Marquette University - Hilltop Yearbook (Milwaukee, WI)

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Muc h like a gyroscope, our university life should constantly revolve on a sound core to maintain balance. To achieve this, all potentialities of each individual student must be activated in their proper proportions. If one outweighs the others, it may topple the gyroscope. The student who places so much value on his social life that his intellectual life suffers has misplaced the gyroscope on the seal, tipping it perilously to one side. It can be rescued to its proper position only if we learn to be more than one-sided, to take advantage of the whole University—its teaching, organizations, and activities—so that we will become wholly educated persons. And it is the wholly educated man who is able to give each phase of his university life its proper weight. Last fall this concept of the wholly educated person was presented us at the President’s Convocation. We were challenged “to foster individual development within a framework of rational and moral values. If we arc to take up the challenge we must discover the deeper meanings of this message. Individual development is the primary accomplishment which will prove the success of our University education. In a university we find a mass of students who share a common bond of class schedules, social activities, and spiritual life. Despite these common characteristics, each student is an individual, morally responsible for the development of his own spiritual, intellectual. and social personality. '+ Last year, the University announced a new theme. Marquette University: A Commitment to Intellectual and Moral Excellence.” On this occasion. Father Adrian J. Kochanski, S.J.. Dean of Liberal Arts, stated that Marquette is reaffirming her vital concern for the development of the whole human person by demanding a higher quality of effort and achievement in all disciplines working to this end.” Under this new theme, students have completed another year of college education; for some, their last year. If they have accepted and met the challenge to full development, they have attained the balanced life, signified in the MU seal base of the gyroscope

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After 38 years of inspiration and guidance to students of the College of Engineering, Dean William D. Bliss retired from his active position. However, his retirement did not deprive the school of his services entirely, for in 1957 he was honored with the title of Dean Emeritus. Since then he has become the acting director of the Mechanical Engineering department. 0 With an informal manner and a cigar in hand. Dean Bliss made his students comfortable while he urged them to persevere and work, much as he himself has done during his lifetime. His own career illustrates his struggle to achieve an education. As a youth he Wisconsin, graduating as a chemical engineer in 1912. 0 In 1914 Dean Bliss came to Marquette and the Engineering School when school officials were looking for a temporary teacher to fill a gap left by a resignation. Dean Bliss, then working for Allis-Chalmers. volunteered his services. The Dean once reminisced about his early teaching days, saying “I taught thermodynamics, heat engines . . . everything. 0 Dean Bliss extended his temporary job and in 1919 initiated the co-opcrativc training program at Marquette, whereby engineering students were required to alternate two weeks working in local plants with two weeks in school. This plan was later made optional. In 1928. Marquette lost Dean Bliss for two years to Texas A M College. Then he returned as head of the Chemical Engineering department. $ When Dean Franz A. Kartak died in 1943. he was asked to take the dcanship. It seemed to be the best contribution I could make to the war effort, so I agreed to serve throughout the duration. he recalled, adding that when the vets came in. I couldn't have been dragged out of the place. $ The now completely willing Dean headed the Engineering College until his resignation in 1956 and led a steady, deliberate advance in engineering education along the soundest practical lines. He was continually searching for new ways to improve the school, and the students found him an easy man to approach with their problems. He had experienced them himself. 0 Even though the Dean has retired from duties of routine administration, observers remark that he seems to be around even more. And since he has time for closer contact with the students, the Dean himself believes he has “a higher job now. 0 To this symbol of perseverance, counsel and advancement, to a man who has taken upon himself a commitment to moral and intellectual excellence. to Dean Emeritus William D. Bliss of the College of Engineering, we respectfully dedicate the I960 Hilltop. quit high school for financial reasons to work in an oil field and later worked as a journeyman machinist before entering college. Faced with insufficient academic preparation—no high school diploma — and lacking funds, he persevered through Milton College and the University of