To the President of Colorado College in the year 1999:
My dear Mr. President, It seems a little strange to address you before you are born but none the less am I writing to a real personage, so great is my faith in the future of Colorado College.
The growth of this institution during the past quarter of a century is, I am sure, prophetic of what the institution is to be under your administration.
You will be interested to know something of the great loyalty which has been shown by the friends of the college in this day of smaller things. It has been the purpose of its friends from the beginning to maintain the Christian character of the institution and to send our young people forth believing that first of all they must be earnest men and women, doing with all their might whatever is given them to do in this world. The strong moral and religious purposes of the college we have tried to make dominate everything else. The beginnings which have been made will lead I have no doubt into a much larger and better future.
The buildings which have been erected by the generous gifts of its friends will no doubt by the time of your administration be multiplied many fold.
The endowment funds which today are less than one half million of dollars will long before your time have increased to five or six million of money.
Our small library of thirty thousand volumes has no doubt increased tenfold.
The number of students which this past year has been five hundred under your administration has become between two and three thousand. I have no doubt your engineering department has become one of the most important in the country with its splendid equipment along the lines of electricity and the application of power to practical affairs.
Your laboratories of chemistry, biology and physco-physics are among the best in the country. Along the lines of applied science the development of Colorado [College] has been very great indeed and its industrial department is playing no doubt a very important part in the development of the Rocky Mountain Region. But far more than this I predict that the college has become a center of literary production and influence. The publications of its faculty are now reaching in their influence into all parts of the world and its graduates are feeling more and more the helpfulness of the opportunities offered by the institution for literary study and research. The college, in other words, has become a center of literary production and with its great library and its distinguished scholars is regarded as one of the most important centers of scholastic learning and classical study.
The influence of the college in the state and throughout the section of the country is most far reaching, producing a better social atmosphere and great purity in politics. As it is today the leading moral and intellectual influence in this section of the country so will it be in the great development that is sure to come in this section of the country one hundred years from this time.
The students, faculty and Board of Trustees send their greeting down along the years to you, living in the next century. They rejoice in all your prosperity and in the work which you are doing.
Bidding you all God speed, trusting that it may be our privilege to look in upon you from the unseen world, to walk through your buildings, to sit under the trees which we are planting, to witness the growth that has come and with every good wish for the future;
Believe me,
Very sincerely yours,
William F. Slocum