rch of Engineers is
the march of men whom God has trained; in a special sense His
master-workmen, craftsmen whom He loves. It is theirs to say, We are the
Kings of Works: the Master-builders of the Most High!

5. There are Kings of Academic Thought, men who lead in professions and
in collegiate careers. The wise man is the true aristocrat. His court
may not be in a palace, but within its precincts are received and
entertained the leaders of the race. To be provost, to be college
president or university professor, is to be seated on an
intellectual throne.

The problem of academic rule is not to attract a large number of
students, to put up imposing buildings, to have endowments, and fill
chairs with learned specialists; to grant many degrees, and to keep the
hum of a teaching staff and of a student body alive in the ears of a
community, marking the college group by flags and colors, cap and gown,
processions and occasions. These things are right, but are mainly
accessory. We have not all of a university when we have men and
buildings, money, students, brains. Back of a university there lies its
foundation-idea, that of academic control.

What is academic rule? It is rule over the pride of man. A college is a
place whose chief power is to inculcate humility by the means of true
learning; to establish intellectual honor and integrity by searching out
the ways of God in nature, science, and philosophy, and in letters
and in art.

It is the primary work of a university to make men humble. The Freshman
is not teachable. The Sophomore is an intellectual upstart. But by the
time a man has been beaten and conquered by the great ideals of the
world, which have pierced his bones and humbled his conceit--by the time
the race-passions and the race-sorrows have crept across his spirit, by
the time that he has been confronted with the achievements of Homer,
Empedocles, Hippocrates, Michelangelo, Socrates, Buddha, Plato, Emerson,
Gladstone, Bismarck, Lincoln, and Carlyle--his self-exaltation drops
from him like a garment. He--who knows how to construe a few pages of
the classics, who knows how to demonstrate a few mathematical problems,
scan a few verses, recite a few odes, carry on a few scientific
experiments, undertake a small research--how shall he compete with these
rulers of the thought of men?

Then it is that the real rule of a university--its spirit of humility,
and of reverence for antiquity--begins. The true universit