Both Lowell's and Conant's speeches reflected the direction they wanted the University to go in. Lowell looked to the continuity of history and the succession of generations to reassure a world in crisis that out of darkness had always come light and out of chaos order, so long as higher education remained atop its pedestal in society.

"As wave after wave rolls landward from the ocean, breaks and fades away sighing down the shingle of the beach, so the generations of men follow one another, sometimes quietly, sometimes after a storm, with noisy turbulence," the conservative president said.

"But, whether we think upon the monotony or the violence in human history, two things are always new--youth and the quest for knowledge, and with these a university is concerned. So long as its interest in them is keen it can never grow old, though it counts its age by centuries."

Conant, on the other hand, emphasized his faith for the future in the perfection of a "true national culture" to be created by "those of who have faith in human reason [and] believe that in the next hundred years we can build an educational basis for a unified, coherent culture suited to a democratic country in a scientific age."

In "The Founding of Harvard College", Morison remarks, "From the small college here planted in sylvestribus et incultis locis on the edge of the Western Wilderness, Harvard University has grown, and higher education in the United States is largely dervied. So we are gathered here to commemorate our founders and early benefactors; to thank God for the faith, overriding all prudentobjections and practical difficulties, thatsustained them through poverty and struggle, in soambitious and so excellent an enterprise."

The need to give something of healing andrestorative value back to Harvard is echoed inPresident Roosevelt's address, which reminded anaudience all too familiar with the militaristictone of modern times that "Harvard should trainmen to be citizens in that high Athenian sensewhich compels a man to live his life uneasinglyaware that its civic significance is it mostabiding, and that the rich individual diversity ofthe state is born only of the wisdom to chooseways to achieve which do not hurt one'sneighbors."

Although their eloquence was timeless and theirwords pregnant with meaning, all of the advice andadmonitions so freely given those two days fell ondeaf ears. Sooner than anyone hoped or expected,the Second World War engulfed the nations,changing them and Harvard forever.

The elitist enclave of Cambridge intellectualsthat lingered on through the last golden days ofthe 1930s would become the highly diversifieduniversity of the second half of this century. Theworlds of Lowell and Conant are gone forever,alive only in reflection and remembrance