SÆCVLO PROSINT
In his First Tusculan Disputation (no, I’ve never read it), Cicero notes of a fellow Roman, Cæcilius Statius, SERIT ARBORES QVÆ ALTERI SÆCVLO PROSINT.
He plants trees for other generations.
This was a powerful idea for the U.S. Founders. On his family seal, President John Quincy Adams announced SECVLO PROSINT.
It is also a powerful concept for UL, and for all of Cajun & Creole Louisiana. On the first day of the 20th century, UL’s first president Edwin Stephens planted acorns he had gathered from a particularly impressive New Orleans live oak in approximately 100 locations around the original SLII campus, which was only about 25 acres. Today that campus has grown to 541 acres, and we have added other campuses totaling almost 800 additional acres.
We are having a good football season, very good considering our youth and turnover… but some people here are losing their minds this morning. I’m watching Des, however, and I firmly believe he is planting oaks.
To understand, go back to Stephens. He would never see those oak trees grown. And neither will you nor I, not even our grandchildren. Some of those oaks will still be growing and becoming more beautiful for centuries to come.
There is another metaphor in all of this. The Latin SÆCVLO has other meanings beyond ‘generation.’ It can also mean ‘other worlds.’ Stephens not only planted the UL oaks, he founded the American Live Oak Society, which still exists and promotes live oaks across the South. Under Stephens, UL also cultivated and sold live oaks to the other universities in Louisiana. LSU opened its current campus in 1926, and as Stephens was an LSU alum, it is almost certain that many of their oaks were purchased from UL, as were probably oaks at Tulane, Northwestern State, and Tech. His mission of vision and sharing continue to live on at UL. Martin Hall is now looking at ways that we can use our successes, resources, and political strength to move the UL System, our other colleges, Louisiana schools, and all of the state forward.
I went back through my lengthy chronology on the history of UL and of the Cajuns & Creoles. Our history, and our advantage, is one of repeatedly planting oaks: we invest in slow-growing things that become some of the strongest and most magnificent things anywhere.
The first ancestors of the Acadians/Cajuns/Creoles* arrived in the New World in 1604, 16 years before the Mayflower arrived. They were innovators from the beginning. They were almost definitely the first New World republicans, creating democratic self-governance and a hearty egalitarian culture in the face of neglectful French colonial administration.
But the Acadians also quickly displayed two other aspects that are key to our modern success. The first is that they claimed farm land from the sea. The ingeniousness of the dikes and valves the Acadians built are evident in a biting English hypocrisy: the English thought the Acadians lazy and unsophisticated, but after le Grand Dérangement of 1755, when all of the Acadians were expelled from the region, the English found that they could not figure out how to maintain the dikes. So they kept a few illegal Acadians nearby. The dikes are another metaphor of our strong sense of independence and inventiveness. This story also represents the prejudice and the dismissiveness that many cultures have shown toward the Acadians and their modern descendants. For instance, a 1951 Louisiana geography school textbook described Cajuns as “an unsophisticated agrarian people … slow in adopting ‘American’ ways…” It does not matter how often the Cajuns and Creoles confound the prejudices, and contradict those who consider themselves our ‘betters,’ the outsiders do not learn; to their detriment, and to our profit. (And BTW, for reasons beyond this discussion the preceding egalitarian attitude is essential to our innovative spirit in our region, and our University.)
The dikes were also part of a social advance the Acadians pioneered: they were tolerant. Because they took no land or other resources from the local Mi’kmaq tribes, the Acadians, unique among New World colonists, lived in peace with the natives. In fact, the Acadians and natives intermarried, and the Mi’kmaq hid and sheltered some of the Acadians after the expulsion. This tolerance has paid off repeatedly for our culture and our University.
Here it becomes personal for me. I am of Lebanese and WASP ancestry with no Cajun blood. But the Lebanese and other Middle Easterners have not only been tolerated here, they have become critical to our University. Two important buildings on campus are Abdalla and Antoun Halls, named because of generous donations from alums and supporters. Two of our seven deans, Azmy Ackleh (Sciences) and Ahmed Khattab (Engineering) are Middle Easterners. Indian Ramesh Kolluru, VP of Research, has been the driving force behind our recent research explosion, and there are many other internationals and other minorities making important contributions to our University. (Not to mention the Kibodi brothers, who are of Congolese descent.)
So long before any of our known ancestors were born, remote forbears initiated 400 years of political, technological, and social innovation. Those early plantings, like any good oak, are only today becoming fully formed, impressive, and beautiful. But we must fully understand our inheritance, and protect it. Impatience would have destroyed these things, or even prevented their germination.
We plant trees for others: for our descendants, and for the world.
In 1776 the US Founders created what they thought was the first New World republic, but as we have seen, they were not the first. When asked whether the Acadian experiment informed the Founders, Yale’s John Mack Faragher, author of a history of the early Acadians, A Great and Noble Scheme, noted, “The silence is deafening. The Founders were all aware of the Acadians and their experiment in government, but they never mentioned them in their deliberations.”
Then in 1816, William Darby, in surveying the land around the Vermilion River noted, "If a bold extent of view can give vigour to the imagination; if the increase of the powers of intellect bear any proportion to the sweep of the eye; upon one of the eminencies ought a seat of learning be established…"
Obviously, he did not visit in summer.
In 1836, the same year that Vermilionville was incorporated as little more than a village, the Police Jury passed a bond issue to build five roads to the much larger cities that surrounded us. That sort of economic initiative seems obvious today, but it was a radical idea at the time. In fact, as best we can ascertain, Lafayette became the first of dozens of ‘Hub Cities,’ including Boston. Two decades later, in 1858 Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Dean of the Harvard Medical School and father of famed jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., declared that the Boston statehouse was “the Hub of the Solar System.” Did he borrow the idea from us? There is no way to know, but we have seen much larger and better-known cities and schools ‘borrow’ our ideas and innovations. But the impact of those roads was huge, as immediately to go anywhere in Acadiana, one went to Lafayette first. It is no coincidence that, almost a century later, the first piece of recorded Cajun music ever published was Allons à Lafayette, ‘Let’s go to Lafayette,’ by Joseph and Cléoma Falcon. (BTW, notice ‘Falcon,’ an assimilated name, and family.)
The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 incorporated the first public demonstration of electricity. Apparently, enough of the locals went to the Fair that a brief 4 years later, an 1897 bond election for water & electricty created the Lafayette Utility System. I was told by a retired senior manager for LUS that part of the reason for that effort was because it was known that SLII, which was only in discussion at the time, would want electricity. To understand how visionary, progressive, and patient that was, the city of Scott would not get electricity until 1927. So it was another slow-growing but enormous tree: in 2005, LUS passed the Fiber To The Home initiative, making Lafayette the world’s leader in municipal Internet utilities. As a speaker noted at a national conference at the time, “When Denver grows up, we want to be Lafayette.”
Then in 1898 little SLII was founded. We’re not even sure today what we were then… were we a vo-tech school? A prep school? A community college? Who at that time could have foreseen where we would be today? But even the creation of UL offers insights. Today we use the term ‘Town & Gown’ to designate warm relations between college & city, but that is not the origin. The first modern university was established in Bologna in the 11th Century, but relations between the townspeople and students became so fraught that riots erupted, and so a group of faculty and students removed themselves to Paris, where the second-oldest university was created in 1215. However, the same tensions, and drunken riots, emerged, and some students and faculty left for Oxford, elevating that cathedral school to a university. Unfortunately, the same problems arose, and some of the students and faculty relocated to Cambridge.
Those tensions persisted into the 19th century. Just as creating the Hub City seems obvious today, so having a college in one’s community would also seem to be an obvious asset. But the majority of 19th century colleges were located in small towns, because most cities saw them as a nuisance. Opelousas refused SLII, but Lafayette, Scott, and New Iberia all vied to host the campus. Once again we see our independence of thought, the vision it produces, and the patience it requires.
In 1904 the oldest surviving issue of The Vermilion was published, displaying the Victor Hugo motto, Ceux Qui Vivent Ce Sont Ceux Qui Luttent: Those who live are those who struggle. Again, a fit description of our path.
In 1934, again because of the Cajun & Creole traditions of tolerance, the first four black priests in the United States were accepted by Bishop Jules Jeanmard into Lafayette’s Parish of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. It is impossible to calculate the impact of Jeanmard’s foresightedness, but 20 years later UL became the first historically white school in the South to desegregate, and we simultaneously became the first in the nation to conform to the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v Board ruling. Despite the courage of our administration and of the black students who enrolled, the students were often ostracized. But they were welcomed at Our Lady of Wisdom by Fr. Alexander Sigur, who would later become Msgr. Sigur. It was, again, a work of vision and patience, and we paid for it: the Legislature was highly punitive toward UL for some years. Nevertheless, that independence and tolerance laid the groundwork for the top-10 basketball teams, and helped UL recruit many of the outstanding professionals, community leaders, and standout athletes that UL has produced. It also allowed us to recruit Ernest Gaines as our first writer-in-residence, who has carried our name around the world.
There are so many others, and they accelerate with each passing year.
In 1957 the UL Weight Lifting Team won our 1st national championship in any sport, and on the team was UL’s first known Asian student, Walter Imahara. That was the first step in many areas of athletic excellence.
In the same year, UL created a master’s in Mathematics, Computer Science and Engineering; it is believed that this was the first graduate program in computer science anywhere in the world. That moved us into the national spotlight in an exploding field, and computer science, in turn, moved all of the sciences forward. It also elevated UL to become the third public university in Louisiana, with Southern and LSU. That initiatve also opened the way for the South’s first master’s in computer engineering, in 1981.
In 1963, a group of students and faculty began broadcasting a ‘radio’ program through the campus power grid; that effort became KRVS which today is nationally recognized among NPR affiliates as one of the top producers of local programming… much of which is, again, multi-cultural, yet another reflection of our tolerance.
In 1974 Ray Authément became president, and he began emphasizing research. It was slow going, we did not reach $15M in research funding until 1994, and $50M in 2004. But then we hit $100M in 2017, and $200M in 2022. And the $87M grant we recently received could possibly push us past $300M this year.
In 1981, Ray also asked Alfred Lamson to raise the first $1M for the UL Foundation. Alfred thought about it a few days, and told Authément, “No. Small money is harder than large money. Let’s raise $10M.” We could hear the peals of laughter coming from BR & NO; but within a few years both LSU and Tulane were calling us to find out how Alfred did it. In 2000, the Dowty Foundation building opened, in 2018 the Foundation passed $150M, and today the Foundation sits at over $232M. In addition, we are over $400M into a half-billion dollar fund-raising campaign.
In 1984, UL took over the NIRC after LSU turned it down. It is now the largest primate center in North America, and it has paved the way for two centers totaling over $50M: the New Iberia Bioinnovation Center; and a Level 3 testing facility, both of which will bookend the NIRC. The first will provide laboratory and research facilities for pharmaceutical design, creation, and preliminary testing, while the second will allow for human testing.
In 1972, the USL History Series was created, which became the UL Press and the Center for Louisiana Studies, both of which moved into the rennovated Roy House earlier this year.
There are too many others, and I have worked on this for much too long. But look over this sample, consider the starting points, look at where we are now, and ask where will be in a few years. Over and over, UL and our local culture flourish in the face of insufficient resources, and much ridicule. We succeed against the odds with patience and vision; we build things the right way.
And the harvest is like our oak trees, slow, but solid, and very strong.
So first of all, I see too many people here, too many people in Martin Hall, and too many people at Reinhardt Drive, who constantly fret, "What are they doing at the 'big' schools?" I would urge them to reconsider. I would invite them to instead ask, "What have we done that has brought us to where we are with such a poverty of resources?
"How might we build on the strengths we already have, particularly those strengths that may be unique to our culture?"
Coach Des and his players are not happy with last night’s game, either. But I can promise you that this morning, he is looking at his team with much love, commitment, and concern, and they are learning to respond to him, to one another, and to our university, with the same focus. The players are re-committing to his path, his vision, and his unyielding dedication to personal and collective excellence and hard work.
Don’t be too critical. Don’t be too impatient.
Let us plant trees for generations we will never see.
*The local Creoles have their own culture and traditions, but we are all related, and each of our cultures, and many other cultures besides, have intermingled and have mutually informed one another.
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Re: SÆCVLO PROSINT
Originally Posted by CajunFun
