University of the South - Cap and Gown Yearbook (Sewanee, TN)

Page 10 text:

I remember reading four years ago an amusing article in the Chattanooga Times abou t the admission of women to this masculine stronghold. Though the article was amusing I was distressed to see Sewanee described as long the bastion of the Southern Gentleman. Notice the change — a phrase that those men of our past who adopted Christian gentleman would have deplored as inadequate, narrow, and contrary to the hopes and aims they had for this University — as if we no longer talked about the Christian gentleman. And many of us now deplore this replacement as we see the phrase Southern gentleman restricted to the backward looking, foot- dragging sentimental romantic whose grandfather had the foresight to plant a magnolia tree in the yard. This yearning for a South that never was — certainly never was at Sewanee — is not what our founders did. It is not what we are here to do. It is because of this belief in the rightness of putting Chris- tian and gentleman together that they saw a university as a uniquely appropriate Christian endeavor. They saw that the liberal arts have a similar aim. A better name would be the liberating arts. The liberating arts take a man out of his region, out of his own age, beyond his prejudices and assumptions. Through them he is at home with Aristotle, James I, Kierkegaard, and Roosevelt.