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

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N9 Put another nickel in . . . physical surroundings had changed. The entire building had received a new coat of paint. Shealy Hall had been converted by a movable partition into two classrooms. The Thalian Theatre had emerged from the wreck of room 609 and the library had had a glass partition installed to separate the call desk from the main reading room. The Registrar's office and the Curved Horn Sanctuary were now fluores- cently lit. Perhaps the most far-reaching physical innovations took place in the elevator shafts and in the lounge. Gone were the openwork continental-style lifts. New steel-enclosed cars paid their re- pects to modernity and the fire regulations. No more were we to enjoy the stirring rush hour races with their hastily organized betting pools. The hurried inter-elevator conversational snatches which we had formerly enjoyed were banished from our lives. The lounge, too, had experienced the ar- rival of the era of machinery. Despite the fulminations of Mr. Grace against our modern gimmick culture, vending machines had come to the School of Ed. Row upon row of bright varicolored gadgets greeted our marvel- ling eyes, solicited our nickels and provided a constant source of reference material for wry comments on the commercialism of the modern age on the part of a few of our compatriots. The lady in the bookstore and her cohorts winced before the massed onrush of those who were unprovided with change and replied in the negative to their earnest pleas. A few of the more astute found a solution to the adamant Miss Kavanagh by purchasing a nickel's worth of blue books with a five dollar bill. 27 You don't get change with three blue books E

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Only God is without change. Nothing else remains static. The essential note of all human activity is either progression or retrogression. ln the course of our lives, we have become aware of certain profound transformations that now and then occur in our personalities. Per- haps, the most subtle and far-reaching of these was experienced during our stay at Fordham. Four years is a remarkably short period when compared with time, itself. lt loses al- most all meaning considered in reference to timeless eternity. Yet four years can have great significance in the lifetime of an individual but only in relation to the change that occurs in that period. lt would be false to assert that every one of us has experienced vast and profoundly signifi- cant spiritual transformations as a result of his four years at Fordham. Some of us have Queen Anne I. I 1 A i 1 undergone few, if any, changes in our person- alities during this time. Some have experienced profound changes, in spite of these four years. Yet most of us have, in varying degrees, be- come aware of great and signifcant personal transformations as a result of our education at Fordham. Vtfe had brought to 302 Broadway, certain basic capacities for thinking, feeling and will- ing. Leaving Fordham, we take with us these same characteristics, but so subtly and radi- cally transformed, sublimated, crystallized and enriched by this culminaton of our Catholic education that we who have undergone the metamorphis are scarcely aware of our original endowment. At no period in our progress through the School of Education was change more manifest than in our sophomore year. As freshmen, we had been merely continuing the educational processes of our youth. lt was in reality a per- iod of transformation, different in some re- spects from secondary education, yet basically the same. By the end of second year we had made our first progress into higher education. Attitudes were changed. New outlooks on study, new concepts and judgments, opinions and values arose for the first time in many of our lives to shatter the formerly cherished illusory system of thought and moral evalua- tion we had clung to as youths. We began to have reason for the Faith that was in us. Sophomore year saw our first formal intro- duction to that great stream of intellectual tradition that, springing from Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, amplified, magnified and Chris- tianized by Augustine, Scotus and Aquinas, has been inherited by the Maritains, Gilsons and Adlers of our day. Through it, we first fully awoke to the existence of the eternal unchange- ables of our world of change. We first began to know that, however obscure, complex and elusive they were, some partial answers were still to be had for the great enigmas that peri- odically arise to confuse and dismay whole generations of mankind. Arising to an aware- ness of the problems and mysteries of man, existence, truth and God, we sought to probe deeper into their depths, to discover, if pos- sible, some rational solution to the ever present chaos of our erring generation through an in- creasing awareness of the order and serenity of essential being. We approached Truth. Nor was change an exclusive property of our inner selves. Returning in September we discovered, to our surprise, that much of our in ze 1'! 'm

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Father McGinley and Cardinal Spellman. lt was during this year that Fr. Robert l. Gannon, the well-beloved president of Fordham was to leave for other duties. Concluding a thirteen year tenure characterized by the pecul- iar brilliance that was his, Fr. Gannon was suc- ceeded in office by Fr. Lawrence J. McGinley, an administrator no less brilliant. Since Jan- uary of l9-48 we have come to love and admire Fr. McGinley as greatly as we did Er. Gannon but for different reasons, for the new president is a different sort of personality than that of his predecessor and the university has profited greatly from his administration. We had acquired a new City Hall Division Direction during the summer. Fr. Daniel J. Burke had replaced Fr. Barnett and we came to respect the new even as we had respected the old. Nor was the field of jurisprudence long neglected in the face of this era of sweeping change. The famous Bottleneck Code promptly issued from the tenth floor office of the newly appointed Fr. Burke. Included in the historic legal enactment was the new Ele- vator Law by which we alighted from the descending elevators at the second floor and proceeded out of the building by way of the Duane Street exit-for the first two weeks after its inception anyway. The Bottleneck Code made other important revisions in our lives at Fordham. No longer did the elevators trail clouds of tobacco smoke on their precip- itous passages through the school. Mr. Berger was frequently to be seen in the lounge ad- monishing the faithful to keep their feet off his furniture, and the students' attire, while never up to full academic standards, soon lost some of the Picasso influence it had acquired over the summer, The legislative activities of the forces of adminstration soon prompted the students solons to follow suit. Aided and abetted by Sophomore representatives, Lou Staiano and Jim Ryan, the Student Council quickly com- pleted the long delayed work of framing a constitution and proceeded on to compile a School of Ed. handbook. Even our feelings toward registraton had undergone a transformation. Veterans of two periods of academic hurly-burly we now were resigned to our fate. We no longer even at- tempted to combat the conflicts, contradictions and disasters that an inexorable destiny had forced upon us in the form of a fiendishly diabolic class and hour schedule. Adopting a completly fatalistic attitude we blithely con- sulted catalogues, chose courses and enmeshed ourselves in the most awesome of schedule conflicts and then brought all our difficulties to the lap of the ever-patient Mr. McAloon. The kindly but hectored registrar smiled and solved them all. With a whole new set of ma- jors and minors we then proceeded on to our new classes, new subjects and new teachers, eagerly anticipating our first few days of class. Nor were we disappointed. Under the pre- cisely logical and always patient tutelage of Dr. Probst, we soon lost our awe of Philosophy and in his Logic classes gleefuly romped through acres and acres of undistributed mid- dles and reductio ad absurdams. Later on in Epistemology we were to graduate from the positions of Skeptic, Agnostic, ldealist and Rationalist to the one true philosophic position. Like the Seventh Cavalry of frontier fame, Dr. Probst always succeeded in finally extricating our overly enthusiastic intellects from the meshes of hasty generalization, rescuing us from the snares of enticingly tempting logical absurdities and building in us a firm foundation for a true knowledge and appreciation of the wonders of Philosophy. ln our literature courses, the penetrating wit and incisive intelligence of Mr, Grace trans- lated the apparently dull columns of type into burning social issues and living thought. Em- barassing us with dramatic pauses for unan- swerable rhetorical questions, he always gave us a profound and searching interpretation of literature in its historical and sociological con- text, showed us the universal aspects of prob- No, l'm sure you can't take 25 credits.