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But all this, in Lee's mind, is secondary to "the main business" of S.M.U.: teaching students to think. And, says he, "the older I get, the surer I am that it is not only important to know how to think, but that it is important to know what to think about.
"No higher education, professional or otherwise, can afford to neglect philosophy, literature and religion. In a country as practical as the Southwest, one would think the public would demand only the scientific and the practical. For some reason, a considerable portion of the Southwest thinks that there is no harm in believing something." No thunderer, no John Wesley, Umphrey Lee stops short of telling Texans exactly what to believe. His sermons are built with brick and stone.
*Not new. In the 1840s, an English traveler visited a Texas frontier community, sardonically recorded in his journal that "they have built two colleges and have logs cut for a university."