University of Virginia Library

A LETTER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA FROM THE
RICE INSTITUTE

In accepting the invitation of the Rector and Visitors and the President
and Faculty of the University of Virginia requesting the presence of a delegate
from the Rice Institute during the exercises in celebration of the one
hundredth anniversary of the founding of the University to be held on
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, May the thirty-first to June
the third, nineteen hundred and twenty-one, the Trustees and Faculty of the
Rice Institute have pleasure also in announcing the appointment of Mr.
Stockton Axson, Litt.D., L.H.D., LL.D., Professor of English Literature, to
represent on so auspicious an occasion in the history of University education
in America the youngest of educational foundations in the South, and to
bear to the University of Virginia, Alma Mater of men and of universities,
cordial greetings of congratulation and good-will from the Rice Institute, a
university of liberal and technical learning founded by William Marsh Rice,
and dedicated by him to the advancement of Letters, Science and Art, by
instruction and by investigation in the individual and in the race of humanity.
And these cordial greetings carry also grateful recognition of several
reminders of his ancient university which an alumnus of Virginia may discover
in the environment of the new institution in Texas: a campus site of

spacious dimensions and a comprehensive architectural plan of dignity and
distinction; the spirit of research and teaching housed in a home of extraordinary
beauty as well as of more immediate utility, and the features of the
founder of the University of Virginia cut in stone among the effigies of its
patron saints in the more humane letters, ancient and modern, and the
fundamental sciences, pure and applied; a society of scholars seeking solutions
of the universe of thought and things, and a guild of students living a
common life under the restraining influences of an honor system of self-government:
these reflections of academic traditions that flourished in
Virginia's early history: and Faith and Freedom: here the freedom of the
plains, as there the freedom of the mountains: here, as there, faith in the
capacity of human intelligence to find in human experience firm foundations
of hope for the human spirit: and here as there, the freedom vouchsafed by a
heavenly vision of service towards which men may well press forward,
heartened by whatever of progress our civilization may have already
achieved towards Justice, Security, Tolerance, Knowledge.