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[ music ]
For this fair day we have worked
and prayed
and waited.
In the faith of high adventure,
in the joy of high endeavor,
in the hope of high achievement,
we have asked for strength,
and with the strength a vision,
and with the vision courage:
the courage born of straight and clear thinking,
the vision of enduring forms of human service,
the strength in resolute and steadfast devotion
to definite purpose.
[ music ]
And today,
by virtue of the founder’s splendid gift to the people,
and by virtue of the public spirit of his early advisers…
the Rice Institute which was to be,
in this its modest beginning…
now has come to be.
[ music ]
Behold a campus of three hundred acres.
Unfold the map we have made,
for a great deal of the meaning of this new institution
appears in its lanes and lawns,
its walks and drives,
its cloisters and retreats.
[ music ]
The new institution thus aspires to
university standing of the highest grade.
For the present it is proposed to assign
no upper limit to its educational endeavor.
[ music ]
Ladies and Gentlemen of Houston:
At your gates there have arisen for all time
the walls and towers of the Rice Institute,
whose life is to be an integral part of your life,
whose service is to be local in the best sense,
whose significance, let us hope,
may be state-wide,
and even national, in its reach.
[ music ]
[ JFK: But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? ]
[ JFK: And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? ]
[ JFK: Why does Rice play Texas? ]
[ JFK: We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, ]
[ JFK: not because they are easy, ]
[ JFK: but because they are hard. ]
[ music ]
A university devoted to the advancement of literature,
science,
and art…
A society of scholars in whose company your children,
and your children’s children
and their children,
may spend formative years of their aspiring youth
pursuing culture with forward-looking minds
and far-seeing spirit.
A temple of wisdom and sanctuary of learning
within whose courts and cloisters
you yourselves may find an occasional retreat
in which to think more quietly and more deeply…
and mayhap to discover you may have a share
in the high privileges and solemn duties
which belong to every member of that great community…
that in the continuity of human history
you may march forward,
in a great pageant that moves from the living past…
through the living present…
into the living future.
[ music ]