Forth--Without Cheer

Forth-Without Cheer

On the theory that college campuses are cloistered founts of academic learning, commencement speakers each June have traditionally considered it their duty--or at least part of it--to describe the world outside for their youthful audiences. But if the world outside was anything like the one described at commencements across the U.S. last week, 1960s graduate would do well to forget that $600-a-month job offer and bury himself as far back in the library stacks as he can squirm. The mood was one of gloom, doom, and disdain for the U.S. and the road it is traveling: P: Princeton University President Robert F. Goheen, baccalaureate address: "Near and far the cheap and tawdry are glorified over achievements of solid worth; opiates of half-truth are seized in preference to realities of fact and need . . . We find ourselves as a nation on the defensive and as a people seemingly paralyzed in self-indulgence."

P:Harvard President Nathan M. Pusey, baccalaureate address: ''To many, not just the colleges but the whole Western world has for some time seemed adrift with little sense of purposeful direction, lacking deeply held conviction, wandering along with no more stirring thought in the minds of most men than desire for di version, personal comfort and safety.P:I Poet Richard Armour at Whitman College: "Can you visualize with me brain service stations called Brainatoriums or Braindromats, where attendants (appropriately clad in white jackets) will wipe off your glass cortex and polish the chrome of your cerebellum while pumping in five ounces of grey matter? 'Fill 'er up,' you will say, 'and give me the superpower antiknock Ethyl think juice, with vitamins added.' And sometimes you will drive off with a hole in your head, when the attendant forgets to replace the cap at the base of your skull." P:M.I.T. President Julius Stratton, at Carleton College: "The impact of technology upon self-government is to subject the processes of democracy to a complete change of scale. In the massiveness of the effort, the influence of individual leadership is diffused and destroyed . . . Problems are of such colossal magnitude that it becomes virtually impossible to understand them in sufficient detail for wise decision and the mass of the system is so huge that decision more often than not leads to no perceptible action." P:Yale College Dean William C. DeVane, at Loyola University: ''The world that a young man enters today is a glittering and insidious thing . . . We must acknowledge that the loss of faith in our world, our destiny, our religion, is the cloudy and dark climate which most of America finds itself living in today. The individual may do what he likes to further his own gain. The man of wealth owns a whole district of slum dwellings, and feels no pangs of conscience for the hunger, squalor and disease he encourages. The aggressive salesman makes outrageous claims for the product he wishes to sell. The novelist writes a scrofulous book in hope of being on the bestseller list, and television corrupts the public taste ... I seem to have worked myself into a most unhappy state of gloom by all this."

P: University of California (Santa Barbara) Chancellor Samuel B. Gould at Pomona College: "The challenge of the hour is one in which we face adversity for the first time in our history. We face a moral and spiritual adversity within our own borders brought on by a general slackening of will, a general tendency to countenance cupidity and applaud cunning, a general distrust of intellectual pursuits and those who pursue them, each a general vagueness as to national purpose and resolve. We have learned to distrust the intangible, to fear the nonconformist, to worship the material."

Before delivering his riposte to the world, Chancellor Gould had the wit and wisdom to examine the academic rite of the commencement speech itself, and to wonder if anyone was listening. Said he: "The commencement speaker represents the continuation of a barbaric custom that has no basis in logic. If the spate of oratory that inundates our educational institutions during the month of June could be transformed into rain for Southern California, we should all be happily awash or waterlogged."

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