"Quotes" from the Alumni

In his inaugural address at Cornell University on October 8, President Edmund E. Day '05 said that "when men in power conclude that ideas should come from authority and not from thought, men of reason must battle."

"Reference has already been made to the current eclipse of the liberal tradition. Force is in the field, armed, aggressive and arrogant. War in some quarters has become so natural a phase of governmental action that it no longer has to be declared. The outlook for peace-loving peoples is in certain respects most ominous. The life of the university is inevitably affected by this world situation."

Another force, Dr. Day continued, was the love of money "which has dominated our social psychology to such an extent as to make the intellectual life appear to many pale and academic." Closely affiliated with the love of money, he said, but by no means identical with it, was the insistence on vocational results in American education.

"Practical men commonly want quick results. As a people we are afflicted at times with attacks of unwarranted impatience. Even our leaders sometimes succumb. All through our political and economic life are evidences of the virus of immediacy. We forget that the course of civilization has been one long struggle to recognize the greater wisdom and efficiency of doing things in round-about ways that are ultimately time-saving, but initially time-consuming. Our universities, like our social institutions, suffer at times from too great outside insistence upon quick practical results."