Article August 8, 1936 Issue

Signs of the Times

Topic: The Practice of Unselfishness

with contributions from Fletcher Agnew, Ernest H. Jeffs, L. B. Moseley, A Correspondent, J. Herman Olsson

[From the Herald, Alhambra, California]

When Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler told the freshman class of Columbia College that selfishness never walked with education, he undoubtedly meant that it had no companionship with true culture. For if education implies merely worldly knowledge, then, of course, history is rather full of men who had it but whose careers were more Machiavellian than altruistic. In characteristic straight-from-the-shoulder language, Dr. Butler declared: "Who thinks only of himself is hopelessly uneducated. He is not educated, no matter how instructed he may be." Conversely it may be said that the unselfish cannot be uncultured. Unrecorded in "the short and simple annals of the poor," innocent of all scholastic advantage, are the unobtrusive deeds of unnumbered obscure, useful men and women, the sweet fragrance of whose lives made happier their little worlds. Surely of such it must be written that they possessed the truest culture.

The charge is made, and with good reason, that religion is scorned in the schools, that atheism rides high in many American colleges. Materialistic faculties would do well to ponder Dr. Butler's charge to his freshmen that selfishness and self-centeredness are the greatest enemies of human progress. They might recall the words of Israel Zangwill, "Selfishness is the only atheism," and wonder what claim to education their curricula possess.

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