Monday, Sep. 29, 1941
Looking Backward
Red Russia was not invited. Nazi Germany, though invited, sent regrets. But delegates from 560 of the world's colleges, universities and learned societies, outnumbering by some 50 the turnout at Harvard's 1936 Tercentenary, turned up last week to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Jesuit Fordham University, second largest Roman Catholic university in the U.S.
Pope Pius XII sent Apostolic Delegate Amleto Giovanni Cicognani. President Roosevelt sent Vice President Henry Agard Wallace. Heading the gowned procession that marched across Edwards Parade and up the broad stone steps of Gothic Keating Hall was Professor Albert Feuillerat of the University of Paris (founded early 12th Century). Five Catholic bishops in traditional purple robes brought up the rear. Amid the faint rumble of trolley cars that reached the 70-acre campus, Fordham's President Robert Ignatius Gannon faced his distinguished assemblage and exclaimed happily: "John Hughes [Fordham's founder, later New York's first Catholic archbishop] would have cried: 'This is Europe! . . . Our vision is looking back, not forward. This is the Paris of the 13th Century!'"
Bouncing among his guests, helping them to tea, conferring honorary degrees (in Latin) on Catholic Lieut. General Hugh A. Drum, Baptist Nelson A. Rockefeller, Jewish Governor Lehman and twelve other bigwigs, small, genial President Gannon had a wonderful time. He showed his guests an up-to-date university: Fordham has a big-time football team, a world-famed seismograph (earthquake-recording) station, a Nobel Prize winner (Physicist Victor F. Hess), a downtown branch in the Woolworth Building, schools of law, business, social service, pharmacy. Of Fordham's 8,200 students, only 1,400 are in its liberal arts college.
But Father Gannon looks back with longing to the days when scholars were concerned only with art and philosophy. Said he at the final centenary ceremony:
"Education, especially higher education . . . must be not only progressive but conservative. Sometimes we read in Sunday supplements that we are sinking back again into the Middle Ages. Shades of Canterbury and Chartres! For years past we have been sinking forward into a thoroughly modern chaos. . . ."
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