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REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT

excellence and creative power. There should be no lowering of
standards in the extension process. Its standards and opportunities
shall be second to none and open to all to the end that we build a
commonwealth in which shall be preserved democracy without vul-
garity and excellence without arrogance.

2. The Schools of the People

The public schools are now and will increasingly be the community
center of university extension and adult education. The University
will not only extend and share its life with the public schools and the
people but University men, as citizens, if true to the traditions of
this University made by men who can fight no more—Murphey,
Yancey, Wiley, Vance, Alderman, Mclver, and Aycock—will fight for
the schools of the people.

The University is resourced in the public schools and the public
schools are resourced in the University. They go up or down together.
Now is the time in the midst of depression, unemployment, and
educational defeatism for the Extension Division and the public
schools to envisage and lay out the plans for a future all-inclusive
educational program in the communities for the continuous education
of all the people as a way to use wisely the advancing leisure, to
substitute cultural content for merely mechanical contacts, natural
creative play for artificial and empty excitement, and to lay the
intellectual groundwork for a more general and intelligent under-
standing of and participation in the affairs of the world and its oppor-
tunities for a larger mastery of human destiny. Land to the west for
more than two hundred years helped to keep open and free our
American life. The land is closed but the schools are open and will
help to make us free. Along the converging roads of the public schools,
adult education, and university extension, lies one hope of our
American democracy struggling for a higher mastery. We cannot, in
these critical times, which test in our budgets what we really believe
in, cut the schools and pinch our way out. With the inclusive and
continuous education of all our people we must socially invest, we
must build, we must create our way out from depression into a higher
prosperity and from poverty into a nobler power.