Oberlin College - Hi-O-Hi Yearbook (Oberlin, OH)

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present students, you will discover that the spirit of youth does not greatly change, and that the same ideals and aspirations are to be found in the student body now as in days of yoreg and therefore, I believe, you will conclude that in spite of new faces and new build- ings, the Oberlin that was is in essence the sanie as the Oberlin that is, and you will have confidence t-o look forward with joyous expec- tation to the Uberlin that is to be. llfhether or not the old and the new thus seem to you to blend, I hope that the work which you find here will seem to you worth doing, and the leadership wise and progressive. To an extent not paralleled anywhere else, Qberlin draws its students from a world constituency. And it is able to do this because its Alumni and former students are so loyal. In this loyalty, based not on mere sentiment, but in a genuine confidence in the College, the Faculty and the President, is our strength and our hope for the future. i 2. - ut yta a .v 2 48 4,, V , . .. i. ,. V . Qin the Qlumni iiaume uf resihent Earrnms

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Ulu the Qlumni Qgariab 5. Bust l l l I U E E 3 W 5 .ik I - -, F EEK 4,-begat, K 4. Q - ref:-c,q, : . - V J, ,-Q ig?---Q---------- ''F N F F grads- FFHF XCFMFCXXRN - K . q7L?dwazn'mmwW' I , -.Q 1: . . , ,- ex K-.' ' ' .11 A ' 'x . .- -' ,,' S Chairman of the General Committee on Arrangements for the coming Reunion, I am asked by the editor of the Annual to say a few words to the Alumni and former students. You come back to an Oberlin which islboth new and old. New, in the sense of new equipment, new buildings, new Faculty, new students. Prob- ably even those of you who have been out but a few years will be' sur- prised to see what changes those few years have brought about in the Faculty, and how many are the teachers with whom you have no personal acquaintance. You will find, too, the buildings increased- a new chapel and a new library building, while the old. library building is to be remodeled for zoological purposes, and so be- come, to all intents and purposes, a new building. And if you take the trouble to go through the buildings, you will be im- pressed with the extent of new equipment. To give but a single example: if you go into the basement of Peters Hall, you will find two or three large rooms given up to the physical laboratory, where formerly there were great coal bins, and if you go into the upper stories, you will find there ample facilities for the Dsychological laboratory, which was housed so long in a little room up under the roof. But while all these things will suggest a new Oberlin to you, there will be much also to suggest the old Qberlin. The Campus, with its stately elms, the older veterans in the Faculty, together with a goodly number of the younger men who in your days were College or society mates: these will be reminders to you of the Qberlin which was. And if you get into the Society Love- Feasts, or hear the casual comments of the younger Alumni, or of ' 12

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HE young men who have this publication in hand X N ' M have asked meito speak a word or two for Oberlin from the standpoint of an outsider. I don't know whether I can very easily put myself ff 1 into that attitude. I ,am reminded of an exper- I M ience at the old Exeter- I-Iall, in the Strand, on washington Qlahhen the occasion of my first visit to London. It was the Wor1d's Mis- sionary Convention, and delegates were there from all the world,- Parthians and Medes and Elamitesu and so forth,-and they were trying to: take care of us in the room of the entertainment committee, when one of the young men of that committee plumply asked me the question, Are you a foreigner ? I thought he ought to know bet- ter, and I said, rather hotly, No g I am an American. I confess' I didn't want anybody who used the English language to call me a foreigner. I have a little of the same kind of feeling when anybody rep- resenting Oberlin wishes me to appear anywhere on her premises as an outsider. I don't know whether I can very well masquerade under that role. I haven't been accustomed to take that line when I have been in Oberlin 5 I have never felt like a proselyte of the gate, and they have never kept me cooling my heels in the Court of the Gentiles. How an Ohio Congregationalist is going to hang about Oberlin in the character of an 'outsider I don't quite understand. For it belongs to us, and we to it, and if we should attempt to deny it our speech would bewray us. And if anybody undertakes to palm off what I have to say here as the testimony of a wholly unbiased and disinterested witness, it will be a case of false pretensesg for I am not at all unbiased, and I a1n very much interested. Of course it is true that I am not a graduate of Oberlin, and that I have never had any official connection with the University. But I am not to blame for that, at least for not being an alumnus, for I think that in the far-off antiquity of 1855, when I was pre- Pafing f0F College, I had never heard of Oberlin. And I suppose I o c u . . .. Q , t it is this misfortune of mine which is alluded to when I am re- ues - . q ted to regard myself as an outsider. There are quite a number l-L