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THE UNIVERSITY TODAY

The Inaugural Address Delivered November 11, 1931

By FRANK P. GRAHAM

Eleventh President of the University of North Carolina.

The local occasion which brings us together is submerged in the
international occasion which focuses today the thought of the world
upon the coming of peace. A university is so dynamic in its life that
no occasion, however local or however international, is outside the
range of its radiation. The campus and the world interact upon each
other with generative and regenerative power. A university is more
than intellectually dynamic, it is vitally organic with the life streams
of the culture of the ages and the present hopes of the people. With
a rootage as deep as the race and as wide as the worlds the university
grows in local soil for the finding of truth for all and the development
of youth in whom are gathered both the local and international hopes
of mankind.

A modern university is such a vital and manifold institution, has
been so integrated into the structure of western civilization, unbroken
in their interconnection since the twelfth century, is so intimately a
part of the context of every real problem of the modern world, that
any life strand found at hand anywhere running through the life of
the world enters into the texture of the modern university. We may
work out from that strand into the complex life of the university
and back again into the tangled life of the world.

ARMISTICE DAY AND THE UNIVERSITY

This is the forenoon of November 11, 1931, the fourteenth Armis-
tice day. As we, in Chapel Hill, go back to the armistice hour of that
first day we find as the minute hand moved close to the hour, a young
man, not long from the classrooms and playing fields of this Univer-
sity, was struck down at the head of his men and lay dying as the
armistice hour struck the peace for a war-wrecked world. He was
one of the tens of thousands of college men killed where danger
stretched its farthest front, one of the ten millions of the fittest men
on earth killed in four years of war. Greater than the gigantic figures
of death, disease, and physical destruction is the uncountable loss of