University of California Berkeley - Blue and Gold Yearbook (Berkeley, CA)

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TKe Beginning of tKe Greater University

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Blue and Gold 19O4 [10 THeodore Roosevelt The latter-day type of the American university man is shaping itself on the modern demand for trained men who can take a hand in affairs, who can do things. The drift of the times is away from amateurism toward expert service, and away from the theories of the doctrinaire toward the capacity for correct and effective action. Educational development tends in the direction of learning by doing. The methods of the laboratory and the seminary are eating their way into the curriculum of the university. Life has come to have a real use for university men and is formulating some real demands. It wants men trained in real work. It wants engineers who can install and build, gardeners who can plant and bud, lawyers who can write briefs and try cases, historians who can help make history, literary men who can write, students of political science who can themselves draft legislation or run a caucus quite as well as find fault with the way someone else does it. The world has a right to expect that a university man should have ideals and shape his action on them, and it does expect it. It is a poor education that does not lift a man out of the moulds of the conventional and the sordid and show him somewhat of the pattern set in the mount. A man who has been trained in straight seeing and straight thinking ought surely to frame his own decisions and seek to influence those of others on the basis of direct and open reasons, and refuse to ply or to obey the false plea or the hidden motive. He is under bonds to the intellectual righteousness in which he was reared, that his argument should be candid and his judgment straightforward and open to the sunlight. A man who has toiled with those who seek the truth and helped at its unveiling and seen how firm a rock it is and how feeble a mist of dreams is the lie that hides it, he cannot fail of the bold- ness which is the true man ' s courage, the courage of him whose strength is allied with the ultimate will. The type of the modern university man, the man who in public service practices intelligence, enacts reason, works out ideals and does righteousness, who in all his doings plows straight, hits hard, plays fair, seeks the truth, speaks the truth, and is not afraid, that type is well set forth in the person of Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States. BENJ. IDE WHEELER.