“We have been appalled by the tragic shroud which cloaks our undergraduate. This student apathy, this disregard of all save the most material, is a thing of the mid-twentieth century. If we do not kill it now, here on a thousand campuses, it will eventually kill us – an ugly cancer polluting the bloodstream of democracy.”
– Willie Morris
Morris spoke these words when he began his term as Daily Texan editor in 1955. They were later reprinted in The Daily Texan: The First 100 Years (1999) by Tara Copp and Robert Rogers.
“To the students: We ask you to be fellow workers with us. You should try to understand your true relations to the university. You frequently hear the phrase used, ‘coming to the university,’ not remembering that you ARE the university. More than the faculty – more than the board of regents – more than all else – it is the students that make the university. It is not the crumbling stones of Oxford, nor the memories of its hundreds of able teachers that make it the great university of England, but it is the never dying intellectual and moral life of the five and twenty generations of men who have gathered there as students. The students are, in the highest and truest sense, the university themselves.”
– Professor Mallet
quote originally from: Catalogue of the University of Texas for 1883-4, the appendix of which gives addresses at the laying of the cornerstone and inaugural exercises. Cf., Austin Daily Statesman, Sept. 12, 18, 1883.
also appears in: Ronnie Dugger Our Invaded Universities: Form, Reform and New Starts p.7
UT Watch believes that for students to truly create a participatory democracy on campus and in the community we must invert our current perspective to see each of us as a part of the university and not as “consumers of university services” as described by UT President Larry Faulkner and other administrators.