Facts of Change

As the year continued, the University seemed determined to impress the seniors with the blunt facts of change. Gore Hall, the College library since 1841, was torn down, and construction on the new Widener Library was begun. The College was in relative chaos as books were switched to at least ten temporary locations. Lowell also announced the institution of the University Press, to be housed in the bottom of University Hall. The Administration revealed that $4 million was being spent on construction.

Even the composition of the undergraduate body was changing. In a survey published in the Spring of 1913, it was shown that over 60 per cent of the "leaders" of the College earned at least part of their expenses. The CRIMSON noted that the myth of the "rich man's college" was irrevocably shattered.

As the 397 members of '13 prepared to leave this changing College, Lowell reminded them in his Baccalaureate address that the world too was changing. This provided an opportunity, he said, and "wherever there is opportunity, there is duty."

As the Class of 1913 discovered, this duty lay in many fields. In one direction went the public figures: A.A. Berle Jr., Kennedy's former Latin American adviser; George H. Earle III, Governor of Pennsylvania; Lincoln MacVeagh; Ambassador to Spain, Portugal, and Greece; and General Daniel Needham, a Boston civic leader. But in another went the scientists and humanists; Dr. Howard Root, the nation's leading authority on diabetes, Gerald L. Wendt, a noted science journalist, and Dows Dunham, curator emeritus of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

As 50 years have passed, the Class of 1913 has adjusted to the changing world. They seem to have remembered a lecture given by Henri Bergson in the Spring of 1913. Bergson found stability in change itself. Life seen as movement, as a perpetual creation, could "only reassure man of his immortality."