Repository: UIHistories Project: War Publications - WWI Compilation 1923 - Article 17 [PAGE 2]

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T h e College Man and th C War

By EDMUND JANES JAMES

President of the University

EMBERS of the Class of 1918: I take keen pleasure in welcoming tou into the great fellowship of college men and women. It is a fraternity which you may well be proud to join. It is broadly extended not only through our land, but through all lands. The bond holding us together is a very subtle—not easilv explainable—but nevertheless a very real and compelling bond. In all the years to come, no matter where you may be. under whatever circumstances you may live, if you run across a fellow alumnus of your Alma Mater on sea or land, in valley or on mountain, in desert or jungle, though you may never have known or even seen him or been in college with him. though you may he half as old or twice as old, yet when vou know that vou and he were at the University of Illinois,—I will not say together, for his class may have been 1870 and yours 1918, his subject mav have been Greek and yours Mathematics^—yet in spite of it all, you will both experience a strange warmmg of the heart as you grasp each others hands, and the fountains of emotion will flow again—no matter how old you are—as you talk and think of old Illinois. This feeling of college fraternity is not limited to the students of one institution. iNext to our own, perhaps, we stirred to emotion by meeting' fellow students from other colleges with whom we have contended in oration or debate or on the football field or the river. Rut it is not *ven limited to this. When an Illinois m an meets a Michigan man or a Harvard m an or a California man, be it in the trenches on the blood-stained fields of northern France or in the hilly stretches of Macedonia or the desert wastes of Mesopotamia, think you not that his pulse ill beat more quickly and his heart he strangely stirred because he has run across a fellow fraternity man? It doesn't even •top here. When you shall meet, in the years to come, men who have studied at Oxford or or Rome or Tokio, you will feci this same strange companionship in the freemasonry of college men and women. It is one of the things best worth while as a result of four years of college life and work. What is the secret of this bond? It is difficult to ascertain and analyze. But I take it we shall find the chief reason in the essential oneness of all college work and effort. We were of much the same age when in college. We were all trying to find ourselves in this universe of mystery. We walked along the same high paths, and peered out into the mysterious depths in front, behind, on either side, to see what it all meant. We were trying to prepare ourselves to run a worthy race, to do our share in the work of the world, to become a real part in that infinite process of life in which we find ourselves. We were raising the same questions, finding the same answers, Ieaving unsettled the same mysteries. We were reading and studying together the records of the thoughts and feelings of the great ones of earth, of our own country and of other countries, of our own age and other ages. And so we became fellow citizens, intellectual and moral and spiritual, in the same great republic of letters and thought and aspiration—a citizenship which we far more often felt than talked about in our personal intercourse. This fellowship, my young friends, you will feel more and more to be one of the most valuable results of college life and college graduation. And if some fool asks you sneeringly of what use your college education has been to you—you need not think of anything else; you need not stop to estimate how much higher or lower your salary or greater or less your wealth or reputation because of the opportunities which college and university have brought you. In this beautiful and sat( ; .