Ask the Archivist

When I was a student, and each time I return to Rochester, I find Professor [John] Slater’s inscriptions on the front of the library (“HERE IS THE HISTORY OF HUMAN IGNORANCE,” “HERE IS THE HISTORY OF MAN’S HUNGER FOR TRUTH”) particularly moving.

I am searching for matching photographs—taken at the same time, from the same angle, with the same lighting, etc. When I was an undergraduate, I spent an afternoon in the library looking at historical photos and other documents from when the River Campus was first constructed. At that time, I was able to browse a set of black-and-white prints taken by Ansel Adams. But it’s been 40-plus years (!) since then, so I don’t remember whether the photos I am looking for were among those prints. —John Womer ’82

In 1998, then University photographer Joe Gawlowicz took the pair of photos shown here: these seem to be the only deliberately created pair in the Archives.

Ansel Adams visited campus in 1952 and created a portfolio of photographs to use in a capital campaign to fund the merging of the Colleges for Women and Men. Adams’s photographs only include one of the inscriptions (“human ignorance”). The 1977 cover of Professor Arthur May’s A History of the University of Rochester, 1850–1962 features a dramatic photograph of the other (“hunger for truth”).

As you note, the texts were composed by Professor John Rothwell Slater. Hired in 1905 as assistant professor of English, he chaired that department from 1908 until his retirement in 1942. The October 1930 River Campus dedication issue of Rochester Review noted: “Professor John R. Slater . . . has virtually carved his personality on the front of the Rush Rhees Library for the inspiration of future generations, as well as the present.” His original compositions, or choice of quotations, also grace the library’s doors and Messinger Periodical Reading Room and the Meridian marker in the center of the Eastman Quadrangle.

Correspondence in the Archives between Slater and the University’s president Rush Rhees shows that formulating the inscriptions began in 1929. “There are plenty of familiar quotations about books, but they are all hackneyed by frequent repetition. Certainly, I would not quote Bacon’s recipes for readings. . . .” A deeply religious man, Slater also looked to the Bible: “The pessimistic dicta of [Ecclesiastes] come as near the goal as anything, but not for the young.”

One draft shows three pairs of suggested texts—glimmers of the final version alongside Milton and Emerson—to which Slater has added a note: “There is first the literature of knowledge and secondly the literature of power. The function of the first is to teach; the function of the second is to move.”

John Lorenz, deputy librarian of Congress, spoke at the 1970 dedication of the addition to Rush Rhees Library. As a teenager, he accompanied his parents on a 1930s road trip across New York state:

“I don’t recall how we happened to stop at the University of Rochester campus. I was already an inveterate reader so one of the buildings we visited was the [Library]. . . . What really made a great and lasting impact on me were the two inscriptions on either side of the entrance, an impact which led me to take paper and pencil right then and there and copy [them]. I have seen many inscriptions since that day, but I have never again been impressed to the point of copying another one down . . . and this yellowing piece of paper has been in my files ever since. Looking back, I’m inclined to believe that if there was any single influence which started me toward thinking of being a librarian, it was the impact and the meaning of these inscriptions.”

In submitting the final texts to Rhees, Slater reported on a meeting at which he and other faculty considered every element of the inscriptions: weighing the meaning, effect, and word count. “One member of the faculty doubted whether ‘ages yet to come’ are likely to be ‘wiser.’ Dean [Arthur] Gale said of this criticism, ‘If they are not wiser, God help them!’ And to this I add, Amen.”

For more history about the inscriptions.