Fordham University School of Education - Grail Yearbook (New York, NY)

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27 ,...a--ff For the past four years or so, the Class of l95l, Fordham University, School of Educa- tion has been busily occupied in garnering that fund of experiences collectively known as a Catholic college education. We have been engaged in a quest for the intangible, for the aggregate effect of this four year trek through the wilds of higher education can never be enumerated in Latin on any number of parchment scrolls. All that we have gained in this period of search has yet to be realized. lndeed, we who have been seeking do not yet know whether we have achieved what we sought, nor shall we know for many years whether our search has been successful. For these four years have been but a preparation for and a por- tion of a larger, far more important quest, in a far more real world than that of term papers, football games and proms. ln any event, this period of preparation will soon be over. ln June we shall have finished our Quest. We shall have been graduated, received degrees certifying to our successful attain- ment of the goals of a four year course in a Catholic institution of higher education. ln a larger sense, we shall have achieved nothing for the success of our careers here at Fordham hinges upon the success of that larger quest which is life and which we shall never know until we die. We are quite an ordinary body of college seniors. We possess the average quotas of genius, mediocrity and invincible ignorance that are to be found in thousands of comparable groups. We have our complement of grinds, big men on campus, social butterflies and dead wood. Few of us will become famous and fewer wealthy in our chosen profession. We share an identical or at least similar stock of experiences with the millions of young people that attend or have attended Catholic colleges and we really aren't very different from them. ln one sense the following sixty pages will-be a rehash of the commonplace. Yet, in another sense it will be unique, for it has been to us that these profoundly challenging, albeit every- day, experiences have occurred and we are the ones who have been transformed by them. This is the only justification we can hope to offer for this chronicle of our four years at Ford- ham. Just as history never repeats itself, just as all human experience occurs to uniquely created personalities, so this history, while treating of matter common to multitudes, never- theless, records a series of episodes, impressions, transformations and associations that have occurred to us alone in these four years of life in preparation for the great quest that is life. Children of a depression and a calamitous world war, we know enough of modern history to entertain few illusions concerning this great quest. However sublime its purpose, life is, on the whole, rather a frustrating experience since in life we do not fully possess God without Whom there is no life. So aside from a strong basic conviction in our purpose in life as Chris- tians and an earnest desire and intention to achieve God as our ultimate end, we won't take ourselves too seriously. This then, is a story of a four year quest for something we have not yet achieved and shall not until we die. These four years have taught us what it is that we are seeking and how we may attain it. Were we to wax flowery, we might liken the following prose to an epic chronicle of a glorious four year crusade by an army of Galahads in search of an elusive and cosmically important golden Grail. But it really wasn't that, and so we won't. We have no banners to unfurl, no clarion calls to sound. We are not marching close order into any neon-lit sunset, spelling fame and fortune for all. We are determined to do our best, and we'll let Divine Providence care for the remainder. y,,,1:af95z

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Back in September of l947, at the start of our college careers, the energetic and very efficient Miss Scanlon, who appeared to be in general charge of a bewildering kaleidoscope of sanity tests, exhortations, questionnaires and confusion that constituted Freshman Week, requested each of us to reveal to the assembled mass of our newly acquired classmates our names, terrestial origins and the reasons why we came to the School of Education. The rea- sons why we registered as students in the School of Education are perhaps as varied as the hundred and sixty-nine personalities that finally made up the entering Freshman class. Some of us, prompted by the aureate vestiges of an adolescent athletic partisanship to seek a closer spiritual kinship with the sweaty tra- ditions of Alex Wojciechowicz and the Seven Blocks of Granite , envisioned college life as a glorious round of football bacchanaliae. Some, influenced by the cinematic caperings of the Rudy Vallees of our youths and the last traces of the goldfish swallowing-hipflask-raccoon coat epoch in American culture, thought of higher education in terms of dances, parties, and that ultimate culmination of middle class social expression, the Senior Prom. Others, the would-be Frank Merriwell fans, born twenty years too late looked upon college as a four- year period of government or pa rent-sponsored rest and recreation complete with ivy-covered walls, white bucks, blazers and fraternities. The more mature members of the Class of 'Sl saw college as a means to an end, connubial bliss, or a fattened pay envelope. And finally, some of us entered Fordham to seek intellec- I I I tual and spiritual enrichment, personal develop- ment and a step forward in the working out of our salvations. The complete lack of athletic facilities at 302 Broadway and a 75-O rout by Pennsylvania soon convinced the few who pictured college as a projection of grubby-fingered applause at the Promethean feats of Jimmy Crowley's stal- warts, that the School of Education was scarcely the place to seek gridiron laurels and that the iron age in Fordham's football history was at hand. Those who envisioned college as a gay round of cinderella balls met with early disil- lusion. Term papers and exams left little time for extensive social flitting, The few who thought of higher education as vacation time