Dear CAS faculty and Staff,
As you’re aware if you’ve walked down 13th Street between Chapman and Johnson, Tykeson Hall, the new home for CAS and a building that will offer integrated academic and career advising to UO students, is quickly rising. We expect Tykeson to open for classes in Winter 2019, and we’re now working on the details of the building: interiors, furniture, finishing details, artwork, etc.
We will soon be choosing quotations to be incorporated into Tykeson’s design and become part of the building’s message to students, faculty, and staff. We invite you to submit ideas for building inscriptions, and we are seeking passages from a diverse array of cultures, regions, and time periods. We will have to choose only two or three in the end, and we hope you will help make it a difficult choice by sending us words of wisdom, illumination, guidance, and good sense from your favorite authors.
We’ve been guided thus far in our planning by a stanza of a Robert Frost poem, “Two Tramps in Mud Time” (https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/two-tramps-in-mud-time/), a poem that weighs the need to work with the love of work and concludes that we should choose work that speaks to both the necessity and pleasure of the jobs we do, that is, to both vocation and avocation. Three years ago we took Frost’s stanza for our working motto:
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
We welcome your suggestions for quotations that might become inscriptions about education and careers in Tykeson Hall. Our teaching and advising in Tykeson will emphasize
- The importance of advising and mentoring
- The interconnection between academics and professional pursuits
- The value of a liberal arts education.
To read about the Tykeson vision and see the building plans, please go to the Tykeson Hall website (https://tykeson.uoregon.edu).
Please submit brief quotations with attributions to Jules Jones ([email protected]) by Friday, July 27, 2018.
Thank you for your ideas.
CAS Dean’s Office
Andrew, Bruce, Carol, Hal, Karen, and Philip
Knowledge is good.
What, me worry?
Grow up, get a job, raise a family.
Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean?
Mr. McGuire: There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?
For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home
Diversity is Excellence
“The world is full of bastards, the number increasing the farther you get from Missoula, Montana.”
Norman Maclean: A River Runs Through It
“Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”
“We smoked it all.”
Michael: “You can have my answer now, Senator. Nothing.”
A Frostian couplet more suited to collegiate life at UO might be:
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
From After Apple Picking, published in Frost’s second collection, “North of Boston.”
Mark’d out by dangerous parts he meets the shock,
And fatal Learning leads him to the block:
Around his tomb let Art and Genius weep,
But hear his death, ye blockheads, hear and sleep.
“John 3:16”
Correction out today: Tykeson is expected to open Fall 2019, not Winter 2019.
From A. Lincoln: “It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this, too, shall pass away.” How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! — how consoling in the depths of affliction! “And this, too, shall pass away.” And yet let us hope it is not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us; and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.”
U of O should be happy that it is sitting on a $900 million endowment and raised $130 million during the academic year. Maybe the inscription should read “Your name could be on a building if you shell out enough dough”, but in Latin.
I have serious money for anyone that can get “but in Latin” inscribed in stone on the side of a UO building. And by serious, I mean a major fraction of my net worth–a fin or sore buck at least.
I’m no classics professor, although I do own an air compressor. But Harbor Freight wants $12.99 for the air hammer and another 4.99 for chisels. So while I salute your free speech efforts, count me out on this one.
https://www.harborfreight.com/air-tools/hammers/air-impact-hammer-kit-92037.html
Coincidentally, “I’m no classics professor, although I do own an air compressor” is the Classics departmental motto.
then that motto would be in Latin,
so what is Latin for air compressor?
Mottos in Latin are too hegemonic. Besides, the university can’t even translate it’s own Latin motto correctly (Senate is complicit in this too: https://senate.uoregon.edu/tag/mens-agitat-molem), so this one is in Greek. Compression of air in Alexandrian engineering is πιλήσις ἀέρος. It is left as an exercise for the reader to work out the rest.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.”