Leonidas Polk Family Papers

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constant to the end. He perished at Pine Mountain, Georgia, on June 14, 1864.

Out of the ashes of war there survived an idea and an opportunity, a plan and a place, and these were all that was needed by that little band that gathered around Bishop Quintard to rise up and build.

So the University of the South took shape and has come down to us, and through it, Leonidas Polk, being dead, yet speaks to our condition.

For some years Mr. Robert M. Hutchins has been drawing our attention to the fact that the elective system in our colleges has produced chaos, that there is no longer any unity in the sense of a common frame-work of ideas, and that, consequently, our institutions of higher learning are no longer universities in the proper sense. These reflections have made Mr. Hutchins homesick for the Middle Ages. "The medieval university," he writes, "had a principle of unity. It was theology. The medievel theologians had worked out an elaborate statement in due proporation and emphasis of the truths relating to man and God,