MacMurray College - Tartan / Illiwoco Yearbook (Jacksonville, IL)

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faculty ana

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President Michalson at home with his wife, Louise, and their son, Mike. When a nation rises up and decides that the educational needs other citizens deserve a first draft on her resources, it is a high point in her history. Our decade is witnessing this grasp upon the vital realities of a nation ' s self-consciousness. American citizens are be- coming more aware that the greatest wealth of our land lies in the talents of our citizens than at any time in our national life. For the first time, we shall soon witness the opportunity for every young man and every young woman of college age and of college ability to achieve a college education. What this will mean to the product of human Imagination and aspiration is as yet only a national dream. But it is doubtless a fact that if the I960 ' s have been unparalleled in the technological advances of man, the I970 ' s will witness an Intellectual and technical advance which will leave even the recent past far in the distance. Two directions are assumed In this educational expansion to which our day ' s opportunities are being addressed. The first direction Is that of disposing the national resources to the education of every possible citizen. The second direction Is a search for talent — a mission of peculiar proportions which endeavors to find that highly selected group of young men and young women, whose natural endowments and whose cultural exposures lend promise of the highest possible achievement. It can be expected that the public Institutions of our land will be geared to the education of the great numbers of college age youth. It devolves, therefore, upon the responsibilities of the private colleges to seek out that segment of the talented and the highly motivated outh who have already demonstrated that they have the ability and the ambition to pursue a maximum effort In order that they may contribute to a maximum service to their community. MacMurray has elected this second course as her appropriate task. She has endeavored to steer a more accurate course In the choice of her students. She has chosen to serve the educational needs of the decade at hand and the one to come by recruiting for her student body a group of students whose potential and whose performance reflect high seriousness of purpose and high possibility of reaching the more distant goals, both of academic performance and of civic fulfillment. Convinced that this group of students Is not the exclusive product of any social or geographical context, MacMurray has sought a mixture of many backgrounds — but increasingly with the intention of previous promise of achievement. This, to be sure. Is not the only valid contribution to be made to the educational needs of our day. But It is a special contribution and it Is a responsible one. Set, then, within the further qualification of believing that a mind matured In thought and at home In the experiences of man ' s many ages must have opportunity for commitment to the highest aspirations of the human venture, MacMurray has insisted that her search for able students and her efforts to accelerate them to maximum performance should be undertaken within the context of a peculiar devotion to the faith and the principle of the Judaeo-Christian pilgrimage. Both her search and her cultivation are, in them- selves, a witness to this devotion. Whatever successes may attend this mission of search and seasoning, they are the product of the hopes of those who people her classrooms as teachers and as students. And in no little measure, they are themselves acts of faith, yet to be realized in the substance and texture of a society in which they live and which they aspire to serve. Faithfully,