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UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA

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lution which became the foundation of our present world. Amid all
the dislocations, disillusionments, bewilderment, and yet opportunities
and hopes of the present hour, the need of real colleges and universities
was never deeper than today as they stand as outposts at the crossroads
of the world. The universities are needed today to test the values,
contribute to the content, and guide the direction of the economic-
social and intellectual-spiritual changes underway in our time.

The breakdown of our economic order, recently widely accepted as
one of those automatic, inevitable, and cyclical depressions, is coming
to be considered the result of an undue lack of social intelligence and
guidance. The lack of an understanding of economic processes and the
need of political adaptations, the lack of spiritual and social insights,
and the neglect of the ethical emphasis, are all basic to our lack of the
social mastery of those mechanisms and forces which enter so hap-
hazardly into the economic disorder and social injustice of our modern
world.

We of the colleges and universities, in which leaders in church and
state, industry and business, are trained, must share heavily in the
responsibility for this social drift and economic breakdown. A host of
men and women leave college every year with too little understanding
of the ethical implications of the social drift and the human conse-
quences of economic disorder.

The universities must not stand aloof from these human conse-
quences but rather must have the social intelligence and courage to
help the people understand the manifold context of the world in which
they live and do their day's work. We cannot without betraying the
hopes of the people in every land let the world remain as it is. It will
not so remain. It will tend to mend or crash in its own ruins. Neither
should the people in violence tear it down. We must dream, plan, and
build the great society while we live in the old society. There are those
who want economic recovery regardless of reconstruction and those
who want social reconstruction regardless of recovery. Some think
reconstruction is a barrier to recovery and others think a wise recon-
struction is the only basis of a sound recovery. If recovery is to be
the recovery of a false prosperity then it is but the tragic overture of a
breakdown vaster and more terrible.

In our trusteeship for a university we would hold that recovery
should be attended by a reexamination of the content and ways of our