Page:A History of the University of Chicago by Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed.djvu/472

41 6 A HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO In 1906 the fifteenth anniversary of the University was cele- brated. Before the death of President Harper an elaborate program for this celebration had been prepared. That event would have prevented any celebration at all under ordinary cir- cumstances. But the circumstances were not ordinary. Presi- dent Harper had expressed the earnest desire that the anniversary should be celebrated, and it was known that the University's fifteenth anniversary marked the semi-centennial of the founding of the first University of Chicago. In reporting on the question to the Trustees, President Judson submitted a dignified program from which all the special festivities had been omitted. This was approved and the celebration was held in connection with the June, 1906, Convocation. A special effort was made to gather the alumni of the old University and of the new one. One item in the celebration was the publication of an Alumni Directory. The days of the celebration were largely devoted to commemorating President Harper and his work. The alumni, in their memorial resolutions, said: A thousand years hence, around the gray walls of the University he loved, the name of Dr. Harper will be known and revered as a man who organized his splendid vision in a living and abiding institution for the highest service of the world through its trained and gifted sons and daughters. The Convocation address was delivered by Professor William Gardner Hale. In speaking of the circumstances attending his call to the University in 1891, he said: I saw, as I believed, the seat and promise of a great university, which any man might be proud to help to build. Five things, beyond the money needed to make the start, were essential to the success of such an enterprise; an able and winning leader of high convictions, not only upon undergraduate but upon graduate work; a strong and devoted body of trustees; a command- ing situation in the midst of a great section of the country; the immediate neighborhood of a vigorous and powerful community, full of confidence in itself and in the future of its city and with a reasonable leaven of belief in the intellectual life; and the existence in that community of a well- developed common- and high-school system. Of all these things I expected to find but one the commanding position in the heart of the country. I found all five.