Rice University - Campanile Yearbook (Houston, TX)

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I I TO RICE NINETEEN THIRTY-TWO Most students, I think, hnd the senior year the best of all. In the first decade of the present century, however, a strong movement was set on foot to do away with the senior year altogether in order that preparation for business and professional careers might be entered on a vear earlier. The move- ment failed to prevail. The seniors themselves argued against the proposal. All this happened before there were anv Rice students, but at the time I thought, and I now think, that the course of reasoning was convincing and its conclusions sound. They said it was not until the senior vear that they began to see what it was all about, pull themselves together, and place in something like proper perspec- tive tliemselves and the things alike of useless and useful learning with which they had been more or less concerned. A prettv good case could be made out for the proposition that a university is useful in proportion to Its devotion to useless knowledge. It is somewhat like this. I mean bv useless knowledge the sort that at the moment seems to be devoid at once of direct or remote application to things practical or material, the kind of knowledge that is of use to the thinker with no other object in mind than the gratification of his immediate intellectual curiosity. By a curious paradox, pure thinking is at its best in the single-hearted pursuit of truth alone, and proves to be not onlv the most engaging em- plovment to the thinker, but also the most profitable, both to him as a thinker and through him to that other different tvpe of mind, that later sees and makes the application. Thus in the historv of scientific thought, for example, progress has been led now by theorv and now by practice in turns about indehnitelv. It was so with Newton and the workers in celestial mechanics who followed him. So it wi ' s with the successors of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell, as has again been brought to light in the centenary anniversaries latelv celebrated. Onlv at rare intervals from Archi- medes to Kelvin has an individual mind manifested theoretical insight and practical instinct simiil- taneouslv, and seeminglv with equal power. In this connection there is another odd thing, that appears to traverse but realh- supports what I have just been saving, for scientific men in particular have repeatedly remarked that ideas on a spicific problem come to them when least expected, and at times indeed when they are thinking about some- thing else. This, so far from ignoring the logician ' s injunction to stick to the point, or disavowing the rational processes of thinking, simply says again that the mind works best in freedom. I hope that among your liveliest recollections of this place will be its atmosphere of disinterested research and freedom on the intellectual side, and one of temperateness and cheerfulness on the spiritual side. To me thev are one and the same atmosphere, because even to intellectual progress I see no satisfying outcome without a moral and relisious background and outlook. Like many distinctions, those I have been making between useless and useful knowledge depend upon the point of view. In the unity of learning for which the university stands, thev are interesting rather than important. Thev are no less difficult to make than it is to distinguish between the useful things that chart the seven seas and the useless ones that charm the sailor ' s life. The important thing IS that from this port you will be carrying both in plenty: useful understanding of the universe and your place in it, useful knowledge of human relations and your part in them, useful powers of obser- vation and communication, useful machinery of judgment in fine working order, and so on, together with such useless things from the wider expanse of emotional experience as poets dream on and phi- losophers think on, the useless things of memory and imagination that seem to last longer than the useful ones of reason, even as the sailor ' s song of the ship outlasts rudder and compass, sudden storm and calm after storm, alike.

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Board of Trustees James Addisox Bakkr Chdiriihiii William Marsh Rice, Jr Vice Ch.iiriiuni JoHX Thaddeus Scott Vice ChdUDuni Benjamin B. Rice Secreti rj-Trc, i rer Edgar Odell Lox ' ETT Alexander Cleveland Edward Andrew Peden i Si I i i a

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Edgar Odell Lovett, Ph.D., LL.D. President of the WiLLi. M Marsh Rice Ixstitette