure that Mark Hopkins spent the first period of his association in comprehending the boy at the other end of the log. The good potter analyses his clay before he attempts to fashion it into a vessel. The good farmer studies his soil before he plants his crop. The good carpenter considers his finished object before he selects his lumber. Then why in the name of common sense should not the good college appraise the boy before it attempts to fashion his life? No other institution has such an op-

portunity with and therefore such a responsibility toward unfocused adolescent personalities. The university approaches them with an objective authority which they recognize. It has them in its hands for the most and the best of their conscious hours during the most impressionable years of their lives. A t a time when by the mysterious movements of human nature they are tending to develop personal initiative and independence, to assert their own individuality as over against parental control and traditional loyalty, the educational institution is the dominant factor in their environment. Therefore - and this seems to me a most reasonable plea - why should not the first period of college life be a period of evaluation and orientation? Why should not the attempt be thoroughly made to discover inclinations and aptitude, not only for vocational life but for avocational life as well ? That is the first part of my thesis. Perhaps my second is more closely related to the demand which Walter Lippmann has laid at the door of higher education. I should like, however, to cite another, and greater, authority in order to establish the criticism concerning which I seek to offer constructive recommendation. One of the bombs which fell on London last winter caused a grievous loss to the whole world of constructive thought when it blasted life from the body of Sir Josiah Stamp. Many of you have heard him, some may have known him personally. I quote from his address given at Syracuse University in June of 1935: " F o r the present

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period the world makes its claim upon us with very special and troubled needs. The aspect of education for fitness to pass opinion upon world affairs, for voting and for taking a hand in guiding human destinies, makes a demand upon university training which may well be the test of success or of failure to our age. I t is the lack of education of this sort that has brought failure to democracy so far." The call here, as I understand it, is for an education which, in addition to helping the student find himself, will help him to bring to his life's associations in all the aspects of citizenship the spirit of cooperative understanding rather than that of selfish exploitation or equally selfish indifference. What is demanded is education for good citizenship. There are three types of citizen, all too prevalent in our society today, whose attitudes and actions are viciously destructive, not only of our democratic patterns but of all that is good in life. The first is the man who does not carry a high standard of honesty into his human relations. The recent articles in The Reader's Digest, narrating the experience of two investigating customers successively with auto repairmen, with radio repairmen and with watch repairmen, are appalling in their indications of a widespread dishonesty. When we add to them what we know to be the case in general business and in politics, to specify but two phases of life, surely we are faced with a devastating weakness in society. It becomes apparent that the profit motive uncontrolled by honesty and social responsibility can spell destruction. C98 3

The second villain in our midst is the one who decides every question on the basis of selfish advantage. Of such are the destroyers of our natural resources, the exploiters of political organization, the opponents of humane legislation, the fomenters of racial and religious strife, and all their kindred. These are the true forerunners of bloody strife. They block the course of progress. They stand athwart the path of justice. In the measure in which they succeed, they create frustrations that weaken or destroy faith in democracy, and to the degree in which they dam the stream of evolution, they pile up the floodwaters of revolution. The third type of bad citizen is characterized by mere irresponsibility. He will rise in wrath when his rights or privileges seem to him to be transgressed, but he is, except for moments perhaps of emotional sympathy, quite indifferent to the protection of the rights and privileges of his neighbor. He seldom bothers to vote or if he does, merely follows the straight party line. If he contributes to any charity, it is a mere pittance. He gives no time in voluntary service. He does not participate in community affairs. Such a one may be judged a good family man, a loyal churchman, a respectable citizen. As a matter of fact, in religion and in democracy he is worse than a total loss. He is a burden to be borne. George Adam Smith has said that "the purposes of God are not overthrown by the hot assaults of the devil. They are rather smothered by being sat upon by a mass of indifferent nobodies." The truth of this is manifest in the struggle of humanity to achieve the goals of democracy. C 99 ]

The point is that these three types appear all too prevalently among the ranks of college graduates. I must go farther. I must point out some evidences of great weakness in the training of men and women entering even those professions which in the past have denoted public service. I do not except my own - on that score I could say much - but I choose to speak particularly by way of illustration of medicine and law. Before I express criticism, however, let me first pay tribute to the many able and unselfish men and women in both of those professions. But when that has been done it still remains true, for instance, in the field of medicine that the Medical Association, by their failure to provide effective service for the lower income brackets and by their stubborn opposition to cooperative movements, are preparing the way for something which I should deprecate as much as they - state medicine. As for the legal profession, it has much to answer for. I t has put the stamp of approval upon types of practice which derive lucrative reward from plotting legal methods of circumventing law and of avoiding taxation. It, too, has failed to meet the needs of those, and they are the majority of the population, who are listed in the lower income brackets. Many a man of modest income is perforce defrauded of his just rights because he fears to risk the costs of litigation. The Legal Aid Society, with its high purpose and its meager support, cannot discharge the obligation which rests upon the whole profession. The fact that lawyers are increasingly monopolizing C

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political office and accepting the responsibilities of government in addition to those specifically within the field of their profession is laying upon them a tremendous obligation of responsibility and upon their education a commensurate importance. I have pleaded for an educational novitiate - an introductory period in which the resources of the university will be directed to the aid of the student in his evaluation of himself. Now I plead for the reorganization of curricula around a grouping of courses which will prepare each student to enter into an understanding and responsible relationship to democratic society. Such courses should be required of all. In addition, when the student advances from the general to the particular - when he elects to enter a specific field such as law or medicine, engineering, agriculture, etc. - he should be required to study the particular sociological implications and responsibilities of his chosen lifework. In recent decades education has been training men to exploit the possibilities of freedom. Now it must train them to meet its responsibilities, or they and we will have no freedom. By all means we must go on producing men of skill in science and the arts. But let us see to it that these men of technical skill are also men who will serve and save democracy. This final word. For myself, I am convinced that this cannot be done on any merely humanistic basis. Perhaps the leaders of institutional religion have betrayed the word "religion" by making it seem synonymous in the public mind with sectarianism. The fact remains that C

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"the creative principle" of our society to which Walter Lippmann referred sprang from the Judeo-Christian tradition. It was the gift of religion through religious men. And that creative principle simply cannot be maintained apart from religious conviction and practice. This fact has never been more clearly stated than in the words which Washington incorporated in his Farewell Address. " 'Tis substantially true," he said, "that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular governments. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle." Sons of Rutgers - custodians of its present - stewards of its future! Our beloved college was founded when this nation was in the throes of birth. It was established to train loyal citizens and unselfish leaders for the responsibilities of that day. In this hour the nation's need is equally great, and it is a similar need - the need for loyal citizens and unselfish leaders. I call you, therefore, not to some strange way, not to some novel and radical departure. I call you back to the ideals, the dreams, the hopes of the little handful of men of faith who, one hundred and seventy-five years ago, established the heritage for which we today are so profoundly thankful.

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Pioneers and Trustees R O B E R T R. W I C K S HOSE of us who stand in the American educational tradition are automatically reminded by an occasion like this that good pioneers must be good trustees. "That good thing which was committed unto you, keep . . This pithy admonition of Paul to his co-worker Timothy is pertinent to this hour of celebration. Archbishop Temple, of York Minster in England, on receiving a degree from Princeton, addressed a distinguished gathering of faculty in our Chapel, and said, "Universities stand for the search for new truth and must not be interfered with by any claims of religion; the church stands for truth that is known and nothing must interfere with following its implications into new situations without end." Modern education did religion a service in attacking the unbelievable which had gathered on our beliefs like barnacles on a ship; but an overconfident modernism egregiously side-stepped the old toughened truths about the control of human nature with which religion has to do. Men assumed that self-interest guided by reason and the hidden fears of mere prudence would make a heaven on earth without benefit of God. But instead it has raised a hell on earth which has added to unbelief in God a withering unbelief in man. Our young t

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people are suffering a vast bewilderment partly because their educators have ignored the ancient insights concerning the finiteness and perverseness of human nature which now constitute the supreme problem of contemporary society. As my humble part in acclaiming a great trusteeship in this University, let me intimate where modern eyes are being opened to old insights as we suffer the shocks of a disintegrated world. For instance, we are recovering a great Biblical emphasis where we feel the shock of endless uncertainty. Our students are facing today the curious dilemma that our search for certain knowledge has infinitely multiplied our uncertainties. When everything is at sixes and sevens, and becoming more so, we cannot just sit coolly on the fence. Everywhere moving masses of people are committing themselves to belief before reason can make everything a matter of proof. Just at this point we can understand the New Testament idea of where living faith begins. It shifted the whole emphasis from what to believe to whom to believe. That makes sense, for you and I learned whom to believe long before we had brains enough to know what we believed about anything. Wordsworth wrote: "My mind leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky." After that leap the scientific business of knowing what to believe about a rainbow followed as an afterthought. So in the realm of human personality the responsive leap of admiration toward people whom we believe comes long before reason answers all the questions about what to believe. Dr. Mayo felt that leap when he first read Darwin and Huxley,

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in whom he found many uncertain opinions, but an unwavering spirit that was committed to knowing the truth though it blistered one's eyeballs. Thus knowing whom to believe set the direction of his life ever after. So it is in the Christian experience that our real religious motivation has come alive through people whom we believe. We learn most from those who forgave most, who never felt they were good, who were most ready to suffer for the truth, who carried more than their share of the burden. Strangely enough the ultimate source of this impression was a personality whose life was not a success story. Something there was in Him that could be defeated by Herod who has since gone with the wind; something there which is forever suffering from the bigotry, greed, and inhumanity of men; and something so absolutely good and beyond attainment that it reveals our final need for repentance, forgiveness and whole-hearted committal to a divine power that can make new use of a humble and contrite heart. In the mixed system of life which has flowed out from this source men have come to believe that they have experienced the saving grace of God. The exception which the Nazis are taking to all this is becoming the grand exception that proves the rule. Their ability to hate and kill is killing their own feeling for what life is and killing their chance for constructive peace. A recent New York Times editorial thus summed it up: "In an undying hate that arises around them and behind them in tongues of fire that some wind of freedom will some day fan to a devouring flame, the Nazis reap the lurid harvest for which they ploughed and sowed. C

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As they slay, they themselves die to all that makes life worth living." Men may be fooled by tyrants for a time, but we come back to those who have something we permanently believe in. They remind us of others on a long, long trail that winds back through our family to an unknown legion of battlers for lost causes whom we do not want to let down. Again we are learning old truth from the shock of the unhappiness in the world. It has been a familiar delusion of the American people that man was born to happiness. It seems that the Constitution guarantees the right to the pursuit of happiness; and surely a religion which is good for anything ought to capture the happiness. Luther's emphasis that we could be devoted to God, not only in a monastery, but in our daily work, has led us to stress the virtues most useful for success, until we have allowed economics to be the chief end of our civilization, while religion has been considered the means to make the economics work. Now that the world wars have exploded the idea that this world was arranged for our happiness, the disillusionment has caused doubt like that of the man who said, "I have a toothache, therefore there is no God." This shock should remind us of the Biblical view that "man was born to trouble as the sparks fly upward." This is not a gloomy conclusion, but a realistic starting point. For just when happiness is disturbed by trouble, we make the supreme discovery that man was born not just for trouble, nor for happiness, but for a great devotion which contents the heart whatever our condition may be. I t was Biblical religion which furnished the inC

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sight that there is acting in human history an unpredictable factor, and our final loyalty is to that even before we know just what to believe about it. We are always preparing the way for the coming of a surprise which appears after we have chosen for better or worse. Men like Washington and Lincoln took unhappiness in their stride and showed no moral defeatism because they found their life in devotion to this unpredictable factor as a Tightness stronger than all wrongness, and transcending the might of any class or nation. Despite our passion for happiness our real inspirations have come, not from the easy-going lives, but from those who suffered to be faithful, glad that the outcome was not all in human hands. Life is such a bundle of contradictions, of sin and recovery, good made out of evil, that religious people have always enjoyed not knowing just what to believe about a redeeming power that makes unexpected beginnings out of bad endings. After knowing whom to believe they have found comfort in not defining the divine activity which must forever be beyond anything we can ask or think. We grow through eternal difference about what to believe. Around each intellectual corner there can be no finality, but only differing schools of thought. And if we stand in intellectual pride and say, "No God allowed unless he and his ways can be reduced to the measure of my small mind" - that is human finiteness gone berserk. Finally a profound truth of our religion may be learned from the major shock of our generation as we face the bitter truth about people. Much talk has gone the rounds about the way young people refuse to be I

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taken in any more by moral window dressing. The bombs of the last war smashed all the front windows and the stark fact appears that we are far short of what we ought to be - not even as good as we thought we were - and we see no chance that we can be what we know we should be. A student was recently telling me that men of his age were brought up in the depressing backwash of the last war. Their youth was fed on diatribes against the folly of war and now they hear the arguments for it beginning all over again. "We are calloused," he said. "We will do our bit if we have to, but we will not be taken in by the purity of anybody's motives." Sentimentalists, especially those who have security, object to this. But this realism is just a sound return to the old Biblical teaching about original sin. We know that the oldest legend in the Bible about Adam and Eve is not a scientific story; but that original man blaming his wife for what he did, and she blaming a snake in the grass for telling her that forbidden fruit was not so bad after all, is just a picture of the fall of man at any time in history. Certainly this is the stock-in-trade of Freudian psychology at its best. Our conscious reason stands over subterranean depths in our nature where emotional drives, as old as man, are like dynamos of sheer power. They have no conscience, no guiding purpose, no way to manage their conflicts. By prudent argument we try to restrain and harmonize them, but, alas, they inveigle reason to be the devil's advocate until our spirit abandons its high calling and falls into the place of servant to the flesh. Only some honest self-awareness which C

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brings this hidden stuff into the light of consciousness can open the way for deliverance. Confession is good for the soul, and perhaps a trusted physician who comes not to judge but to save is a modern revelation of the healing grace of God that says: "Forgive them for they know not what they do." Strip this psychology of the nonsense uttered in its name and we realize that it has created in us the modern counterpart of an old religious attitude which refused to be taken in by human nature. This frame of mind may degenerate into a futile neutrality that makes no distinction, or into the cynicism of a famous sceptic who said that all men are boobs and their leaders are boobs and there is nothing to be done about it but to sit on the sidelines and be amused by the show. But a thorough-going sense of sin and finiteness in its healthy state is the secret of human effectiveness. A scientist who is humbly aware of his finiteness is the true discoverer. Wagner at thirty years of age, with his whole lifework plotted in his mind, was kept in fear and trembling by a confession which he wrote to a friend: "As a musician I am no great shakes." Saint Thomas Aquinas said: "Pride, by which we are turned from God, is the first and origin of all sins," and Dante pictured a ledge of purgatory where the proud were humbled by walking up and down a pavement on which were inscribed pictures of all great souls whom pride had brought low. The men who are going to be tough enough to see through the problems ahead of us will not be taken in by the pretended purity of human motives, knowing that C

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the ultimate best which we can get on this earth is a repentant sinner. The most dangerous people in this world are those who think they are good, who believe they are all right and should have their own way, and whose hatred arms itself against any opposition. Says Thackeray in Vanity Fair: "Are not these the great qualities with which dullness takes the lead in the world?" Without proper self-awareness we live on unexamined premises that are dated for change, and we must look as silly to God as the New England woman who found lobsters in San Francisco and was surprised that they could be so fresh after travelling three thousand miles. After all, this sense of human insufficiency, which is the condition of growth, is the mark of our unbreakable relation with the t r u t h and righteousness of God. Thomas Mann has reminded us that the democratic faith in the dignity of man rests on the capacity of our nature to transcend itself in devotion to the eternal idea - call it what you will, justice, truth, love, sublimity, God. By this final loyalty we may become independent and unafraid of men, with an open life ever ready for new light to break forth. So the Nazis hate our religion because their new order is unsafe as long as this religious root bears fruit in the independent personality with a healthy sense of sin. The dictators want the conscienceless man, terrorized into despair of all justice and truth and love of a state whose trust is in force. The shock of this revolution against religion, which destroys the essential dignity of man, is beginning to convert Christians to Christianity. M r . Middleton

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Murry of England writes out of the darkness of Europe: "There is one religion to my knowledge which requires its believers that they should face the truth and not despair. Absolute despair and absolute confidence these are revealed in the cross of Christ. He is the fountain of the world's incessant renovation. Thither, to be renewed, we must ourselves return."

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