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UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA

37

THE UNIVERSITY AND THE PEOPLE

1. The Extension Division

It is the function of the state university not only to find its bits
of truth and teach the truth gathered from scholars everywhere, but
to carry the truth to the people that they may take it into their lives
and help to make it prevail in the world of affairs. It is the ideal of
the University Extension Division to make the resources of the
universities, the discoveries of science; and the finding of the social
scientists available for the people of the commonwealth. The members
of the general faculty; the special faculty; the special library, special
lectures, courses in class and by correspondence, bureaus, institutes,
interscholastic activities involving athletics, debates, classics, music,
plays, and playwriting, and in an independent and far-reaching way
the general library and the library school all serve to carry or send the
University to the people. The public schools, teachers, men's civic
clubs, professional associations, women's clubs and associations, and
people in towns, on farms, and in remote mountain coves, all tap the
life that is here. The universities should set their faces like hint
against what is clearly trivial, merely current, or only novel. Yet the
American state university should not, from a fear to assert its own
soul against what in its life would be a new Toryism of exclusive cul-
ture, high tuition, and intellectual stratification, be misled into a mere
imitation of European traditions and institutions. The state university
comes from the people and should go out to the people. The intellec-
tual life of the university should be quickened by contact and inter-
change with the people. They have a common destiny in the adventure
of building a better state. The state university cannot, as the univer-
sity of the people, be an institution of a class, whether based on
section, blood, money, creed, or intellectual background. Deep injus-
tice anywhere in the commonwealth leaves its psychic scars upon
university life; the well-being of the people makes more radiant the
life of the state university. The state university can never lose the
common touch without treason to its own nature and without drying
up the springs from which flow the living waters of its own life. The
state university is the university of all the people. It takes no side,
but democracy and justice are on the side where it belongs. The
university is organic with the life of the people, and the currents of
its life would flow back into the life of the people with transforming