Commencement Harangues

College commencements are a flow of soul rather than a feast of reason. Last week they overflowed. The class of 1940 was cast adrift into the narrowing world with more than usual confusion of harangues, warnings, objurgations ringing in its ears.

^ At Columbia, 22,000 commencement visitors cheered British Ambassador Lord Lothian as he was kudized, heard President Nicholas Murray Butler exclaim (by proxy): "The call is for every civilized human being who believes in justice, in liberty and in public morals. The bell is ringing!"

>Johns Hopkins University's President Isaiah Bowman: "Reason is on the run.

Those who are most vocal want you to whoop it up, not to think it out. I plead for strength before we bait the bear." >At Cooper Union (Manhattan), Case School's President William Elgin Wickenden told graduates: "The decades of illusion and self-indulgence are over. Your generation may never know security of wealth, of employment, perhaps even of life itself." >Owen D. Young (at Syracuse): "I cannot say that the insistent cry of youth today-jobs, not war'-is wrong, but I can say that unless you are prepared for the second you may never have the first." >New York University's Chancellor Harry Woodburn Chase: ". . . In these last tragic weeks there must have come home to every one of us a new sense of the worthwhileness of the institutions of a free civilization."

>Swarthmore's retiring President Frank Aydelotte: "When the great mass of our citizens see the situation clearly, they will bring irresistible pressure upon the American Government to make available to the Allies our airplanes and other war material, our military secrets, our great financial resources and the immense productive capacity of American industry." > M. I. T.'s President Karl Taylor Comn-ton: "I believe that the policies of pacifism and isolationism . . . are in no small degree responsible for today's tragic ruin of the hopes of 20 years ago." President Compton announced that M. I. T., which in 1914 started the first course in aeronautical engineering in the U. S., was engaged in several important research projects for U. S. defense, would soon build a laboratory for research on airplanes with a $100,000 gift from General Motors' Alfred P. Sloan.

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