Dedicatory Address – Annie Merner Pfeiffer Library
May 27, 1953 – 4:00 pm
Bishop Fred C. Corson – President of the Board of Education for the Methodist Church
(As transcribed by Brett T. Miller, College Archivist in December 2011)
Dear friends,
It is my high privilege this afternoon to say a word on your behalf in gratitude for the memory and the generosity of Mrs. Pfeiffer. Her gifts are numerous to Methodist education around the world, and in the generations to come, many will rise up to call her blessed.
It is also my very high privilege this afternoon to speak a word concerning the importance of what has been done on this campus as symbolical of the need for libraries if we are going to maintain our essential protestantism (and I speak of that in the philosophical, rather than in the denominational sense) and also maintain our democracy.
Winston Churchill, on one occasion, said that we in the great democracy build our institutions and then our institutions build us. And when we look back over the sweep of history, how true an observation concerning what happens to men was made by Winston Churchill. Because the Hebrews, when they lived in tents, thought of building a Tabernacle and putting it in the center of their life and civilization, all of their life and culture has been made different by that very fact.
We can understand why the Greeks were philosophers when we look at the Acropolis and the place it had in that ancient civilization. We know why Rome decayed and crumbled and fell even though it had at the time at its command virtually all of the material power of the world, when we view again the Colosseum and bring back into our memory what happened there and its influence upon those people.
And on this occasion, all of us likewise can understand why America is what it is today when we think of our forefathers leaving a settled civilization, coming to a new world where they had to carve out for themselves even the barest means of livelihood. And yet when they cut the logs to build their homes, they cut logs also for the schools, and for the church, and for the town meeting. And as these institutions have influenced the larger life of the world, so we must bear in mind in our academic life the microcosm of a college campus, the institutions that we create, they in turn build the boys and girls into manhood and womanhood and place upon them their mark.
So when we are building a college, there are many things to take into account that are not material, that cannot be put down in statistical columns and cannot be, in that sense, evaluated both as to the influence and the success of the college. West Virginia Wesleyan has been a college whose influence and service to the world have been far greater than any numerical and statistical enumeration could set forth. For while you have sent out graduates who perhaps have not created the world’s wealth, you have sent out graduates who have done the world’s work. And so in these institutions, and this one especially that we come this afternoon to dedicate, let us think of how the institutions that we put on a college campus, those symbols of what we consider important, the equipment that we place at the disposal of our young people for their development, how these institutions may influence for good the lives of those whom we commit to the care and the development of the college.
All of us who have a concern for the academic life of America and for the Methodist Church rejoice in the progress of West Virginia Wesleyan College. We see it objectively those of you who are close to it and tied to it by strong cords of love and of sentiment and of devotion. Perhaps you do not see it in objective as some of us who are a little farther removed do. We have observed your progress, your fidelity to the liberal arts ideals of education, the manner in which, so devotedly, you have kept close to the church and made your education Christ-centered, the long and the lean years when men of great devotion stayed by this institution, though they had opportunity to go elsewhere, much to their own personal advantage, and the wondering that I know occurred in the minds of all of you whether or not your fidelity and your service would be properly recognized by those upon whom the independent colleges must depend for their development.
And yet when I compare what I saw on this campus six years ago when I was here to deliver the Commencement address, what I see now on this occasion and on this very happy visit for me, it is amazing the progress that you have made. You should rejoice in it. You should give credit to your Board of Trustees and to your administration of the college for their success in these years when they have striven to do what all of you have been praying might be accomplished.
And now today we have the equipment, we have here the symbols of all that go into the making of a great liberal arts, Christian college. And on this occasion I raise for your thought the question, “What will you do with them?” You remember that Thoreau said something like that when he was told that the cable had been laid across the Atlantic and that now people could send words across the Atlantic and they could be heard on the other end, at least transmitted there, almost as soon as they were uttered here. And in the enthusiasm of those who were recording this great scientific advance to Thoreau, enthusiasm for the technical accomplishment that has been made by American geniuses, Thoreau said, “well, the important thing is not that the cable is laid, it is not that you can speak here this moment and your words will be transmitted across the ocean in a moment or two after, the important thing is what kind of words go over the cable and what the cable will be used for.” So I say in this very brief dedicatory word this afternoon, that this wonderful symbol of what is essentially the core of the liberal arts educational program, this symbol which is intended as an implement to advance the two great fundamental principles of liberal education – the training of the mind and the development of Christian men and women.
The answer comes in how you use this building and what you see it as accomplishing and how it impresses the students who come here by your attitude toward it. We are living in a day when, unless we understand the use of the mind, unless we understand what academic freedom really means, unless we keep open always the possibilities of the development of the mind as it affects the soul and the life and the community, we will take out from under our democracy the very foundation on which it depends.
So I say to you this afternoon, charged with the responsibility of training our young people, making out of them men and women useful in their communities and Christian in all their relationships, that what happens in this building, how it is received, what you do with it and for it, will determine very largely the outcome in service and in accomplishment for this college.
There are four things that are very necessary, in my judgment, for a library in a democracy to accomplish. And the first of those requirements is that a library shall satisfy the inquiring mind. Sometimes we are tempted to shut off the inquiries of youth because we become worried and afraid of what they will lead to. But if you have institutions and men and women in charge of those institutions who understand the normal development of the human mind and who set out to satisfy it rather than to shut it off and make it become neurotic, and cause it in the dark ways to become warped and frustrated and then misused, you have no fear for the future of American democracy. We have that responsibility when young people come to a college campus, to have the means at their disposal that they may satisfy the curiosity of an inquiring mind.
The college library ought also to nurture the developing mind. We have not done such a good job of that in America. We have developed along some lines, but on some other lines we are woefully lacking. Perhaps scientifically we have become mature, but who can say that culturally or in many social relationships and understandings, or in matters of religion, or in this business of fulfilling our personal responsibility in a democracy, that we have become full grown? We are like babes in those fields of endeavor, very largely because we have been so anxious to get ahead in this world, that we have failed to understand what is involved in nurturing a developing mind. You may be amazed to know that there are 33 million adults in the United States who, by actual survey, have never read a book through. And oft-times the attitude of that New York stenographer, going to work in the subway one morning, what she said and was overheard represents the attitude of the American public today regarding reading. One girl asked another if she had read a popular current book. And she answered, “No, I never read any books anymore. If they make the grade, I see ‘em in the movies.” Well my friends, you cannot have a democracy unless you develop the mind of young people to the point where they can come to intelligent and responsible decisions on which they will base their lives. And one of the advantages which some of these awful totalitarian systems have had in this day, when they have gained all too much territory because of our own failures in this field, has grown out of the fact that they have had respect for the minds of their young people and they have not fed them with the superficialities of life, but they have indoctrinated them with philosophies of life, though they may be wrong, yet nevertheless they are philosophies and on that basis those young people have come to their decisions. Let us hope that here, through this building, the young and developing minds will be nurtured so that they can come to a full understanding of the significance of Christian democracy, and they can exercise their individuality and their personalities on the side of the good and of the true and of the beautiful.
It is essential also, my friends, that through this building, which is a symbol and a safeguard for these fundamental things in our Christian and democratic life, that this building and what it does shall be a guide to the responsible mind. One of the reasons why we have fanatics in the world is not because they lack responsibility, but because in their development they have not been guided to exercise that responsibility along valid lines. As one man said, they were encouraged to major in the minors and thus they became fanatics. And another reason why we have bad men in the world today is not because those men, as boys, were essentially bad at heart, but because in the development, the outreach of a personality that wanted to leave its imprint upon life, they were not properly guided, either by the church, or by the school, or by individuals. You can’t judge the effects of a college when it comes to this matter of personal influence. What a professor does in the long years that he spends in comparative obscurity on a college campus; that never can be estimated, the effect of it, as it reaches out into the world from one generation to another. But as long as we have men and women in our colleges, as well as ministers in our pulpit, and responsible laymen in the community setting the right example, who feel a sense of obligation to guide the developing minds of young people toward the responsible expression of the things that make life abundant, then you have no fear of any outside force coming in and undermining our system.
The final thing that I want to say about the value, in my judgment, of this building and what it stands for is that I hope always it will be a bulwark preserving the open mind. One of the great curses of this day dear friends, one of the places where we follow Jesus afar off is the fact that all too frequently we close our minds to truth and we become bigots then and we rearrange our prejudices and substitute them for real thinking and we go forth with passion to preserve the things that destroy and divide, rather than the things that bring us together and build us up. It’s a wonderful thing to keep an open mind, to be receptive to new truths, to see life in its varied relationships as conditions change, to be able to say that once you believed this, but now you believe something better, to be able to say that once you were mistaken because you were unenlightened, but now you are glad that through the enlightenment which has been made possible in a free world you have come to a new and a better position. All Christian truth comes upon us in that manner. And the revelations that Jesus promised for those who followed, greater revelations than those who were with him experienced, is a revelation that cannot be mediated to the people of our day unless we keep an open mind. And the hope of tomorrow, dear friends, lies not in those of us whose patterns of life are fixed, whose ways of thinking have become solidified. The hope of tomorrow lies in the young people who see more clearly what the reality of things today are and who move out in that direction to lead us into new and better ways of life. It is my prayer that this shall be the expanding responsibility and the enlarging glory of West Virginia Wesleyan College.