Augustana College - Rockety I Yearbook (Rock Island, IL)

Page 24 text:

w .ngq. Liberal Arts and the Art of War War time is a time of testing. Its fires attack not merely the lives of individuals. but the structure of society and its institutions. Not least, the professions of education are put to the test. We begin to discern how enduring those ideals are that were the toundation of a nation's educational program. What Lincoln said in the midst of the Civil War about that war, whether any nation conceived in liberty could long endure. may well apply to the refining process oi this world conflict Many of our established notions have already dissolved in the heat of the struggle. We talk 01 the emergence of CI new world order. We can be even more certain that another America will come out 01 the holocaust than the America we knew in 1941. World shaking as the war emergency has been. the peace problem will be just as challenging to the men and women of the American democracy. We have been learning c1 new geography day by day as we have followed the course of the battle lronts. Aviation has turned the earth toward us in c direction not before familiar. But we are just beginning. We shall have to learn more than new names and new measurements 01 distances. We shall have to learn about the peoples of these once remote lends, their problems, their relationship to our lives and the lite of mankind. We may well prepare for a period ahead which to my knowledge has only one parallel in history, the open- ing up of the East to the West in the times of the Crusades, the Saracens, and the result- ing Renaissance After the war we shall lind ourselves in the midst 01 world currents in every phase 6t human activityepolitics, economics, even philosophy and religion, art and music. Out of that former conflict of East and Westcame the Renaissance and the universities and a modern culture. Out of this epochal struggle oi the races will come c1 new period of intellectual stimulation The art of war will again give way to the liberal arts. The liberal arts college was under attack even before this world war. Some there are who would debase its degree and shorten the period below the traditional tour years. 1 find it hard, in view of what the four year college has contributed to America or in view of what lies ahead in the pcst-war world, to lollcw those who could abolish the liberal arts college we have known. Rather, it is my conviction and my hope thczt America of the luture will make available to more of its youth the privilege 01 higher education. The curriculum of the liberal arts will be broadened and enriched, but it is uneAmericcxn to decree that at the age of eighteen the tgrmul education of youth should cease and the way from then on be one of professionalism or industry or trade. That way lies the development of a class and caste system which America has hitherto repudiated. In such a democracy as ours not less but more attention must be given to those arts which liberalize private and public lite. Why and how to live must ever be paramount. America can trunstorm herself back to peace and can help in leading other nations to that way only it her own citizens are at home, not only in the art of war, or industry, but in the arts of :1 full life. WtM CONRAD I. I. BERGENDDFF 5.3-, A.M.. Bull; Ph.Du Th.D.. LL.D- President Page 22

Page 25 text: