117
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Title
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117
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Transcription
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THE FUTURE
The future is always in a certain sense prophesied by the past; and this is most of all true of an institution which, having lived through a certain period of historic formation, has, as it were, settled itself in a course defined by its own conscious tradition. The University of Nebraska has reached such a stage of development. During its fifty years of history it has passed from the state of eager hope, which attended its first seasons, to a state of conscious possession, with attainments recognized and promise assured. It has ceased to be a college of the raw prairies, with breadths of empty space, expanses of future time, and the changing winds of its aspirations for its natural atmosphere; it has become a powerful university, with a world-wide name, and, in a true sense, an Alma Mater whose children are to be found in all the quarters where men dwell, there carrying her memory in their affections and preserving her spirit in their lives. Nebraska is not institutionally old, even in the sense in which the great universities of the Atlantic states are old, but she is institutionally mature, and she has a right to the throne of maturity and to the honors of a mother of learning. Which so being, she possesses an image and a character—the throned and laurelled Alma Mater—whose proper reading is her future.
The fundamental in that character, the great note to which all others ring, is hers by gift of that spirit in which she first came into being. Those ugly but dear bricks that form the old main building which, now cherishingly enclosed by finer halls, first stood so bleak and upstarting on the treeless campus, embodied no material shape merely in those early days of the seventies when hands that had but just broken the virgin sod turned to their piling. Rather, they embodied an idea and a faith, each so luminous that the halo of them still lingers about and redeems the physical ugliness. For the University was founded and the building was built out of a conception of learning and a faith
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Rights
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To inquire about usage, please contact Archives & Special Collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries. These images are for educational use only. Not all images are available for publication.
