The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.
Du Bois articulates the university's paramount function as fostering a crucial balance between practical existence and expanding knowledge, which he identifies as the essence of civilization.
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Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable streams of thought and ethical strivings; the danger of the one lies in anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy.
So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre.
All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities.
But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them.