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SERVING THE CAUSE becoming one of the most outstanding selective liberal arts colleges in the nation." Intelligent planning at any time requires some measure of agreement concerning the purposes of the institution on whose behalf it is being undertaken. During more than the first century of the College's existence it did not seem necessary to express those purposes in writing, at least not in one officially approved document to which one could easily refer. In the early announcements of the College it was deemed sufficient to say that it was a college. Certainly the founders assumed every interested person would know what that meant. In their inaugural addresses, successive presidents usually explained their understanding of the liberal arts and how Gettysburg proposed to present them to its students. In occasional major statements addressed to the church, officers of the College discussed how its purposes were closely related to its Lutheran connection. At the same time, year after year one looks in vain to the annual catalogue for something helpful. Even the greatly revised issue of that publication which accompanied the major curricular revision of 1911 offered nothing more illuminating than the quotation from the charter that Gettysburg "promises to exert a salutary influence in advancing the cause of liberal education," and the further reminder that the College has always endeavored "to meet the special educational needs of the time and of the community." Probably someone who inquired about the specific objectives and purposes of the College at almost any time before 1945 would have received an answer similar to the one given by the committee which the faculty commissioned in 1933 to formulate a statement of objectives and purposes: look at our curriculum and the regulations in force to conduct it; then you will know what we are.136 Actually, this answer was still very much in evidence forty years later. "We must be aware that one characteristic of the style of Gettysburg College, as manifested by many members of the faculty in recent years," the campus steering committee told the visiting Middle States team in 1973, "is a reluctance to develop detailed statements of purposes and then secure adherence to them. The purposes are to be seen rather from the way in which the institution in practice behaves." Without fanfare, the committee preparing the 1945 catalogue added a three-paragraph foreword to that publication in which they declared that "mastery of ideas and discipline of the mind have been and are the primary purposes of a college." They stressed the equal importance of "a high standard of intellectual excellence" and "ideals of conduct." As always, they concluded, Gettysburg dedicates "all her resources to the high purposes of clear thinking 136See p. 549n. 86