Article December 12, 1936 Issue

Signs of the Times

Topic: Education

with contributions from James B. Conant, S. Ralph Harlow, Cordell Hull, Cosmo Gordon Lang, Edgar F. Magnin

[President James B. Conant, Harvard University, as quoted in the New York Herald-Tribune, New York]

The greetings which you bring to Harvard we thankfully accept. In these messages of good will we read the continued aspiration of mankind toward a universal fellowship based on human reason—a fellowship devout in its admiration of what has been achieved in former times, yet believing in the richness of the future which lies before us all; a fellowship which transcends all barriers of race and nation, yet honors the intellectual and artistic traditions of a variety of peoples.

Almost a hundred years ago Ralph Waldo Emerson, speaking of the American scholar, declared, "The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future." In this troubled century the burden is to be borne not by one individual or by one group, but by those who live in many lands. Not the scholar, but the community of scholars must take up "all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past."

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