University of Minnesota - Gopher Yearbook (Minneapolis, MN)

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To the Students: THIS Gopher will be for you the record of your student days. How strange and unusual have those days been! It is simply impossible for us now to sense in any adequate way the meaning of these disturbed times. Only the years can bring that perspective which will enable us to interpret them and to understand their message. You began your University career just after America had entered tlie great war. Your freshman year was glorified by the o])portunity it gave to American youth to serve their nation in a great crisis. our sophomore year brought the strangest experience American university men have ever known. Our University practically became a military camp. None of us will ever forget the days of the Students ' Army Training Corps. Your junior year has been permeated with the spirit of social unrest and industrial upheaval which has characterized our country as a whole. Weird, mysterious forces are at work in the world. Vague uncertainties and subtle possibilities of every nature and description threaten our intellectual soundness. Apparently the tendency to emphasize class distinctions and to appeal to group motives is fastening itself upon us. We are prone to hurl epithets at one another, to indulge in superficial thinking, to accept half-truths, and to trust unduly to fine phrases and dead formulae. It is difficult to distinguish the conservative from the radical. Frequently we discover that our ultra-radicals are our real reac- tionaries and that our sober conservatives are strangely progressive and liberal. We speak much of an era of reconstruction or a period of readjustment. Every- thing seems in a state of flux. Nothing stays put. Few men or women are where you expect to find them. The only certain abiding and permanent factor is change. Such days lay serious and solemn responsibilities upon University men and women. You must insist upon the use of reason. You must demand that our country ' s destinies shall be determined not by class prejudice or party politics but by straightforward, firm opposition to every form of social, political or industrial injustice, by an insistent, unconquerable demand for timely legisla- tion, and by a supreme regard for the ballot-box and the rule of the majority. Not by the appeal to the direct method of force, destruction and unreason, but by a calm, sane, reasonable grappling with the facts of our social order will we achieve social justice and industrial democracv. You cannot escape positions of leadership. Because of your training the people will trust you and have increasing confidence in your University. I beg of you never to permit your personal interest or comfort to limit the service which your country needs from each of you. In a very earnest way, I hope that life will bring to each of you its abiding satisfactions and its richest opportunities. Joys and sorrows await each one of you, but in the midst of them all, I hope you may have strength always to be real men and true women. Very sincerely yours, M. L. BURTON. Page 27

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M. L. Burton Iv- Page 26

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The Hon. The Hon. The Hon. The Hon. The Hon. The Hon. The Hon. The Hon. The Hon. The Hon. The Hon. The Hon. BOARD OF REGENTS Fred B. Snyder Minneapolis The President of the Board Marion LeRoy Burton Minneapolis The President of the University J. A. A. BuRNQUiST St. Paul The Governor oj the State J. M. McConnell St. Paul The Superintendent of Education Pierce Butler St. Paul W. J. Mayo Rochester Milton M. Williams Little Falls John G. Williams Duluth George H. Partridge Minneapolis A. E. Rice Willmar Charles L. Sommers St. Paul C. W. Glotfelter Waterville W. ' . Page 2S