Elon University - Phi Psi Cli Yearbook (Elon, NC)

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Colleges and Leadersliip The class of ' 26 has done its Ahiia Mater a signal service in producing the twelfth volume of the Phipsicli. I wish to voice to them the grateful appreciation of faculty and students and Alumni for their labors. Our appreciation would be deeper, did we realize fully the extent of these labors. And this thought leads me to say that our modern colleges need to devise some method or generate some spirit by which the work necessary to carry on the college activities should be more generally distributed and also more generally appreciated. The activities of a college are the agencies of leadership training. They are the intellectual and social, not to say also the spiritual, gymnasium of college life. The class-room instruction and the laboratories of research are the seminary of ideas, but the college activities are the opportunities for testing manhood and womanhood in terms of leadership. It is therefore obligatory on colleges to provide that the responsi- bilities necessitated by the conduct of these agencies should be very generally distrib- uted throughout the student body. Unless a college does this, it will fail in many cases to give its Alumni that training in leadership which it is their right to expect from the college experience. There is equal reason for saying that colleges should generate a spirit of interest and responsibility for the campus activities on the part of all students. The price of democracy in eternal viligance on the part of its citizens. Students are citizens of the college community and should exercise a genuine interest in every enterprise of their community ' s life, an interest so genuine that it will lead each student to feel personally responsible for the success of these enterprises. Our liberties shall become but scraps of paper unless each citizen by his lively interest in the government his suffrage helps to create makes that government truly responsive to the people ' s will. Colleges .should generate a spirit of personal responsibility for the general welfare on the part of their students. This spirit carried over into active life will insure the perpetuity of our democratic state. Theodore Roosevelt felt keenly the need for such universal interest in and feeling of personal responsibility for our government. Only in such a situation he repeatedly said, to borrow Wilson ' s phrase, is democracy safe? He coineo a fine phrase himself, the strenuous life. But what did he conceive the strenuous life to be? The life of the man who gives himself honestly and consecratedly to his work, whatever it be, and provides in his leisure hours for an intelligent interest in the conduct of his government. Politics should be every man ' s avocation, he insisted, and not merely the profession of a few. Such intelligent general interest in the public welfare would end bossism and render political corruption and graft impossible. Is there not a responsibility laid on those college students who are born leaders to see to it that their less endowed fellow-students should be strategically forced into positions of responsibility and leadership training? I think that is. And the finest thing about this situation is that those who are able to pass responsibility on to others and so train them for leadership are getting at the same time for themselves a splendid skill in a higher form of leadership, leadership of the executive type. It may require more work on a leader ' s part to get ten others to work than to do the work himself, but the executive who sets others to work, blesses them and even more blesses himself. It is good for us, therefore, in college, too, to practice the principle of being brother ' s keeper. Wisdom lies in the direction of the practical out-working of human brotherhood. Page eight

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Dedication XI N loving memory of all the parents of all lands, who have visioned high- ' er, richer, fuller lives for their children, and of our own dear fathers and mothers, whose faith in us has never wavered, whose cour- age has been our stay and whose loving interest and self-sacrifice has been our inspiration, we lovingly dedicate this, the twelfth volume of the Phipsicli.

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|f.%w- l .. r T -r r .T. rT. p « -« R£i?2 . ■«-. ' ■, m%m ' ' Book One THE COLLEGE Book Two THE CLASSES Book Three ATHLETICS Book Four ORGANIZATIONS Book Tive MISCELLANEOUS Pnyr nine