Monday, Jan. 19, 1925
Platitudes
Representatives from 300 U. S. colleges assembled at Chicago for the eleventh annual convention of the Association of American Colleges. Among this learned congress were professors of every known species, from hale and hearty, square-shouldered, square-jawed educators to wizened, bespectacled pedants.
Said one:
"We must find a new appeal.
"Economics should encourage economy. "Ethics should result in more honorable and unselfish conduct.
"Political science should teach a better social control in colleges as well as in cities.
"Philosophy and sociology should find some application of their teachings to the individual life and the improvement of social groups.
"There ought to be some way of trying theory and practice.
"If the colleges and universities do not provide leaders for world tasks, where else are they to be found?
"If we do not uphold an orderly society, who may be expected to do so?"
Said another:
"When the period of reaction is over we shall realize the responsibility of providing education for all the children of the United States."
And another:
"If the welfare of the Nation is to be determined by opportunity of education, then the Nation has its obligations.
"Does not the welfare of all of us mean that finally we shall come along to the time that, as we accepted taxation locally and in the State to support schools, we shall accept it in the Federal Government to support schools?"
Evidently the atmosphere of the convention had laid heavily upon Dr. F. P. Keppel,* President of the Carnegie Corporation. Perhaps he felt that in such density there was no chance for the proverbial spark that might set the world afire. He therefore rose and told the assembled 299 in words plain, blunt, humorous : "Imagine a group of librarians or college professors or Presidents here spontaneously bursting into song or dancing, or both. Yet that is just what we need to break through our self-consciousness and our patterns of convention. This is fundamentally what the arts are for in our lives. It's as true today and here in this land of freedom as it was when Plato taught it in Greece."
* Dr. Keppel served from 1910 to 1918 as Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Columbia University. He resigned to become Third Assistant Secretary of War under Newton D. Baker. In 1919 and 1920, he was Director of the foreign operations of the American Red Cross.