JOHN BASCOM---THE SHADOW OF ONE MAN'S LIFE
Slichter, Charles S.
John Bascom---The Shadow of One Man's Life School of Humanity That Might Serve Society Was Aim of Former University of Wisconsin President By CHARLES S. SLICHTER (Dean of the Graduate...
...Bascom only one year, and as I was very young and very green, there is little appropriateness in my appearance today...
...I thought, until quite recently, that everybody was of the same opinion...
...I started off with four daily classes of forty freshmen each and an advanced class of two students, soon dwindling to one...
...The things as yet but half declared command the coming day...
...Why did President Bascom take such trouble with an insignificant tutor...
...It seems appropriate in connection with Dean Slichter's address to quote what Mr...
...I expect soon to move back again, not to Room 1, but to old Room 2, opposite Room 1, which completes my circuit...
...I was teaching with such enthusiasm and was so proud of my classes that it never occurred to me that my work could be criticised...
...By the magic of genius he could roll the long scroll of a life before him to the epoch of the future, as he willed...
...President Bascom first brought here a company of scholars necessary and sufficient for the beginning of a great university...
...But he was a man of such power, his impress so indelible, that the image of his personality overlays all others my memory holds...
...The virility a ad power with which all this came forth, I, of course, cannot picture nor describe...
...More important even than material and ornament are the harmonies and those excellencies that make up the immaterial values...
...La Follette the encouragement and advice he knew so well how to render...
...That describes his attitude toward youth...
...Charles S. Slichter, dean of the graduate school, made the following address...
...second, the aesthetic attitude, based upon the desire to recognize and appreciate the full beauty of existence...
...He brought his intellect to bear directly upon all about him, faculty and students, not doubting that all were fellow actors in a great and serious business, with big parts to play and that these parts wers already partly learned and that the play was not in rehearsal, but now on the stage...
...third, the ethical attitude, founded upon the desire to achieve the highest good...
...For a long time they sat together in the library talking earnestly of what was at stake in fhe pending political struggle...
...These fortnightly meetings always included a short speech from President Bascom and everybody seemed to turn out...
...Florence Bascom, professor at Bryn Mawr.—B...
...His contact with raen was not at a moment nor at a point, but through the complete trend of a life, the years to come being of one substanca with the present...
...he taught La Follette, Van Hise, Turner, Swenson, Noyes, Faville, Ochsner, Dodson, Hoskins, Cajori, Siebecker, Vinje, Esch, Hallam, Simpson, Olson, Waldo, and scores of others like them...
...but the novelty lay in what followed, for then came John Bascom's powerful exposition of the duties of life that each attitude implies...
...I was so unsophisticated that I could not think of a finer job on earth than teaching mathematics to freshmen...
...I served under Dr...
...My arrival here as a young tutor was coincident with an enormous increase in enrollment —others say post hoc but I say propter hoc...
...After the first affectionate greetings the two men spoke not at all of lesser matters...
...La Follette says in his biography of President Bascom...
...John Bascom himself did not teach either freshmen or seniors...
...In speaking to his students at Baccalaureate, in the glow of the sunrise of their lives, he exclaimed: "Behold the dawn...
...All the power of his commanding intelligence was applied to build here a school of humanity which might serve, through kindly living, through sound learning, the needs and the perplexities of society...
...it was the duty of everybody, not the duty of artists and poets, to contribute day by day to the beauty of the world...
...Those of us who came directly under the influence of President Bascom during the thirteen years he was at the heard of the University will especially appreciate Dean Slichter's remarkably discerning tribute to the ideals and service of this great teacher and prophet...
...It was the duty of everybody, not the duty of specialists, to add year by year to the store of human knowledge...
...I do not believe that there was anything new in that topic—very likely the theme goes back to Aristotle...
...President Bascom stressing the momentous importance of the moral victory whatever else the outcome...
...It was the self-confidence and concoit directness, drawing upon his imagi-ntion to say s&mething pleasant at the end...
...The universities of America have always been generous, even over-generous, in supplying an abundance of students to their green and utterly inexperienced tutors...
...I vividly recall the time to which he refers when President Bascom came purposely to give Mr...
...C. L. I HAVE a part in the program today because I have been a tenant in this building for a longer time than almost anyone else...
...It was a shock to me to learn that some think that there is a higher job...
...Memory of Old Days I REMEMBER well the first College Rhe-toricals I attended...
...it was the duty of everybody, not the duty of a few leaders of men, to make hour by hour the world a better place...
...I taught attorneys, bankers, big business men, physicians, surgeons, judges, congressmen, governors, writers, editors, poets, inventors, great engineers, corporation presidents, railroad presidents, scientists, professors, deans, regents, and University presidents...
...It was because he knew that I was not teaching freshmen, but the real men I have listed...
...Become Men of Affairs BUT I really did not teach freshmen...
...But scholarship is not the only nor even the most prcciaus substance of the structure...
...Others now my neighbors, have spent too much time moving about the campus, leaving me, I think, the only roomer who has stayed here for nearly forty-one years...
...Scholarship is First Need SCHOLARSHIP is the first need of a univer-ity, for it is the frame into which all other things are built...
...John Bascom---The Shadow of One Man's Life School of Humanity That Might Serve Society Was Aim of Former University of Wisconsin President By CHARLES S. SLICHTER (Dean of the Graduate School) The one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of John Bascom was appropriately recognized recently at the University of Wisconsin by the dedication of the new Bascom Theater...
...The theme of his discourse was the three attitudes of the individual towards the universe: first, the cognitive attitude founded upon the desire to know...
...I started right—that is, I started in Room 1, and worked in a sort of spiral, until I have reached number 266...
...The picture of President Bascom on this page is from a photograph taken in his later years, sent us after his death by his daughter...
...It was the radiation from a prophet...
...To John Bascom these values came first...
...That is what my freshmen are now and of course they were, the same persons then...
Vol. 19 • August 1927 • No. 8
