New York University - Violet Yearbook (New York, NY)

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Graduation is not such a serious event, nor is it a final leavetaking. Memories remain, and when they begin to stumble over a name, to fail in recalling sun- light on stone, there are records to strengthen them. Ticket stubs, cards, tran- script copies, old bulletins, dusty textbooks are only numbers and letters. A yearbook, however, embraces these and includes at least a mention of the intangibles. Scenes are pictured, feelings reported, history is bound: four years of an individual, a collective life are laid down. In that process of graduation, which is the closing of one door and the opening of another, a yearbook is a wedge in the door we have left. Along the strait ways and narrow paths which are adult life, it reminds us of when we were a class and young. It is that small space between the two doors, with the diplomas and robes and other souvenirs of a marked-off time pressed among the pages, to which we can return, although already in a fragile new half-century. If this book stands, our class remains.

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chancellor harry woodburn chase TO THE GRADUATES OF 1950: The advent of the year 1950 found its celebrants in something of a quandary as to whether the century rightly passed its midpoint at that time or is not to do so until a year hence. There is no such question, however, that for you, the Class of 1950, the advent of this year-more especially its midpoint in June- is an occasion meriting special celebration in that it marks one of the maior transitions in your lives. 0 As far as your relations with the University are concerned, the transition is, I suppose, primarily that from student to alumnus, and while little I might say here could any longer affect the former, I should like to risk a few admonitory words on the latter. O Never in the history of American higher education has there been greater need, on the part of the privately controlled colleges and universities, for active alumni support. On the financial level, of course, this need appears in dramatic proportions, but I would not limit the meaning of the word to things purely financial. I mean even more the philosophical, if not moral, conviction of the vital necessity of the privately controlled and supported institutions of higher education to our whole cultural fabric. O As graduates of this University, you will be identified not only with this particular institution, but with the whole tradition of private higher educa- tion. lt will not be enough, therefore, for you merely to become members of the Alumni Association, though certainly this should be an initial step. But if you are convinced, as you should be, of the abiding value of the training which is represented in the degree you are soon to attain, then you should in every way possible insure its continued validity through actively supporting the concept of dynamic educational enterprise which has made American higher education what it is today. Cordially yours, ram, wma.. KN'-we Chancellor. The Chancellor at work in his office on the tenth floor of Main Building at Washington Square.