June 12, 1923

Two hundred thirty-one graduates and their families heard President MacCracken’s address on “The Creative College” at Commencement. Declaring that the contribution of colleges to a creative national life was insistent and unwearied review of experience, the application of intelligence in the quest for better means and more desirable ends, MacCracken deplored the country’s decline into isolationism.

“This has been a year,” he said, “of marking time. Few issues of the world have been fully met. The far horizon holds out no promise of an early peace in the world of national and racial rivalry….

“One might borrow President Roosevelt’s word and call our present state a ‘chinafied’ one in the isolation with which we have built a wall of indifference around ourselves, surrendering the prestige of free association.”

The New York Times