Drew University Inauguration - Robert Fisher Oxnam October 12, 1961

Remarks by William Pearson Tolley

is I look about me on the platform, I have the feeling that what we have here is a flash back to an earlier day. We see first Ohio Wesleyan University where

Herbert Welch was President from 1905 to 1916. Our second view is DePauw University where Garfield Bromley Oxnam was President from 1928 to 1936. Our third returns us to Madison, New Jersey, where under the Presidency of Ezra Squier Tipple,

Leonard and Arthur Baldwin made their magnificent gift which changed the name of the institution from Drew Theological Seminary to Drew University and launched that adventure in excellence, Brothers College.

Drew admitted its first students on November 6, 1867. On the following day, November 7, 1867, Bishop Welch celebrated his fifth birthday. His presence here suggests that if time does not stand still, it does seem to deal more gently with some than with others. How appropriate it is that he should be here to link the past with the future and to refresh our memory of the solid foundations on which we build.,

It is, of course, a special delight to have Bishop and Mrs. Oxnam here.

I know how happy a day it is for them, because I share in very substantial measure the same emotions. This is a memorable day for me. It is a day in which I feel both young and old. I was a very young man when I had the privilege of being President

Tipples alumni secretary and general assistant. I was still young, perhaps too young, when he spoke at my inauguration as President of Allegheny College in 1931.

He was all that any father could be, and that relationship continued as long as he lived. My debt to him and my affection for him will continue as long as I live. New, as I stand in a similar relationship to President Oxnam, and sense the continuity of hope and faith and shared affection, I am suddenly forced to conclude that perhaps time has made a deeper mark than I had realized. In any case, the baton in this educational relay has now been passed to a runner in whom we have complete confidence. And, I am sure President and Mrs. Oxnam feel that there is an especial appropriateness in those majestic words of the twelfth chapter of St. Pauls Epistle to -2- of witnesses, ...let us run with patience the race that is set before us."

Since I have mentioned Mrs. Robert Fisher Oxnam, perhaps I should pause long enough to say that my confidence in her is quite as great as it is in her husband. And while this in a sense is his day, it is also hers. In the case of a college president, it is especially important that they not be unequally yoked. It is cause for gratitude and a kind of extra dividend when the President has a wife like Mrs. Oxnam. She is as bright and as competent as she is gracious and lovely.

Because Robert Fisher Oxnam comes to Drew with broad and rich experience, he does not stand in need of counsel. Moreover, I am quite conscious of the fact that this is his day, not mine, and that while it is appropriate for me to be here, it really matters little what I say. It is important, however, that I say it quickly, or at least with reasonable dispatch!

"The final synthesis of learning," said Woodrow Wilson, "is in philosophy."

But he added, "We are not put into the world to sit still and know; we are put in this world to act." This applies with equal force to both administration and faculty in a university. Thought without action is futile. Action without thought is fatal.

On the occasion of the inauguration of a new president of a university, our focus of attention is upon an office that is not characterized by thoughtful inac- tivity. University presidents cannot sit still and know. That it is an exhausting role is witnessed to by the frequent resignations of men who should normally be at the zenith of their powers.

Perhaps many are concerned not with their doubts about a university presidents activity, but about their knowledge. Any words of defense here would be self-serving. Nevertheless, let me say that every successful university president I have known, or have known about, has had well wrought philosophical convictions about the nature of man, the responsible society, the function of ideas in history, and a high optimism about human destiny suffusing the whole. Universities live by hope.

While a university president should be both a man of action and of thought, we have a tendency to confuse action with activity and we seriously overestimate the importance of activity. The number of luncheons, teas, cocktail parties, dinners, -3- receptions, alumni meetings, and public addresses has nothing to do with either action or thought. These activities are fatiguing, they are perhaps a necessary cross for presidents and their wives to bear. We should understand, however, that they are purely ceremonial, extras over and above the real work of the president.

It is not the endless activity that is important. It is the action and the thought.

If we attach too much value to activity, we also attach too much importance to fund raising. Admittedly, one of the critical problems of a privately endowed university is financial support. Because a president must be concerned with all critical problems of the university, fund raising has a claim on his time. It is however, not his chief task. That the public, the alumni and even the trustees often measure success in the presidency only by the yardstick of dollars raised, does not alter the fact that the first requisite of a university president is wisdom. And it is the kind of hardheaded and practical wisdom that embraces both the knowledge necessary to decision and the quiet courage to act on the knowledge.

There may be a time when the promoter, the operator, the fund raiser, is essential to the survival of a college. There may even be a time for great public figures, though this more difficult to justify. In general, however, what is needed is educational leadership. In the long run, nothing can take its place.

What do we want the university to be? This is the first question. We must take care how we answer it, for we are very likely to get what we want. While many may share in the decisions, the president cannot escape final responsibility. And certainly in the determination of educational policy, his is the controlling force.

The judgment as to what is big and what is little, what is important and what is not, what should be done today and what must be postponed to another time, the setting of priorities, the direction of change and growth, the fixing of goals, these are some of the questions with which he must wrestle. Until they are answered, fund raising and promotion--except on a limited scale--are ahead of their interference. And far more frequently than on the gridiron, they run toward the wrong goal.

In the business of educational leadership, the president soon becomes familiar with three problems. The first is that of ends and means. The second is -4-

the conflict between the long and the short view. The third is the pressure of the

narrow as distinguished from the complete view.

As a people we are not noted for our interest in metaphysics. We are

more interested in means than ends, more interested in today than tomorrow, more

interested in the advance of technology than in the spirit of science, more interes-

ted in the tangibles than the intangibles. And, unfortunately, there is much in

American education that reflects this value system.

Because this is so, the role of the university president is of the highest importance. His is the choice of ends, which in retrospect is always the critical choice. In a university the problem is not so much the choice between good and evil, but between good and good. The demands are endless. The opportunity for expansion is unlimited. Thus in the presidents office, if nowhere else, ends have a priority over means, the long view is the first consideration regardless of the temptation of the short view, the complete view corrects the view which reflects the interests of but one group.

It is a lonely business. It requires both knowledge and insight, both thought and action. As Robert Frost says:

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference."

If I could begin again, I would choose more often the less travelled road.

However, we dont have to pass on this advice to President Oxnam. He understands well what I have been saying. So in the time we have left, lets think together about Drew University. The historical pattern of development here has not been typical of American universities. It began as a theological school in 1867, added a liberal arts college in 1928, and more recently a graduate school. The more common procedure of the late nineteenth century was to super-impose upon an American college the ideal of a German university, and then to adapt that ideal to the utilitarian and democratic patterns of our society. The result has produced a medley of excellence and triviality that still appalls our colleagues from across the seas. -5-

There is much to commend in Drews unusual pattern of historic growth and development. The fact that it is a less travelled road is cause for rejoicing.

As it now moves to full stature as a university, beyond aspiration and into reality, it does so with a unique capacity for playing a significant role in American higher education.

The need for more and better graduate education in America is undeniable.

John J. Gardner of the Carnegie Corporation has pointed out that in this decade we shall need 486,000 new college teachers to meet the expansion of higher education and to replace those lost by retirement and resignation. To achieve this figure and maintain the present proportion of college teachers possessing the Ph.D. degree, we out should be producing more than 20,000 Ph.D.s each year. We are not yet turning out 10,000 per year. The outlook for staffing American colleges in the years ahead is at best grim. There is a clear and urgent need for graduate education.

Drews opportunity is distinctive. Despite the growth of enrollments in state institutions, it appears likely that for at least the next decade no less than

40% of the youngsters in college will be in church-related colleges. The quality and flavor of their education will be determined by the kind of graduate education their professors received. There is only a handful of universities still standing within the Protestant tradition, committed to the preparation of scholar-teachers motivated by an ideal of Christian service, consciously concerned for the spiritual dimension of human existence in a context of religious freedom. Ours is a noble heritage of scholarship, scientific inquiry, intellectual freedom, and religious liberty. A Protestant Christian university need apologize to no one for its democracy, its quality, or its service to the nation and to God.

Possessing as it does an historic impulse from the theological school, Drew

University ought to be able to keep its vision clear amid the fog banks of secularism.

With a high and holy purposefulness, Drew University should avoid the shoal waters -6-

This is by no means a plea for traditionalism. Alfred North Whitehead

once said, "The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection

between knowledge and the zest of life by uniting the young and old in the imagina-

tive consideration of learning." Standing on the threshold of service as a univers-

ity, Drew has a genuine opportunity to exercise imagination in its approach to

graduate level studies.

It also has the opportunity to accent the importance of a close knit community of scholars. A university is not merely a body of studies, but a mode of association. The friendships, the contagions, the discussions and debates, the shared life of teacher and student count quite as heavily in graduate education as they do in the college. The graduate school must be concerned with what man is as well as what he knows. It must be a fellowship, a true community.

In The New Yorker magazine, E. B. White succinctly expressed a vision of education in these words: "A campus is unique. It is above and beyond government.

It is on the highest plane of life. Those who live there know the smell of good air, and they always take pains to spell truth with a small "t". This is its secret strength and its contribution to the web of freedom; this is why the reading room of the college library is the very temple of democracy."

Here the imaginative and free association of scholars contributes to social responsibility. It is responsibility of the highest order, responsibility for mature thoughtfulness and vision. The most distinctively human capacity, that which sets us off from all animals, is the power of reflective thoughts. In society it is the task of the University to idealize and dramatically set before the citizenry this high human quality which creates civilization.

The distinguished attorney, the late Joseph N. Welch, once pointed out, "

The citizen who ceases to be thoughtful is no longer a good citizen. A civilization which is no longer a thoughtful civilization will slowly die. Its death may not even come slowly. It may end in a few giant thunderclaps of atomic explosions." He continued, "The one piece of magic remaining in the world which may--which indeed must prove stronger than the hydrogen bomb--is the power of the idea which will give -7-

the world peace. For peace will not come through machines or explosives--it will

come from the minds and hearts of thoughtful and informed men and women of our time."

A university in the Protestant Christian tradition should be concerned as a university with the imaginative consideration of learning; the development of a mode of association that will express the unity of truth it presupposes; and, with the cultivation of a spirit of learning. As a Protestant institution it has a heritage of freedom to exalt and maintain. Finally, as a Christian institution it recognizes that concern for the development of the mind cannot be separated from a concern for integrity, a sense of private and public responsibility, the development of the good society.

In a recent poll of student religious beliefs it was reported that 95% believed in God, but only 26% believed God was relevant to daily life. Our Methodist heritage, experimental and highly empirical, ought to bring that relevance to the foreground in University life. As Jacob Bronowski pointed out in The Nation while writing on the scientific method, "The cleavage today is not between materialism and high-mindedness; on the contrary, it is between the truth seeking spirit and lip- service to conventional absolutes."

In Maxwell Andersons play, Barefoot in Athens, the prosecutor suggests that education may destroy a free society. To this Socrates replies: "The evidence will not destroy a free city....Far from destroying it, the truth will make and keep it free. A despotism dies of the truth, a democracy lives by it! And now I thank you for making me angry, for I realize something which had never been clear to me before. Athens has always seemed to me a sort of mad miracle of a city, flash- ing out in all directions, a great city for no discoverable reason. But now I see that Athens is driven and made miraculous by the same urge that has sent me searching your streets: It is the Athenian search for truth, the Athenian hunger for facts, the endless curiosity of the Athenian mind, that has made Athens unlike any other city. This is a city drenched with light--the light of frank and restless inquiry-- and this light has flooded every corner of our lives: our courts, our theaters, our athletic games, our markets--even the open architecture of the temples of our Gods! -8-

This has been our genius--a genius for light.... Shut out the light and close our minds and we shall be like a million cities of the past that came up out of mud, and worshipped darkness a little while, and went back, forgotten, into darkness!

A Protestant university is not afraid of truth. This is what it lives by.

Its genius, like that of Athens, is a genius for light.