ENPages
2
The Vice Chancellor has asked me to make a brief address at the opening services of Trinity Sem and the Academic Year of 1903-4 I am sure you do not especially desire that I should on this occasion enter into the field of letters or science into which you have been so lately and so well introduced from this place. It may be that I shall best employ the few minutes I shall have in which to address you, upon a review which to some of you will convey nothing new, but to many, and especially to the younger portion of those now before me, will imprint upon their minds a more distinct and I hope welcome knowledge relative to the institution of which they form so considerable a part. My subject will be: why was this university founded, how, and by whom? The founders of William and Mary, of Harvard and Yale are commemorated in the names of those institutions, but the names of the University of the South, carries with itthe name of no benefactor, no Vanderbilt or Carnegie no Johns Hopkins, but the name of a people, united so no other people have been in founding a great institution of learning for their common weal The germ idea of this University was conceived by
3
that great man Leonidas Polk, Bishop of Louisiana, and im -pressed by him upon the other Southern Bishops in a letter addres -sed to them in the Fall of 1856. He referred to the fact "that existing educational institutions at the South, were either established by state patronage, or by one or other of the religious denominations. That in the minds of many, they were not upon a scale sufficiently ex -tended or full, to offer advantages, comparable to those to be had abroad, or at the institutions of the highest grade at the north, and for that reason were set aside, and our children expatriated or sent off to an inconvenient distance beyond the reach of our supervision or parental influence, exposed to the rigors of an unfriend -ly climate to say nothing of other influences, not calculated it as to be feared to promote their happiness or ours." He outlines its plan of government through a Board of Trustees, compared of the Bishops ex-officio and clerical and Lay trustees, elected by the Diacesaro Conventions. As a cardinal princi ple of the whole movement he laid down distinctly that the [???} should be out and out a church Institution founded by the church for the special benefit of her own children for the advancement of learning generally, and for the propagation of the gospel as
