Repository: UIHistories Project: Dedication - New Chemistry Building [PAGE 12]

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importance and with the value of the study of chemistry, and inspire them with the ambition to do their part in making this study effective and helpful to their day and generation. In other words, that the members of this staff shall feel it incumbent upon them not to lop off their students as rapidly as possible, not to pride themselves on the number of students they drive away from the study of chemistry, or cut off from the possibility of studying it; but on the contrary, to pride themselves on the number of students whom they have taught to love chemistry, whom they have fired with an ambition to know more and ever more of the secrets locked up in this great field, and enlighten their minds to such an extent that they will appreciate in an ever larger way what chemistry has done and is doing and may do for the welfare of the human race. Every member of'the staff of this chemical department, it seems to me, ought to feel that it is his business first of all to be a teacher, a good teacher, a thoroughly efficient teacher, an inspiring teacher and guide and counsellor in this field of chemistry to the young people who may elect, or who may be forced into .this important branch of study. In the second place, it is certainly a great and fundamental function of the staff of such a great laboratory as this to be enlisted with a truly religious fervor in making their contributions to an ever-wider knowledge of chemistry; fired with the ambition to add each year some little increment or other to our knowledge in this field, to our control over nature, which comes from a knowledge, a thorough-going knowledge of this field. Every member of this staff should feel that it is incumbent upon him to be an investigator, a research worker, and if he ever feels t h a t he neither has the brains nor the ambition to do something in that line, he ought to resign his position on the staff and select some other career, for certainly no man who isn't fully imbued with his fundamental responsibility in this respect has any business being a trustee of this enormous agency for the benefit of the public. If he is not doing this, he is a false trustee, he is betraying the interests of the people who have vested this power in him. A third very important matter, which every member of this staff, and the staff as a whole, ought to keep in mind is that you should let your light shine.

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