University of Pittsburgh - Owl Yearbook (Pittsburgh, PA)

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In the chasms between dark immense buildings, Pittsburgh life is teeming, bustling, crowding, shoving. The quick tempo of its life is shot with screeches, whistles, shrieks, impacts. At first, Pittsburgh noise and activity swirls around your consciousness, quickening the nerves, opening the eyes. Gulp back your enthusiasm; reorient your nerves; squint at Pittsburgh as an artist squints at a landscape. Here is the real Pittsburgh with its long lines of people, heads bowed, emotionless, ploddingly tramping together the same steps they tramped yesterday, the same steps they will tramp tomorrow. The reason for tramping? They know it not; they tramp because they have always tramped, because their fathers tramped, because everyone tramps. Underfoot there is a continual monotonous thump and shuffle. Here and there, a man, smiling and gesticulating in protest against an enervating spirit, darts forward around a group of people, his shoes scraping briskly like sharp skates. His is a protest born of despair. With a thump and shuffle the whole of Pittsburgh tramps, without reason or hope, from habit alone. What of it? Did we not last year produce an infinite number of tons of pig iron?

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Bernard Shaw, in his play Heartbreak House, described the insane, irresponsible self-satisfaction of war-time English society. England, he implied, was fast breaking to pieces. Through his character Captain Shotover he declared that knowledge of navigation is essential to the avoidance of shipwreck of English institutions. The institutions of the United States, likewise, must be steered away from the rocks and must be headed towards God's open sea. The administrators, the trustees, the faculty, the members of the Alumni Council are in large part the navigators of the University of Pittsburgh. The glory is theirs if rocks are avoided; the responsibility is inevitably theirs if shoals are struck. Their responsibility is not to their own ship alone, since they must utilize their knowledge to make effective the teaching of navigation to others. This knowledge extends to many spheres. It embraces decisions on campus policy, on scholarship, on methods of instruction, on construction of buildings; it reaches out into the arena in which the struggles of ideas and of men are decided. Today, the navigators in the United States are perhaps not so irresponsible as the navigators of the English war-time society. They recognize the need for careful navigation; they are in doubt only as to the proper theory of charting and the proper application of the rules. And so, upon the navigators of a university a double duty falls. The responsibility is great; likewise the necessity. For upon the correct charting of the training-ship, the charting of other ships depends.