Family Reunion

Inside the Gothic doorways to Yale's Sterling Memorial Library, the great procession formed, bright with the hoods of scholars and notables from all over the world. As the bells of Harkness Tower pealed Onward,, Christian Soldiers, the column moved slowly across the campus to Woolsey Hall. There, the Rt. Rev. Henry Knox Sherrill, presiding bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church and fellow of the Yale Corporation, called the assembly to prayer. Yale's 250th anniversary celebration had begun.

It was not an occasion for famous outsiders--presidents or prime ministers or politicians. The most important guests who showed up were all in the academic family. Lord Halifax had come in scarlet robe to represent Grandfather Oxford. President James B. Conant was on hand for Father Harvard. And 38 presidents, deans, and professors had come in behalf of the 41 daughter campuses that Yale-men had either founded or first presided over (among them: President Harold W. Dodds of Princeton, James P. Baxter of Williams, Deane W. Malott of Cornell, Detlev Bronk of Johns Hopkins).

Yale's birthday party, said President A. Whitney Griswold, was nothing more or less than a big family reunion . . . "The graduates of the English universities who founded Harvard, and the graduates of Harvard who founded Yale, brought to us a living shoot from the tree of learning whose roots reach down through western culture to ancient Greece . . . The founders' respect for learning speaks for itself: the scholar rubs elbows with the moralist. Both share the natural piety, the simple moral earnestness that for all our shortcomings has pervaded our culture and extended the aims of American higher edu cation beyond the mere cultivation of the intellect to the preparation for life in a free society and the discovery and fulfillment of man's ultimate purpose on the universe. These aims are well represented here today by an honorable company of colleges and universities sharing with us in an honorable tradition."

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