Your Future and Your University

- 5 - possibility, that Nevada should have no university at all capable of providing quality work in the interest of having many places where the forms of education are gone through, is the real road to disaster. The quality of the state university is important to all of education, elementary, secondary, and higher; and whether publicly or privately controlled. Outside the Northeastern United States--and even there to a substantial extent-- it is primarily in the professional and graduate schools of the public university that future college and high school teachers for all types of institutions are educated, that our future leaders in science and its applications, and in the liberal arts, receive their education. If you have your United States geography well in mind, I invite you to follow me in a little educational map-making. Take the southern border of Arkansas as a base line. First extend that line west to the Pacific Coast. Than extend it east to the Mississippi River. Follow the Mississippi and then the Ohio to the Ohio-Pennsylvania border and then north to the Canadian boundary. Go west with me along the border to the Pacific Ocean, then down the coast to meet the original east-west line. In all that vast area, how many strong graduate schools are there which are not located in public universities? Many knowledgeable people would say you can count them on the fingers of one hand. No one would contend it would take more than two hands. Here is a contiguous area involving more than half the States of the Union, in which, no matter what high school or undergraduate college young people attend, their opportunities for high level advanced professional and scientific and other scholarly education depend almost entirely on the future of the public university. I have talked about the American ideal of educational opportunity for all who have the will and the talent to make use of it. We have made great progress toward this ideal but we are still a long way today from achieving it. It is still a fact that half our young people in the upper 25 per cent of ability nationall