June 7, 1927

“The task of culture in the civilized world,” President MacCracken told the 248 members of the Class of 1927, the faculty and their guests in his address at Commencement, “is first to obtain a real community or commerce of thought and then to concern itself with its value.” Speaking on “One Equal Temper”—words, he confessed, “purloined from a mid-Victorian source”—MacCracken contrasted this task with the “selective” task of education, which “bears upon its shoulders the burden of the communicable past. The symbols in its treasured pack must be taken out, dusted off and exhibited before our youths, like the symbols of a tribe…. Generation by generation the symbols become more dim in meaning, and the sense of reality is transmitted into unreality.

“We have failed…in our life here with you,” he continued, “if you have not to some extent cultivated the habit of fuller communication. We shall fail more signally if in the years that succeed college life you do not resist the tendency, so common with us, of skimming on the surface.”

Helen Kenyon ’05, secretary of the board of trustees, announced that, in addition to the gift of $97,000 from Charles A. Wimpfheimer for the building and maintenance of the Mildred Rosalie Wimpfheimer Nursery School, Mary Morris Pratt ’80 had given $50,000 for the enlargement and restoration of the organ in the Chapel.

The New York Times