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

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; i all Roberts, i i Hermann Hce.

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and to consult and co-operate with the similar committee of the Academic Council of the Faculties. This committee is still in existence as one of the most important in student self-government. It investigates all such matters as may tend to disturb the peace of, or otherwise injure the interests of, the student body. In these various ways and along this path, the Executive Committee of the A. S. U. C. has come to be a continuous and responsible body, always progressing and retaining the confidence not only of the student members of the University public, but also of the members of the boards of instruction and administration. Its powers are exercised only by the consent of the governed and its meetings and actions are open to the inspection and criticism of its enlightened constituency. All departures from the established constitutional provision must be submitted to popular vote. We may trace in this way, and even more in detail did spa ce allow, the ' subordination of individual and group interest to class interests and the final rise of the idea of University interest. We may proceed further in tracing the gradual extension of the idea of student control from one activity to another as the realizing sense has come through practical experience that all different lines of action in which a student may be engaged must necessarily be considered and reckoned with, if the general welfare is to be safe-guarded. From general and indefinite supervision, attention was first directed to financial matters, then to social affairs and representation, and finally to the matter of the dual control of conduct both general and special. In these later days it is especially this narrower aspect of the general problem which is spoken of as Student Self-Government. In this more limited sense, student self-government has been the result of several factors. Beginning with the serious consideration instituted by President Wheeler in connection with the administration of discipline, encouraged by the attitude taken by the Committee on Student Affairs in mutual discussion of conditions and reasons for eliminating certain annoying and injurious actions, certain officers of the A. S. U. C. were led to investigate and search for a solution satisfactory alike to both students and Faculties. They introduced the discussion into the honor societies and other associations and clubs and at Senior meetings, until Senior Control became a reality. The control at first was slight, but as it became evident that its results were good, it was extended. Rushing was abolished and buried under the Big C on Charter Hill. Rallies were confined to the campus. Petty, but annoying, disorders were suppressed and eliminated, and finally even cheating in class- rooms and examinations has been placed under the ban. All this has been done without destroying, but rather with the result of increasing that Uni- versity spirit which is satisfying and productive of definite and salutary results. May the seed sown and the tree that is already of good size and nourishing continue to grow and to extend its protecting branches over us.

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Jacob Voorsanger Dr. Yoorsanger was born in Amsterdam, Holland, in 1852. His theo- logical education was supplemented by only a single year of university study, but it included at least enough of the humanities to give to the natural intensity of his nature a balancing breadth of sympathy. During his first year in America various charges in Eastern cities enabled him to make himself a master of English with tongue and pen, to adjust himself to the difficulties of his new life, and to estimate the opportunities it offered him. Eight years of active ministry, private study, editorial work and close contact with sturdy Western life in Houston, Texas, rounded out the formative period of his ambitious career; and when in 1886 he came to his last pulpit, in San Francisco, he was not long in assuming a place of leadership on the Pacific Coast. Devoted though he was, heart and soul, to his own people, he still knew how to be and to feel all things with all men. In pulpit, press and private life he sought to identify himself and his congre- gation with the joys and the sorrows, with the physical, the ethical, and political welfare of the whole community. His protest against the threatened sinking of ideals in the inrushing flood of materialism was raised as fearlessly when he addressed Catholic or Protestant audiences as when he thundered from his own Jewish pulpit ; the secular press shared his influence with his own Emanu-El, and if he demanded aid for his own persecuted brethren in Russia, he was no less eager to offer it to all alike when industrial troubles filled the city ' s streets w r ith the hungry, or earthquake and fire filled them with the homeless. Idealist, but withal practical ; religious, but without fanaticism ; patriotic, but without Chauvinism; earnest, but without narrowness; man of the world, but without weakness; scholar, but without pedantry, Jacob Voorsanger was himself the type, almost in perfection, of that for which he believed a uni- versity ought and the University of California desires to stand. And so when, in addition to his many other burdens, in 1894 he undertook the task of founding a Semitic Department at Berkeley, it was with no mere desire to be of assistance to a few divinity students in their study of the Old Testament language, however worthy even such a purpose alone might be ; but he planned and from that date spent a certain number of hours each week in the realization of- his plans, to add to courses and lectures on Hebrew and the Bible, others that would set forth the part played in the universal harmony of things by the life, the languages, the literatures, the philosophies, the religions, the political ancl industrial history of the entire great group of Semitic peoples. From the midst of visions, plans and fulfillments such as these though the time allotted for man ' s life journey had long not passed Jacob Voorsanger was suddenly taken on April 27, 19C8. 24