Education: Openers

By this week most U. S. colleges & universities had disposed of preliminary card-signing, fee-paying and handshaking, were settling down to work. In New York a new State law required each & every assistant, lecturer, associate, instructor, assistant professor, associate professor, professor or plain teacher in Columbia, Cornell, Syracuse, Colgate, Hamilton and every other university, college, normal school, high school, elementary school and kindergarten in the State to subscribe to the following oath: ”I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support the Constitution of the United States of America and the Constitution of the State of New York, and that I will faithfully discharge, according to the best of my ability, the duties of the position of— .”

Other openings made news when the following college presidents made the following remarks to their student bodies:

¶ Colgate’s George Barton Cutten: Will it be rugged individualism or ragged collectivism? . . . We’ve taken better care of the idiot than we have of the genius. We have coddled the moron and starved the intelligent. Those with the divine spark we have neglected, while we’ve lavished money and training upon the pinheads. . . . Social legislation begs the unfit to become more unfit and cordially invites the fit to stop the struggle and vegetate.

¶ California’s Robert Gordon Sproul: I am no flag-waving jingo but I have grown infinitely weary of the deprecation of America and American institutions. Listen and learn about Communism, Socialism and every other “ism” so that you may balance the different systems one against the other, but don’t be misled.

¶ Harvard’s James Bryant Conant: There is a great danger that at times of crisis like the present we shall disappear under a welter of words used in a perfectly meaningless manner: psychology, integration, relativity, complexes, vitamins, service—you have all heard them. Certainly they appeal to the ignorant, but the really educated should be proof against them.

¶ Columbia’s Nicholas Murray Butler: In respect to manners and personal conduct, present-day habits . . . are quite shocking. One wonders why it is that youth can come to full adolescent years with no apparent appreciation of the difference between good manners and their opposite. Manners are manifested through speech, through dress, through personal bearing and through respect for the personality and the opinions of others.

¶ Dartmouth’s Ernest Martin Hopkins: I have had much concern . . . that emphasis has been so largely placed upon what the colleges should do for their men and so little emphasis has been placed upon what these men should do for themselves.

¶ Oklahoma’s William Bennett Bizzell: The trouble with our present-day society is that too much is expected of our colleges and universities.

¶ Princeton’s Harold Willis Dodds: You will be asked to learn and to remember many facts. And it is important that you do so. … A cavalier attitude toward facts carried into later life dooms you to a second-rate career.