That's Good Advice

"I happen to believe in commencement ceremonies," confessed University of Kentucky President John Oswald, generously, as he gave the commencement speech at Indiana's DePauw University. If commencement speeches do have value, it must--to judge from their customary content--be that of good advice. Last week, graduates got good advice by the chapelful, by the audi-toriumful, by the stadiumful.

Yes But No. At Brigham Young University in Utah, Globetrotter Lowell Thomas took for his theme the merits of skiing; at the University of Delaware, Ralph W. Tyler, Stanford Behavioral Scientist, warned students against "outdoor sports and other leisure pursuits which provide self-gratification but have little constructive value to society." Poverty Planner Sargent Shriver called on Boston College and Wesleyan University seniors to aid the economically poor; University of Chicago Chancellor George Beadle urged his own graduates to help reduce "cultural poverty"; Senate Democratic Whip Hubert Humphrey said, at the University of Massachusetts, that those who really need help are people who suffer racial discrimination.

Adlai Stevenson agreed with that and invited Maine's Colby College students to get jailed, if necessary, since "a jail sentence is no longer a dishonor but a proud achievement." At Marquette, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, on the other hand, warned "the concerned generation" not to let zeal carry them as far as jail. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, while approving all these domestic good works, told Smith girls that foreign policy is "as close and important as your friends and family, as everything you cherish."

Is That Clear? While Barry Goldwater inveighed against Big Government at Pennsylvania Military College in Chester, Lyndon Johnson argued at Swarthmore that Big Government would achieve the "Great Society." At the President's next stop on the academic circuit, Holy Cross College, he offered the hope that science might "bypass the politics of the cold war." Lady Bird thought it more important to stress peace of another kind, and told Radcliffe seniors to "avoid a conscious war with men" and to use their brains to become "not a superwoman, but a total woman, a natural woman."

Yet doing what comes naturally, warned Kentucky's Oswald, has resulted in the population boom that inflames "the ills of mankind." Was that a gentle recommendation of birth control? Maybe so, but Psychiatrist Frank Ayd, the father of twelve children, told graduates of Roman Catholic Xavier University in Cincinnati that the choice is between sacrificial abstinence and the "almost Hitlerian precept" of artificial contraception.

Arnold Nash, professor of religion at the University of North Carolina, said in a baccalaureate sermon at Vanderbilt University that graduates should "view the universe as an ordered place with a purpose," not see life as "just one damn thing after another." But Vanderbilt Chancellor Alexander Heard, making the commencement address there, saw a world in revolt, "a world running wild with no place for minds standing still." Chicago Advertising Executive Lee King, at Northwestern, said that "our deadly malady is a disappearing supply of the creative resource," while at Pomona Ambassador (to Mexico) Fulton Freeman saw students "coming into creative citizenship at a fascinating moment in history." Columnist James Reston, at Brandeis, deplored "poverty beyond understanding or excuse," and Internal Revenue Boss Mortimer Caplin, speaking at St. Michael's in Vermont, sternly disapproved "the excesses of expense-account living."

Avoid becoming second rate, cautioned Corning Glass Board Chairman Amory Houghton Jr. at Michigan's Albion College: "It is one of the most all-encompassing, intoxicating forces you'll ever come up against." Take care not to be pushy, either, added Calvin B. Hoover, Duke University economist who spoke at Duke. If anyone realizes that "you are grooming yourself for leadership, you will be considered the insufferable prig which you would be." And thus was Youth once again infused with the distilled wisdom of Age and Experience.

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