From the writings of Geraldine “Gerry” Hammond, a Wichita State professor emeritus of English:
“I have come to realize that alumni associations are among the most important of all the components of any university. They give continuity, value and meaning to one’s educational experience over the years. Without them, bonds would be weakened and connections lost. They are, indeed, the heart of complicated and otherwise impersonal institutions.”
– Written in 1994 on the occasion of being recognized with the Laura (McMullen) Cross ’25 Distinguished Service Award for her contributions as a teacher at Wichita State.
“Institutions do not actually exist in themselves but are only abstractions of whatever the people in them at any given moment do and are; and all the continuity or meaning institutions can ever have is in whatever is recorded and remembered of what the people in them did and were while they were there.”
“We had Thanksgiving-eve bonfires, nightshirt parades, sorority and fraternity feuds, friendships, politics and parties, wonderful May Days with May Queens, Maypoles and Maypole winders (and real rain, of course) – and then at the end of our collegiate years, commencement. It’s all there, and if we had time enough we could put it together and bring it all back because in a very real sense everything still exists in some form or other.
The past is necessarily part of today or there is no continuity. So you see, what we were and what we did was part of the structure that is the present institution. The faculty affected us and we affected one another. Nothing was or is ever too small to be part of a greater pattern.
And institutions are not manufactured but grow out of the kinds of people who lived them. You and I can be proud of this university and of our very real part in its growth toward greatness.”
– Written in 1981 for the University of Wichita class of 1931’s 50-year anniversary and reunion; Hammond had served as editor of the 1931 university yearbook, the Parnassus
