The Two Towers: Main

EPILOGUE

"Be their names ever honored," said one of the speakers at the dedication of Boynton Hall in 1868 in tribute to the Institute's founders, "honored among their fellow citizens, among their friends and cultivators of sound learning everywhere, as well as among those to the latest generation, who shall especially reap the fruits of their wise beneficence."

Who shall especially--in no other category fall the friends, the trustees, the alumni, the teachers, and students of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the year of 1965.

During the hundred years of W.P.I.'s existence many similar schools have been founded. Some have disappeared, others have thrived. The calendar has been the same for all of them-- admissions, semesters, graduations; the activities--social, athletic, and academic. The development of complexity has been parallel, the evolution of administration, comparable.

What, then, has made Worcester Tech unique? This is a question which deserves an answer before the Institute picks up the challenge of what will make it unique in the future.

In the first place, the school has never known exactly what it was. Its founding definitions were too new, too broad, too hazy, to label it with any of the usual names or hamper it with any of the prescribed patterns. The direction of each word in the school's first name, the Worcester County Free Institute of Industrial Science, resolved into healthy, continuous argument for many years. Even after the adoption of a new name, the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the old concepts clung like barnacles. By the time of its Centennial observance, the school had long been acknowledged a college of engineering and science, and a new name for a new role seemed to be imminent.

This constant search for identity has kept the school always a-growing, always a-building. Rarely an imitator, sometimes an innovator, the Institute has seldom been less than conservative at many points where it did not matter, but always brave enough where it did. Moreover, Tech has expressed an eagerness to work out its own destiny.

At some edge of its educational program, the Institute has always maintained contact with the real work of the world. The school has prospered and languished according to the proportionate strength of this contact, and the steam of endless controversy produced by it has generated unbelievable energy for the professors.

Human progress has always depended on the proverbial conflict between the dream and reality. Sometimes one is in the lead; sometimes the other. This is not a new idea, nor especially worthy of note, except that at Tech the two have existed under the same roof since the day the school first opened its doors. There was