- Today we are pleased to introduce J. David Hoeveler
as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum's
History Sandwiched In lecture series.
J. David Hoeveler is
Distinguished Professor of History
at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.
He earned his BA degree at Lehigh University in 1965
and his doctoral degree at the University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign in 1972.
He has written seven books in the field of American
intellectual history on subjects ranging from
puritanism to postmodernism.
He has a special interest in the history of higher education in
the United States, as reflected in the book he will discuss
today, "John Bascom and the Origins of the Wisconsin Idea,"
published last year.
And today is the 17th day of his retirement.
[laughter] [applause]
Now onto J. David Hoeveler. Thank you.
- I have a feeling that this is a recognizable sight to you.
Right on State Street here.
This is Bascom Hall, of course.
It's at the top of Bascom Hill, and the buildings along the side
going up the hill, the campus buildings,
all have the address of Bascom Mall.
I have a feeling also that this is not a familiar face.
But this is the person for whom that building is named.
This is John Bascom, who served as president of the UW
at Madison from 1874 to 1887.
John Bascom was a philosopher, a theologian, sociologist,
and a political reformer.
And my effort today is really to
try to summarize what I did in the book,
to show how John Bascom laid the intellectual foundations
for what we call the Wisconsin Idea.
So, let's start with an orientation, though.
And what we mean by the Wisconsin Idea
and where it fits into our history.
We refer to the progressive era of American history
as covering about the years 1901 to 1918.
It was an era saw government activity reform legislation
at all levels of our governments,
from cities to states to the national level.
And Wisconsin had a very large place
among the states in these efforts.
Governor Robert La Follette, of course a very familiar name,
but also Francis McGovern were the two republican governors
who oversaw this legislative activity in Wisconsin.
And these reforms took place at two levels.
Economic first. We had a state income tax.
We established bank regulation.
We set up a State Department of Forestry.
Conservation was part of the effort.
We created a highway commission, a water conservation law,
a state insurance fund, and a workman's compensation act.
The other level of reform was political.
We established a strong anti-lobbying law,
a comprehensive civil service reform law,
and Robert La Follette's favorite reform:
the direct primary.
Wisconsin was not alone in doing this.
As I said, this was at all levels
of government and many states.
But in sheer quantity, it stood out.
And even got us the recognition or the reference
often as a laboratory of democracy.
Now, the Wisconsin Idea.
I know we hear a lot about it,
but let me try to frame it in terms of three principles.
First, the special connection of the university
to the political structures and functions
of the state government,
connections of the university to state government.
In 1912, this person, Charles McCarthy, on the left here,
wrote a book called "The Wisconsin Idea,"
explaining how this connection had emerged
to this point in 1912.
He was the head of the Legislative Reference Library,
which gave a role to professors doing research at Madison
and making their research available
to legislators for information, studies, research
on which to base the reform legislation.
When Richard T. Ely came here,
we saw another possibility.
Ely was at Johns Hopkins.
He would be a part of the Wisconsin Idea
in a major way, as we'll see.
But he came here and he saw State Street.
He said, "My goodness, what an opportunity we have.
We have the university at one end
and the State Capitol at the other.
We should have a connection so that students are trained,
apprenticed to work in government
along the way of their education,
and the university should play a major role, therefore,
in fortifying the state government and its activities."
This is Richard T. Ely
came here in 1892
and served for a long time thereafter.
Another person involved in this was John R. Commons.
He became very well known for the seminars he had on economics
in which he involved students studying all aspects of economic
history, statistics, and so on.
Again, this was another contribution to this
reference library available for state legislatures.
A part of this state and university connection was
the role of professors in the state government itself.
I can think of no better example
than the person who was president
of the university during these years, Charles R. Van Hise.
Van Hise was president, his academic field was geology,
and he served on five different state commissions.
If you look at the year 1910,
you will find that there were no less than 36 professors
in the university with service on state civic offices.
Oh, shoot. I wanted to get to this first.
Van Hise Hall, you probably recognize it.
It's the tallest building on the UW campus.
Okay, so another aspect,
second feature of the Wisconsin Idea
is the outreach to the state on behalf of the university.
Again, Van Hise is a very good source for us.
You probably have seen
this plaque at the top of Bascom Hill.
And it's a famous quotation from President Van Hise.
"I will never be content until the beneficent influence
"of the university reaches every family in the state."
This was the idea, that the university would reach out to
the state, and, again, we would go from the research
and scholarship of professors into the lives of citizens.
This is one thing that got Wisconsin a lot of attention.
If you know the name Lincoln Steffens,
he was one of the muckrakers, a pioneer journalist of his day.
He came to Wisconsin always suspicious of what he heard,
but he was so impressed that he wrote a book for his magazine
called "A State Goes to College."
And what we found here was Extension courses,
correspondent courses, agricultural exhibits at state
fairs, farmers institutes that demonstrate the impact of seed
varieties and fertilizers and pesticides and so on
and was quite impressed by this development
at this campus above all.
In fact, you know, when Van Hise was invited to Harvard
to receive an honorary degree, Harvard's president,
Charles Eliot, said to him, "You know, Charles,
"you are president of the most important state university
"in the United States."
And the third component is the commitment to academic freedom
and the pursuit of truth.
Richard T. Ely, who I mentioned a moment ago,
was very liberal, if you will,
on the side of economic reform.
Sometimes refers to himself as a Christian socialist, in fact.
And there were a lot of people who didn't like that,
and he was accused of fomenting strikes, angered many citizens,
and they tried to get him fired.
The case went to the Board of Regents to adjudicate,
to see if there were grounds for dismissing Ely.
And the Board of Regents, in 1894,
came forward with a ringing endorsement,
here in these famous words, you know them well yourself,
I'm sure, "Whatever may be the state of the pursuit of truth
"elsewhere, here at this university we will have that
"continual and fearless sifting and winnowing
by which alone the truth can be found."
This is a legendary statement, not only in Wisconsin history,
but in the history of American higher education.
It really has a national resonance.
1894 the vindication of Professor Ely.
Well, okay, so then the question is:
where does John Bascom come in?
Here are the first clues.
Robert La Follette was a student of Bascom,
graduated in the class of 1879.
So did Charles Van Hise.
Graduated as a student of John Bascom in the class of 1879.
And when they became one governor
and one president of the university,
they often spoke about how it was their purpose
to carry out the ideas of the person
who talked and influenced them so much.
To put in place the ideals of John Bascom.
All right, but there's another question:
how was it that a person like Bascom,
whom I presented to you as a philosopher,
metaphysician, a person who dealt with these
challenging and difficult ideas.
How do we get from Bascom there to the Wisconsin Idea itself?
If you use the term "Wisconsin Idea," let's look at the noun.
Idea suggests perhaps, at least it hints at,
some conceptual depth.
Some intellectual dimensions that we might tap
for a richer foundation, if you will,
to the Wisconsin Idea.
So this was my purpose, basically,
in writing this book.
To see where that inquiry would lead.
Let me do just John Bascom to you.
As I said, he lived from 1827 to 1911.
He came from a long line of Calvinist ministers,
going way back, in fact, to the Huguenots in France.
Protestants who were persecuted by the Catholic government,
the board and monarchy there.
Many of them went to England and many came to America.
We can trace the Bascoms back to the early years
of Massachusetts Bay colony in the 1630s.
Now, Bascom himself was born in western New York,
an area known as the burned-over district.
That's a strange term and probably new to you,
but with an area of intense revivalism.
Camp meetings with fires burning all night,
hence the term the burned-over district.
I like this map because it clues us into
the variety of religious activity,
new social experiments, cultural ferment.
Bascom was born to an area so described.
This is the heart of protestant evangelicalism and what we often
refer to as the Second Great Awakening.
It also had reform movements.
Especially two stood out.
These were temperance and anti-slavery.
And I think can notice here the great number of churches
that are marked as anti-slavery churches.
One other thing too: John Bascom's birthplace
was only 20 miles from Seneca Falls.
We some time later, in 1848, was the location of the first
national meeting of American women to fight for the suffrage
and who delivered the famous document
known as the Declaration of Sentiments,
a major piece in the history
of American feminism in the United States.
John Bascom lost his father, he never knew his father.
His father died within the year after John was born.
So he was left to be raised by his mother
and three sisters, really.
This was no easy proposition.
They lived in Ludlowville, New York, on a very small farm
and really lived in almost, well, near poverty.
If you look at this chart, this map here,
can you see the Bascom farm?
I'm not supposed to move from here.
[laughter]
It's down by the intersection, and it says,
Mrs. Bascom Notice.
I'm always pleased to acknowledge my debt
to President Ray Cross of the UW System
who found this for me and sent it over.
So I was happy to see that.
Okay, so now we have to take a look
at John Bascom's intellectual career.
This can be challenging.
We're dealing with some very intense philosophical questions.
This is the part of the book I love to work on.
I love to be involved in the powerful minds
that Bascom himself was challenging and taking on.
My challenge is to try and summarize this
in a way that will be meaningful
without going into a lot of detail
in the short presentation.
But let me do this by saying that there were three
intellectual influences that help us understand John Bascom.
First, the influence of German philosophical idealism.
And this was a war on two fronts.
But let's think back and recognize that we're still in
the age of John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume,
Immanuel Kant, all of them dealing with the challenging
questions of what can we know.
Epistemology. What is realty?
What, out there, does the mind have access to,
or does it have only perceptions
and we cannot confirm an external reality?
If we get to the point of Immanuel Kant,
we're left with the proposition that the human mind can know
things of factual experience, of sense data,
but the mind has no access to any transcendent reality,
any supernatural, any realm of divine being.
Kant believed that it existed,
but he said we have no access to it.
So that was the challenge, and John Bascom stood with those who
came after Kant and tried to break this down to demonstrate
that the mind is powerful, has access to truth
that transcend sense experience, our five senses.
That's a crude summary, but if you--
I should have introduced Bascom to Professor Williams.
We'll give him to Madison.
This is Williams College, where he graduated.
I'm sorry.
And then he went to theological seminary at Auburn Theological
Seminary and Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts.
So for 20 years before he came to Madison
he was a professor at his alma mater.
And this is where we find him dealing
with these difficult philosophical matters.
Okay, so, as I said,
Immanuel Kant is the key transition figure here.
The effort is to break down the hard dualism of spiritual
reality and factual/sensual reality.
Bascom is the one who will mix these two
into a dynamic relationship.
Okay, secondly within the realm of German philosophical idealism.
A challenge that came later in the middle of the 19th century
was the challenge of positivism
and associated philosophies of empiricism.
Basically, the effort here was to limit philosophy
to what we can know positively.
Philosophy has no legitimate business
speculating about origins and ends, about essences, numina,
or the transcendent and supernatural.
The challenge of people like John Bascom was to refute
these limitations and show, once again,
the power of the mind to have
a transcendent knowledge of things.
This would create a partnership, if you will,
between philosophical endeavors and religious truth.
So I think maybe I can help here a bit.
If you've studied the American transcendentalist,
you will see the company that John Bascom is in.
The big difference is that he was much more emphatically
Christian than they were.
But he's certainly in the intellectual circle of people
like Ralph Waldo Emerson here, Margaret Fuller,
and Henry David Thoreau.
Theodore Parker and others are part
of this American transcendentalism.
Okay, the second influence of these three intellectual
commitments that John Bascom had is liberal Protestant theology.
Bascom was a committed Christian thinker but emphatically
on the side of modernism against orthodoxy.
As I said, he came from
a long, long family of Calvinist ministers.
And he was resolved almost year by year
as he grew up to break from that hard
religious theological system of John Calvin.
There's a lot of John Bascom's writings about the state
of religion in America and the condition of the churches.
And he had two complaints
against contemporary Christianity.
One, he said it's intellectually narrow.
It's immune to new knowledge,
especially knowledge coming from the sciences.
Out thinking, our religious thinking, he said,
is locked into creeds and confessions
and other forms of dogma.
We seem to be obsessed with questions
that are rather meaningless, he felt,
original sin, predestination, vicarious atonement.
And far too attached to biblical truth as a sole
and unwavering foundation of our faith.
He wanted a much more expansive opening of Christian thinking
to all new knowledge.
And, secondly, in terms of his complaint against the churches,
he charged that they were too narrowly and wrongly focused.
Religion needs to be more involved in the world,
he believed.
True religion is spiritual and moral
and seeks to reshape the world accordingly.
So this you'll recognize, I think,
as a kind of familiar expression of the social gospel.
Our churches today, he said,
are too much bound to the class system.
They are too connected to powerful business interests.
And they must turn their attention
to the social injustices of the day.
We'll see more of this in a few minutes.
Every divinity school, he said, every theological seminary
should have our future ministers taking courses in sociology,
not just biblical hermeneutics.
They should be trained to deal with the world
and to reshape the world.
If you had been in Madison in 1884 on the right day,
you might have been in the audience when John Bascom
gave his baccalaureate sermon.
And he called it "The New Theology."
It was his introduction and he did it
to the graduating seniors on the campus.
His introduction to--
I didn't put that on here. I left that out.
Okay, his way of summarizing these points about his feeling
about the state of the Christian churches today.
Later that became a book.
And then the third intellectual influence is evolution.
And you know of what I speak on this question.
Charles Darwin published his famous work on the origin
of species in 1859.
That would be the fifth of Bascom's service
at Williams College.
Bascom once referred to evolution
as "the great idea of the 19th century."
Why would he say that?
Because, he said, "Evolution informs us of the dynamic
"structure of life, where change and chance..."
Remember Darwin's mutations, they come by blind chance.
They just occur.
"...where change and chance
"are the governing principles of reality."
This discredited, he believed, all notions
of fixity and permanence of truth.
Second, he believed evolution showed
the interconnection of all things.
Creation as a whole. Species are interrelated.
They come one from another as a dynamic progression
taking place here.
And, third, evolutions shows the primacy of mind,
of human intelligence as the key factor in human evolution.
He's very so closely tied with American primitists
like William James and John Dewey here.
And he will make much of the idea that the human mind must
expand and have all the knowledge it can so that we can
evolve in an intelligent way and meet the challenges of survival.
Okay, whew, I'm glad to get through that part.
The rest of it is going to be a lot easier, I promise.
Part two of my talk, and there are only two parts--
[laughter]
Will deal with kind of the application of these ideas,
two of the causes in which Bascom
was involved as president of the university
because he really was an activist president in this way.
All right, so the first of the three is temperance.
Uh-oh. [laughter]
That's an old issue by this time.
It goes back to the 1830s.
It divided the political parties.
It divided most everybody.
Now, I think maybe your first instinct is to say,
what does temperance have to do with progressivism?
Didn't we experiment in a disastrous way
with Prohibition after 1919?
Haven't we learned anything?
But, in fact, in the late 19th century,
this movement had some progressive sides.
There's no denying that alcohol consumption took a huge toll
on workers, on families, on wives and children.
Almost all the literature, and it's a prolific literature,
will concede that fact.
But also, the temperance movement was very closely
aligned with the women's movement and feminism as well.
This is one illustration of that fact.
But it's one that also shows this kind of militant
intolerant side that we associate with Prohibition
as a kind of puritanical zeal that got out of control.
But if we reorganize the role of Frances Willard,
she was the head of the largest and most powerful
women's group in America.
It was almost entirely female.
The Women's Christian Temperance Union.
She recognized that these two causes must go hand in hand or
both will lose: the right to vote on behalf of women and the
laws that will forever ban the production, consumption,
and distribution of alcoholic beverages.
It's no accident that the 18th and 19th century, sorry,
18th and 19th century amendments come back to back,
within one year of each other.
John Bascom made it his business
to make the case for temperance legislation.
A lot of people said, what business does the state have
in telling me whether I can drink or not?
Here we find a key to his whole political philosophy.
That the rights of the social organism of the public have a
greater priority than the claims of individuals.
This would be controversial, but this is emphatic and thematic
of Bascom on all of these reform issues.
It's not a matter of personal liberty when alcohol is
destroying the very fibers of our society.
A quote from John Bascom here.
"So when we deal with temperance, we take on the extended
"and inevitable connection of intemperance with crime,
"with insanity, with idiocy, with the lives of women and children
"striped of all safety by the evil of alcohol."
This is from his sociology book, a book he wrote for the use
of his students in his classes at the UW campus.
And one other thing on the temperance issue.
As I said, it shows for us how Bascom thought of the state.
"We are losing our idea of government, he says,
"if our prejudice against it is so strong that we can do
"nothing to address what threatens us as a society."
Such as he believed alcohol was doing.
"The rights of the community to protect itself
"trump individual rights."
Pure and simple.
Okay, the next cause of the three
was the case for American women.
I'll take a brief interlude here and just introduce some people.
This is Emma Bascom.
She was John Bascom's second wife.
He had married Abbie Burt at Williamstown in 1854.
She died two years after the marriage.
And this was his second marriage.
The couple had five children.
She was a partnership with John Bascom.
She served on state organizations for both
the temperance movement and for women's suffrage.
Of the five children, Florence Bascom
was the most accomplished.
This was the second woman in America
to get a doctorate degree in geology
and the first woman to be elected at the Council
of the National Organization for American Geologists.
Okay, the topic of women's rights
in the book is one of the longer chapters
because John Bascom fought for this cause on many fronts.
So it might be best for me to just list them without going
into too much detail here or we'll be taking too much time.
Co-education, obviously.
He was committed to this even before he came to Madison.
He had led the faculty, of which there were very few on his side.
He had led in an effort to have Williams go co-ed.
He lost but he wrote some very powerful pieces
on behalf of that effort.
At Madison, however, at the UW,
co-education never really was an issue itself.
The school had been co-educational
from the very beginning.
What was at issue was the question
of separate curriculums or uniform curriculum.
And we go back and forth with that in the early history of the
campus with many saying, "It's fine for women to come to
college but they should study things different from men."
This gets into the medical literature of the day,
which is rather incredible to see.
It annoyed John Bascom to no end to have these doctors saying
that intensive brain work impairs the menstrual cycle
and all that kind of stuff.
He didn't buy that at all.
And this is a guy at Harvard, Declark,
who put his name behind this.
So, you know, how can you argue with that? This is science.
Well, Bascom didn't think it was science at all.
Okay, so that's another issue here.
And he won on that.
This would never be an issue after he came here.
The right to vote.
You know, not all of the women reformers
of the day wanted women to vote.
But Bascom was on the radical side of this issue.
He worked with Elizabeth Cady Stanton to set up meetings
in Madison to help the cause here in the state.
This was a state by state issue, as you remember.
So that was another category in this women's movement for him.
Divorce. Oh, boy, that was a hot topic.
Bascom sort of reluctantly had to say, you know,
we just have to come to accept this.
Many women didn't want it.
It would give their husbands an excuse to walk out.
So this was a divisive issue too.
And then I was rather impressed by this,
but even back at Williams,
Bascom was decrying women's dress.
Remember this is the gilded age.
Women are bracketed and braced. They have bustles.
And Bascom is saying how can we expect anyone so encumbered to
play a useful role in the economic life of this nation?
And that's my main point here because, once again, Bascom,
when he talked about the women's cause,
he seldom referred to natural rights and equality.
What he did refer to is the imperatives
of the social organism.
And his point was you cannot have a social organism
that is healthy when half of its components,
female sex in this case, is deprived of an act
of participation in the larger work of the body.
Always these evolutionary analogies in Bascom
are coming in this way.
Okay, so while I'm on this subject,
let me just show you some other images here.
I think at least the most important woman I know,
besides Florence Bascom, who came out of John Bascom's
classes, was Belle Case La Follette.
She met Robert La Follette on the campus here.
They were married, they went to law school together.
She was the first woman to get a law degree in Wisconsin.
And, especially when he was elected senator and went to
Washington, DC, she took up a role that was even more
progressive and reformist than was La Follette himself.
There's a wonderful new biography by Nancy Unger about
Belle La Follette, if you're interested in more there.
And another portrait of our co-educational campus.
This is part of the class of 1876.
And what will later be known as Bascom Hall at the top.
But it's the same place.
And another student to come out of the Bascom years
was the famous historian Frederick Jackson Turner.
Famous for his frontier thesis.
This is a seminar he held at Madison.
But notice the students.
More than half are female.
And then, third cause: money and class.
The labor question, often known as the social question.
We may tend to forget something about the gilded age.
We think of all the new money on the land,
we think of the big chateaus on Fifth Avenue,
the private summer estates in New Port, Rhode Island,
and so on, private railroad cars.
We think it's an age of great affluence.
It was very much a troubled age, however.
This was an age that saw more strikes
than any other era of our history.
You can site a number of them.
This is the Haymarket rebellion in Chicago in 1886.
But think of the great railroad strike of 1877.
The Homestead strike at the Carnegie Steel Works
outside of Pittsburgh.
The Pullman strike that shut down the US Mail.
These are the more dramatic ones,
but they were taking place all the time.
This was the social question.
Many feared that we would not survive it.
That an angry group of anarchists, socialists,
discontented workers would bring the whole house down.
So, Bascom took up this issue too.
But I'm careful to point out that John Bascom
was very much an admirer of capitalism.
He admired its creativity, its inventiveness.
He liked the way that commerce brought people together and made
larger extensions, larger human contacts as it grew.
But he was very much afraid of a terrible imbalance emerging in
American society where too much concentration of wealth did
exactly what he always feared: it upset the social equilibrium.
It upset the balance and harmony of the social organism.
He was concerned that workers were powerless.
He was making the same case for workers
as he was making for women:
"We must have the empowerment of people or they
"will not be parts of a useful, harmonious, social organism."
He cited the fact that money bends everything.
It corrupts everything. It buys newspapers.
Buys legislator's votes. Even churches.
It buys college professorships.
Railroads give out free passes to legislators
and corrupt the political process.
So on and on he went on to make this case.
So he came down to this.
He became defensive of the right of workers
to organize and to form unions.
You must have power one place
to counteract the power in another place:
The trust in the corporations.
But more controversial, actually,
was when he actually endorsed the strike.
"If labor has to take that recourse, then let it."
It's a question, once again, of power.
And a lot of people were worried of that direction.
I would just summarize here in saying that I know of no
president, and I studied American education quite a bit,
no president of any major college or university at this
time that was more outspokenly progressive on these issues,
especially women and labor, than was John Bascom at Madison.
Okay, so I'll finish up by just rounding out some things.
I should reinforce what I was saying about John Bascom
and his view of the state and of government.
Once again he said, "Society is not
"an aggregate of individual citizens.
"It's an organism. A whole.
"A meaningful collectivity.
"And as an organism, as an individual, must adapt..."
This is Darwinism, the age of evolution.
"...must adapt so much to society too."
It must act to assure that all of its parts are healthy,
and if the brain is the individual's means of survival
and adapting, then the state is the society's brains
of adapting and surviving.
We have this sentence that always kind of grabs me.
"Intelligence", says Bascom, "should be fruitful in its
"collective as well as its individual efforts."
It must work by trial and error.
By state laws. Some work, some don't.
We start over again if they don't.
But that's the way evolution works.
And this points, also,
to a major role for the state university.
Because if the state needs intelligence,
where is it going to find it?
That is the key role of the public university.
But a very important point follows here.
In order for the university to be effective,
it must have complete freedom
to pursue the truth wherever it goes.
Otherwise, what knowledge it produces will be limited and not
valuable to the larger public that the university serves.
"We should have no restrictions on what is taught
"at the state university," Bascom says.
"We must legitimate all new knowledge,
"and we must sanction all methods of pursuing it."
This is Science Hall.
Still here after lo these many years.
John Bascom is a part of this concern...
[coughs]
Excuse me.
...was always urging on his students
that they serve the state.
Especially, he said, they, above all,
with the education they've received are in a position
to do the public a lot of good.
I'll read again from one of his addresses.
"The graduates of the state universities have a duty to
"carry into action, through state offices
"or through a large public influence,
"the ideas that will bring about the just state
"and usher in the new era of collective power."
This is what La Follette wrote about his former teacher,
John Bascom: "He was forever telling us what the state was
"doing for us and urging our return obligation.
"Not to use our education wholly for our own selfish benefit,
"but to return some service to the state."
And then La Follette said of Bascom: "This is why it may be
"said that John Bascom was the originator
"of the Wisconsin Idea in education."
So I'd like to finish up by referring to something
from the year 1876.
In that year, this is our campus,
John Bascom asked the student newspaper
to have a piece by him
placed in its forthcoming issue.
Now, it just happened that the owner of the campus newspaper
was none other than Robert La Follette, the student.
When he arrived in Madison to enter the university,
he bought the paper.
And he went out and sold advertising for it.
He made money for the paper, and he made money for himself
to help finance his own education.
In any case, as far as I know this may be the first contact
between these two people, even before the classroom.
But the piece that Bascom placed in the paper was called
"The Spirit of the University."
And this is how he described it: "That spirit is something that
transcends the classroom and the formalities of the campus life.
Instead, he said, "It is an inspiration,
"a growing estimate of truth, an appetite for excellence.
"The central quality of our spirit as a university
"should be a large-minded love of knowledge,
"a thorough disposition candidly and completely
"to know the truth."
He urged that the university of Wisconsin "escape the spirit
"that dare not inquire lest it should break in
"on beliefs already entertained."
This is 1876.
18 years later we had the famous sifting and winnowing statement
from the Board of Regents, and we are getting well into the
full realization of the Wisconsin Idea at that time.
Thank you.
[applause]