Colby Alumnus Vol. 52, No. 3: Spring 1963

Colby College Digital Commons @ Colby Colby Alumnus Colby College Archives 1963 Colby Alumnus Vol. 52, No. 3: Spring 1963 Colby College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/alumnus Part of the Higher Education Commons Recommended Citation Colby College, "Colby Alumnus Vol. 52, No. 3: Spring 1963" (1963). Colby Alumnus. 216. https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/alumnus/216 This Other is brought to you for free and open access by the Colby College Archives at Digital Commons @ Colby. It has been accepted for inclusion in Colby Alumnus by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Colby. - 00 . Colby Alumnus srR1Nc 1963 rl!llll Ma;ne � Literary I and ¥ Theological I Infiitution I . �1m11m11as011a� REMARK BY PRE IDE! T TRIDER IN CLOSI c THE CHARTER ESQ ICE 'TEN 'JAL OB ERVA 'CE ON FEBR RY 13. History is not merely a linear continuum Of events. It is a succession of happenings inex tricably interwoven with others in time past and time future, a dynamic process in which eons come and go, and in which individuals and institutions from time to time emerge in such a way as to affect for the bet ter history's course, some in heroic fashion, others in modest but enduring ways. Such men were the great names in Colby's past, and such an institution is Through its first century and a half this college Colby. has not only endured but prospered. It has main tained through these years sound ideals and objec ti es. It has earned the friendship of its community and its state, has enjoyed rewarding relationships with other fine institutions of education, near and far, and now, in its one-hundred-fiftieth year, can be said to have achieved a stature that commands national re spect. An excitmg future lies before us. We have but to build upon the structure bequeathed to us by our predecessors in order to glimpse vistas they could not have dreamed of. To our successors in the year 2013 we send our greetings, and it gives us satisfaction to think that what we now accomplish will magnify the range of the perspective they will enjoy in that now distant day. As we see Colby move into the second half of its second century we ask the continuing bless ing of the Almighty upon our college and all its com munity, and upon the nation and the civilization that we serve. FROi\l THE LA\ S OF IASSACHU ETIS, CHAPTER CXXXI, AN ACT TO ESTABLISH A LITERARY INSTITUTION IN THE DISTRICT OF 1AINE WITHIN THIS COMMONWEALTH, SIGNED BY THE GOVERNOR ON FEBRUARY 27, 1813 Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives, in General Court Assembled, and by authority of the same, that there be erec ted and established in the District of Maine ...a Literary Inst itution for the purpose of educat· ing youth, to be called and known by the name of the Maine Literary and Theological Insti tution .... Be it further enacted that Daniel Merrill, Caleb Blood, Sylvanus Boardman, Thomas Green, Robert Low, Benjamin Tit comb, Thomas Francis, Ransom Norton, Daniel McMaster, Hon. James Campbell, Samuel Stin- · son, John Hovey, David Nelson, Alford Rich· ardson, John Haynes, Samuel Baker, Joseph Bailey, Phineas Pillsbury, Hezekiah Prince, Moses Dennett, and John Neal, together with the President and Treasurer of the sa id institu tion for the time being . be and hereby are elected a body politic and corporate by the name of the President and Trustees of the Maine Literary and Theological Institution ... A Birthday COLBY COLLEGE for 1813 1963 Dean Marriner and President Strider rnt the birthday cahe. The Dean's address, re/Jri11ted below, was given 011 tlir Pxacl annirlersary, Februar)' 2i, of the granting of tile co/leg cliarter in 18/J. Some Pointers 'iV HEi I \V S A SOPHOMORE IN THIS COLLEGE FIFTY· can be sure of i Lhat tomorrow will not be like today. three years ago, I took a course m European that the law of life i change, what can the Liny pro History under Dr. J. William Black, the fashion-plate vincial institution of the horse and buggy age have to "J. Bill" of the Colby faculty. On the first day that say to the nationally recognized, modern college in a the class convened, after he had gone through his rit nuclear time, even though that college, beginning its ual of donning a linen duster, putting wood into the life in the Wilderne s of Maine, has stoutly remained big box stove, adjusting the window shades, removing in that geographic area which the historian Toynbee the duster, and calling the roll, Dr. Black told us what tells us is at best the very edge of civilization? Of we were going to study in that course. Somehow, all cour e I must join with Kenneth Robert in warning through the long years, I have never forgotten his Toynbee not to repeat such a canard about Maine. definition of history, inadequate as it may sound to Nevertheless, as for learning anything from Colby's present-day professional historians; and it is that defi past that may benefit Colby's fuLure, wouldn't it be nition of history that I would use as a springboard better to let the dead past bury its dead? for what I have to say on this occasion that marks the Despite the not unnatural assumption that the 15oth birthday of our college. " History," said Dr. college Limes of 6 A.M. chapel, mush and molasses Black, "is the record of the present, with a view to its breakfast, memoriter recitations, and long winter va development from the past, and should be studied to caLions to permit students to teach in the one-room the end that the lessons of the past may be applied to rural schools are but symbols of a past that may well our present and future good." be forgotten, I boldly submit that Dr. Black's defini What is there in the century and a half record of tion of history may not be empty rhetoric, that indeed this college that has anything to say about its future Colby's past does have pertinent suggestions for Col course? '1Vhen we are so sure that the one thing we by' future. 2 THE COLBY ALUMNUS HE FIR T H Hlr T THAT I FIND, A I POUR OVER T the re ord , the documents, the letters of Colby's pa t, concerns the very reason I ha e given why one · may su pect that past has nothing to teach us; namely, the inevitability of change. But, if Colby's long his tory teac.hes anything at all it tells future trustees and administrators that progres comes only through will ingnes to face change. This college was founded to supply Baptist pul pits in the District of Maine with ministers trained in an institution supported by that denomination. The new school was to have a theological and a literary de partment, and was therefore called the Maine Liter ary and Theological Institution. There was to be no Croakers, in every country, president. Each of the two departments was to be independently responsible directly to the Board of always boding ruin, Trustees. Now note what happened. Within ten years the college had a single administrative head, to whom have never prevailed here. both the professor of theolog and the professor of languages and literature were responsible; the theo logical school had become distinctly subordinate, and within twenty years it had disappeared. What had happened? The climate had changed. The Baptists from Colby's Past had established a strictly theological school at New ton, Massachusetts, and the demand that a minister should have a firm ba(:kground in the liberal arts was already under way. Colby lived and thrived because Ernest C. Marriner those early trustees read correctly the signs of the times College Historian and Dean Emeritus and faced the wisdom of change. Now for another instance. No institution that has enjoyed half a century of continued existence likes to change its name. This institution could have con tinued as Waterville College. In 1867 neither Gard In 1929, just four months before the fatal Black ner Colby nor any member of his family suggested that Friday in the stock market, the trustees faced the the college take a new name to honor the man who blasting report of the commission to study the status was, up to that time, its most generous benefactor. of higher education in Maine; blasting, because that The tmstees voluntarily determined that this man report said that Colby must move or die. That was who had saved the college from closing in the dreary change, indeed, change in the face of the deepest de days at the end of the Civil War richly deserved to pression of modern times. Yet, a third of a century have his name perpetuated in Colby College. later, here we are celebrating the Sesquicentennial, Again, when Mary Low in 1871 braved the scorn not hemmed in between railroad and river, but on and sometimes the wrath of the male population to the spacious acres of Mayflower Hill. become the only woman student among a hundred During the next half century there are sur to men, the authorities of this college recognized the arise crises that demand change, and in every such changing times. To be sure, as late as 1902, a distin crisis will be heard the opposers and pessimists, the guished attorney on the Board of Trustees declared folk who, as Benjamin Franklin put it, are "croakers that women had never been legally admitted, that the in every country, always boding its ruin." It is the charter declared the purpose of the institution to be glory of Colby's history that here the croakers have the education of youth, and that any court in the land never prevailed.

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