ch
individual is an object of national concern; that we must be mobilized
and we must continue our lessons in team play. We have still plenty to
learn in this field. Third, that we must have and must recognize the
leadership of those who know, which, after all, is the great test of a
democracy. Fourth, that to bring out the best that is in us, as
individuals and as a nation, we must have an aim, high, clear-cut and
clearly understood. If, now, I attempt to apply these four lessons which
we have had a chance to learn, to educational conditions, and
particularly to university conditions, it will be for three reasons: The
first is the general wisdom of confining one's remarks to things he
knows something about. The second, that there is no single institution
more characteristic of the best in our American life than a great
American University. And there is this third reason, that if we had not
had a supply of young men with the stamp of the American college upon
them, we could never have met the call for officers, for nearly a
quarter of a million of them. I am told that the Germans were prepared
to admit and to discount our wealth in money, in materials and in man
power, but they looked forward confidently to a complete failure on our
part in training officers to lead our men in battle. Of course, all the
citizen officers who made good records were not college men, but the
college trained citizens were the men who set the pace and made the
standard.

It was Pitt who said, "The atrocious crime of being a young man I shall
attempt neither to palliate nor to deny." Nor should a university seek
to palliate or to deny the charge of being a place of resort for youth.
A university, it seems to me, should be a place where the primary object
is not the repression of youthful exuberance nor the correction of
youthful failings (though both may be necessary on occasion), but
rather, a place for the encouragement of the great and vital qualities
of youth--enthusiasm, energy, power of acquisition, sensitiveness of
impression. It is the place where the older members of the community
have the best chance to stay young. The university should be essentially
a company of enthusiasts, of pioneers. There is a frontier for every
worker to clear--no matter how narrow or how wide his horizon may be. In
a university there is no proper place, among faculty or students, for
the disillusioned, the cynical, the defeatist.

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