The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 41, No. 2, Ed. 1 Friday, September 25, 1953 Page: 3 of 8
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SEPTEMBER 25, 1858
THB THRESHER
Three
President Houston's Matriculation Address
(Continued from Page 1)
profession or an occupation. Ho must be
able to do hia share, and mora than hi*
share, of carrying on the work of his
community. If he is to be an engineer, be
must be a good engineer. If he is to be
• lawyer, or physician, he must "be on* of
the beet. But, in addition, a useful citizen
must recognise that he livee In a world
with other people. Be must have a sym-
pathetic understanding of them and their
needs. He must guide his actions in such
a way as to benefit not only himself but
his neighbors.
Perhaps better than some of the fac-
ulty, you recognize that there are at
least two aspects of university life. There
is the' academic Bide and there is the side
sometimes called extra-curricular. They are
both important, but the academic side is
the side peculiar to a university. PerhapB
that is the reason why we of the faculty
tend to emphasize it so much. Your social
■ life, your dances, your dates, can go on
outside of a university. Athletics can and
does go in many other surroundings. But
the part that exists only in a college or
university, the part that you come to a
university for, if you have any judgment
about it, is composed of your studies. And
yet these two parts of your life should be
separate and distinct. They should, and 1
am sure they must, influence each other.
But they will be organized a little differ-
ently.
On the academic side, you are expected
to carry out a soihewhat rigidly prescribed
course of study. Everyone of you as a
freshman must study English language
and literature. There may be a few of
you who will question the value of time
spent in that way. There 'may be a few
Dresses
• Millinery
• Sportswear
2519 UNIVERSITY
In The Village
of you who would prefer studying some
technical subject instead. After long ex-
perience in business and professional
fields, most people place a tremendous
importance on an understanding of the
English language, upon the ability to
convey ideas with precision and force, on
the power to use words to create moods
which will influence the action of others.
Precise use of language is one of the
marks of a cultivated man: and it is an
objective whose full attainment is achieved
by far too few.
In addition, pou will all be expected to
study history, to try to understand the
place our civilization occupies in the con-
tinuing stream of man's development. We
certainly face an unknown future. We
must move ahead; but we cannot look
ahead. We can, however, look back, and
possibly avoid making again some of the
mistakes we have made over and over
again in the past.
You are all pretty well prepared by this
time for the other common subject, mathe-
matics.
Mathematics has been a university sub-
ject since the earliest days of the univer-
sity, back beyond the middle ages to the
groups at Athens and Alexandria. Some
10 or 20 years ago it began to fall into
disfavor in many high schools, and stu-
dents came to the end of high school
course without any significant acquaint-
ance with it. During the war, however,
mathematics was found not only to be of
the utmost practical value to officers and
technicians in the army and navy, but
to be the easiest method of distinguishing
between those with 'a capacity for ab-
stract thought and those whose thinking
remained on an elementary plane. Ever
since its founding, the Rice Institute -has
had a distinguished Department of Mathe-
matics ; and it has made a major contri-
bution to the training of those who have
spent their college years here. And so all
of you will study English and history and
ngathematics, and these will provide more
Common ground on which you can stand
together.
But, as I said, your academic work is
only part of the influence under which
you will come in the next years. The
extra-curricular influences are everwhere
around you. The Rice Institute has a
great deal "to offer yOu in many ways;
but you must do your share in finding it
and assimilating it. In the first place, we
have a tradition of culture and scholar-
ship. You will find students and members
of the faculty who have studied in all
parts of the world. From time to time
we shall have visiting lecturers to bring
different points of view on a wide var-
iety of subjects. Whether you listen to
them, or whether you do not, is largely
left up to you. But through them, as
well as through our library, you have
the opportunity for contact with a whole
wide world of scholarship.
The Rice Institute is also especially
proud of its architectural tradition. It
will repay you to study our buildings.
Lovett Hall exemplifies in its rieh detail
the tradition of meticulous and leisurely
craftsmanship of the old world. It will
repay your careful study. The newer
buildings, such as Abercrombie Laboratory
and the Fondren Library, represent em-
phasis of a present day builder on the
beauty and implicity and the adaptation
to the intended use. They also will repay
your careful study.
It is a tradition of long standing among
Rice students to protect and respect our
buildings. Even on the oldest you will
find few disfiguring scratches or marks,
and few signatures of those whose great-
est literary accomplishment is a name
on the wall.
And then again a large part of your
college training will coisist of your ad-
justment to your fellow students. You
must learn from each other, and how to
be considerate of another and of his de-
sires. Particularly those of you living in
the dormitories find yourself crowded into
relatively small space with numerous other
people. Each one feels just as crowded as
you do. You may want to throw your
clothes on the floor for your roommate to
pick up; but he would rather throw his
on the floor for you to pick up. Many of
you may have your first experience in
taking care of yourself and your rooms.
You no longer have your mothers to look
after you to see that your clothes are
washed and your beds are made, and you
will have to see to these matters your-
selves. But such is the penalty of growing
up, and you have the opportunity to de-
velop and 1 practice those qualities, rather
difficult to describe and formulate, but
not too difficult to recognize, which char-
acterize the men and women who are ef-
fective leaders in their communities.
If you do not already know It, you will
find out, and rather soon, that a univer-
sity differs from a high school in many
ways. It is a good deal more than a
teaching institution. It is a center of
scholarship, a place for cultivating inde-
pendent thought. The faculty is not ex-
pected to teach you, but to guide your
individual study. They are not here for
the purpose of repeating to you what
they read in a book. You are expected to
read the books yourselves. They are here
to give you the benefit of their own ex-
perience, carefully considered and judged
by the most rigorous of scholastic stand-
ards.
One of the things you may find diffi-
cult to do is to study sufficiently, in the
face of the opportunities to do many other
things. Some of you were accustomed to
studying in high -school. Others of you
probably found the work so easy that
very little studying was necessary. But I
think it probable that here most of you
will have to do some really honest, earn-
est work, in order to take advantage of
your scholastic opportunities. It is normal-
ly expected that a college student will
spend two hours of study for each hour
of class. No member of the faculty is go-
ing to watch you do this studying, and no
one Will tell you just what to do. You,
yourself, have this responsibility of using
your time to the best advantage. Some
of you may have to spend time in learn-
ing how to study, and in this, perhaps,
your teachers can be of some assistance;
but no technique of studying can take the
the place of honest effort.
You will listen to a good many lectures.
Some of them will be inspiring and stim-
ulating. Some will be informative, others
may seem to you to be deadly dull; but
I hope you will never be deluded by the
idea that your mere physical presence in
even the best lecture guarantees any in-
tellectual development. It is only what you
do yourself with your own brain that
really counts.
The effective academic life is not an
easy one in spite of the belief of many
who are unacquainted with it. The normal
expectation is that you will put in a work
week of something like fifty to sixty hours.
This is no easy schedule, and those of you
who find your minds working a little
more slowly may need to put in even
more time.
But you have been selected because of
your already demonstrated intellectual
ability. With sincere effort you should
be able to do what is expected of you
and do it well.
A university is no place for propaganda.
You will not be told what to think, al-
though .it may be suggested what you
might think about.
Of course, in these days when many
people are loudly proclaiming their par-
ticular kind of salvation for the world's
troubles, you will find plenty to tell you
what to think. They tell you with en-
thusiasm and conviction. But this is not
the way of the university, even though
some, university people fall into the error.
A university is really a product of our
Western ideals of freedom and democ-
racy. It has grown as these ideals have
grown over the past thousand years. If
these ideals fail, our universities will fall
with them.
May I read you a paragraph by Henry
Steel, Commander of Columbia University:
"It is easier to make out the case
against communism and fascism than to
make out the case for liberal democracy.
For, notwithstanding a good deal of rhetor-
ic, the case for the kind of system that
the United States and Britain have evolved
is reasonable rather than emotional, rest
upon experience rather than upon logic or
principles. And it takes a good deal of
maturity to appreciate the advantages of
reasonableness over those of enthusiasm,
to prefer the lessons of history to thoee
of abstract logic."
Many of you find yourselves disturbed
by the opportunities for independent
thought. You will find yourselves faced by
ideas that are new and concept foreign
to your ways of thinking. In particular,
many college student^ find themselves
confused by religious problems, because
they learn new things that seem to con-
flict with their earlier home teachings.
For each individual this is a new experi-
ence, but it is well known to almost
everyone who has gone to college. It calls
for real thinking ami consideration. I
would only suggest that you do not con-
clude too quickly that your home environ-
ment is out of date.
There is nothing more precious than tho
family backgrounds from which most of
you come ,and if at first some things you
learn seem to contradict your home train-
ing, at least you can suspend judgment
for a while. Posible matters will look
different in six months. When we are
eighteen our fathers often seem incred-
ibly stupid and outdated. By the time wo
are twenty-five our fathers often seem to
have suddenly acquired a reasonable
amount of wisdom.
You are on your own to a large ex-
tent. You will have to decide how to use
your own time; whether to study in the
library or play bridge in the student
lounge; whether to prepare your class
work or go to a movie. You must make
your decisions in detail; but you must
also expect to be responsible for the re-
sults. You must look after your own aca-
demic course, to find out whether you are
meeting the requirements of the faculty
for a degree, whether you are taking a
course to which you are best suited. The
faculty is here to advise and help you,
but not to dictate.
The Rice Institute expects of each of you
a standard of conduct; of honor, and of
scholarship that is well known to most of
you. It counts on you to shoulder the re-
sponsibility and the burden of maintaining
these standards. It depends on you to
conduct yourselves on the campus and
elsewhere with a suitable dignity and re-
spect for the rights of others. It expects
you to conform to the highest standard
of honesty and integrity in all things.
You have already been told about the
Rice Honor System, and you will hear
more about it from time to time. It is
one of the most valued of our traditions
(Continued on Page 8)
HOW THE STARS
GOT STARTED « « «
smoking
Camels
yourself!
*
* '
... V *
iSTAKTBD SMOKING CAMELS
BECAUSE A FRfENO OF MINE
ASKED ME 70 TRY THEM. NO OTHER
CIGARETTE EVER GAVE ME SUCH
Pl$AW*e. CAMELS TASTE SO GOOD
AND THEY'RE SO MHO !
- S
0
m
Patrice Munsel says: "When I
was a kid, I wanted to be a
lady football player. Then I
dreamed of another career —
whistling! Somebody discovered
I had a voice, so I took singing
„ lessons. I worked hard at it
— then I won the Metropolitan
Opera auditions when I was 17."
Smoke only Camels
for 30 days and find
out why Camels are
America's most popular
cigarette. See how mild
and flavorful a
cigarette can be!
EIS AGREE WITH MORE PEOPLE
"THAN ANY OTHER. CI^AP-ETTE I
e
O
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The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 41, No. 2, Ed. 1 Friday, September 25, 1953, newspaper, September 25, 1953; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth230945/m1/3/: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Rice University Woodson Research Center.