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Show Jfyou can spare a few minutes. I'LL tell you a story. Just relax there on the grass or in your easy chair and listen while I tell of four thousand college youths who have spent eight months taking lecture notes, dancing at proms, losing sleep over term papers, cheering in the stadium, and laughing all the while in the mountain sunshine. I was born of these collegians, and without their coming year after year I should die, for I am the SPIRIT OF THE UNI-VERSITY. I live in the carpetless room of the engineer student who stokes furnaces every night to pay his tuition. I live in the convertible coupe that carries its fraternity load to football games and its lone couple for midnight rides under the moon. I live in the cold class rooms in the "L" building where Pericles and Wordsworth come alive for students. I live on the Park steps where those thousands of collegians, at noon and between each class, seek me out. I am everywhere in this college world. I am a witness to the tradition and to the change in the college life led by the inhabitants of the University. I have looked over the shoulders of students laboring on final exam "blue books." I have followed the basketball team on its out-of-town trips. I flew with the wind and the skiers down steep mountainsides at the Snow Carnival. I have been company for the tired professor correcting batches of freshman themes. Over the lives of these, the people, I stand guardian. There is sadness here as in the outside world. But the homesick freshman and the defeated election-day candidate thrill together as Utah makes a winning touchdown. There is doubt and questioning and debate, but too, there are exquisite moments when Truth reveals herself in a professor's lecture or in an ancient philosopher's argument. I have seen some loafers and some cheaters, but those thousands more who respect me are honest workers. Everything is here before me. I see it all. Now listen carefully while I continue with my story. |