University of North Carolina Chapel Hill - Yackety Yack Yearbook (Chapel Hill, NC)

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••• r »? - f% ; mi 9 Bffil 8 5 s! ' i a about the South even when the truth hurts. They are composed of precepts and standards which have made the name of Chapel Hill respected throughout the nation, and which more than once have caused men ' s eyes to turn toward the South in delighted surprise. — David Cohn.

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The University of North Carolina is wide- ly known throughout the economically and politically conservative South, as well as in the allegedly more enlightened North, for its liberalism. The term and the school are as inevitable associated in the Southern Mind as are breakfast grits and bacon. To friendly critics, liberalism connotes a grasp of the changing needs of men in a changing world. ... It came into being simultaneously with the pronouncement of the doctrine of the Rights of Man and the Declaration of Inde- pendence on this side of the Atlantic, and with the French Revolution — created in part by these doctrines — on the other side of the ocean . . . There are tangible achievements which are measurable by experts in the field of edu- cation. The intangible achievements of the University are perhaps greater. They lie in an unremitting and successful struggle for academic freedom in an area where the weight of lethargy, as well as the dynamics of industrial opposition and inherited pre- judices, operates against academic freedom. They consist in teaching students the truth

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DEDICATION Goethe once wrote, A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows on rows of natural objects classified with name and form. ' ' Horace Williams was a great teacher — mainly because he was all teacher. He knew what the teaching act was. He knew what education was. And he taught like a man who knew what he was doing. Never was a man ' s life more completely identified with his work than Horace ' s was with teaching. He identified his life with the University. He helped young men to find themselves, stimulated them to the cultivation and expres- sion of their talents, showed them how to grow up to lives of beauty and success. That he possessed the genius of teaching is the unanimous testimony of all those who came into his classes during the fifty years that he taught. He did not deal with information. I did not ask my students to learn about Plato. I invited them into the Platonic experience. Stand on the mountain and see what Plato saw. Equivocating theories about the real meaning of things had no place in his classroom. He put boys in touch with what was meaningful and vital in their lives. He saw the relation between education and reality. There is no abstract knowledge. There are no abstract birds. Why should there be an abstract man? When a speaker begins with ' assumptions ' and ' abstractions ' I always escape and go with my horse into the woods. I have a noble group of pines that I call my temple. I love the music that comes from the swaying tops. It is not an assump- tion. I am come that ye might have Life. ' If Jesus had said, I am come that ye might make assumptions, deal with abstractions, what a hero he had been. Because he was in every way the teacher; because he so beautifully exemplified the aims and spirit of the University, this yearbook of his last senior class is dedicated to that spirit — in his name.