COMMENCEMENT 1965= The Generational Conflict

COLLEGE seniors across the U.S. were uncharacteristically silent. The vast captive audience was once again listening (more or less) to the captive but willing speakers. "We're not responsible in the executive branch for anything at home or abroad just now," said Vice President Hubert Humphrey. "Now is the time we all go to commencements." Humphrey, who spoke at six, was considerably busier than President Johnson, who spoke at four, notably about peace. At George Washington University, Secretary of State Dean Rusk defended the Administration's policy in Viet Nam. At West Point, General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, declared that the global mess was "not hopeless," while at Long Island University, Interior Secretary Stewart Udall sounded pretty hopeless about the urban mess. At the University of Iowa, Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz remarked that "commencement speakers have a good deal in common with grandfather clocks: standing usually some six feet tall, typically ponderous in construction, more traditional than functional, their distinction is largely their noisy communication of essentially commonplace information."

Whether noisy or quiet, at least one thing differentiated the speakers this year. Where they once used to stride along roads (long), sail oceans (uncharted), or climb mountains (lofty), they are now in orbit (dizzying). Said Emmett Dedmon, executive editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, at George Williams College: "May the explosions of your generation cut as clean as those which freed the capsule of Gemini IV from the booster engines." Whatever his fellow editors might think of that particular metaphor, Dedmon stated the dominant theme of the 1965 commmencement speeches: the "explosions" of the younger generation.

Nostalgia & Anti-Nostalgia

Commencement cliches, like their Fourth of July counterparts, deserve a certain affection: they express a deep desire for ceremony and remembrance. Behind the tritest phrase, there is sometimes a desperate attempt to reach across the unbridgeable gap and tell the young what age and experience have taught. In that sense Polonius was the model commencement speaker ("To thine own self be true").

Often, today's gowned Polonius ends up speaking only to himself and to his own generation, confessing his own failures or omissions or hopes, and interpreting the world in his own image. Peter Schrag, an official of Amherst College, has catalogued some of the inevitable themes, including the Simple Uplift Speech, which stresses the need for renewed moral vigor, basic virtue and profound verities, along with the Inverted Uplift Speech, which stresses the lack of moral vigor, basic virtue and profound verities. Then there is the Aching Anywhere Appeal ("Anywhere needs your help; the Anywhereians are starving; their country is in ferment; world leadership depends on saving Anywhere").

Certain other types could be added to the Schrag list, for instance the Nostalgia Oration, which holds that things were much better (or anyway simpler) in the speaker's youth, and the Anti-Nostalgia Oration, which holds that things are much better (or anyway more exciting) today. Of major importance is the Nostra Culpa Theme: "We made a mess of things, and it is up to you, the young, to do better." Hardly anyone dares to strike the opposite note: "We did pretty well, and you'll be damn fortunate if you keep up with us."

No one any longer speaks in praise of success as such, let alone financial success--although Columbia Professor Louis Milic, a specialist in rhetoric, thinks that if a speaker some day were to exhort graduates to make money "it would be a real show stopper." In most speeches, God seems to be a rather fading presence--except at religious institutions. Duty is rarely invoked, and certainly not with the confidence of Harvard President Abbott Lawrence Lowell, who in 1917 severely told future officers: "See that your men have reason to respect you." Politically too, things have become more complicated since Senator Henry Cabot Lodge in 1919 bade graduates beware of schemes that purport "to make men happy in a moment" and added: "I do not fear Bolshevism but I regard Bolshevists as simple criminalists."

Since World War II, two themes have been dominant. One is the Progress Gap: "Our moral progress lags far behind our technical progress." The other is the Conformity Crisis: "In this age of centralized power and vast organization, you must remain individuals." But where a decade ago the silent generation was urged to make itself heard, where a few years ago the beat generation was suspected of not being concerned with serious issues, the present generation is highly audible and riotously concerned. The old picture of anxious youth going forth into a hostile world has been reversed. It now looks more like hostile youth going forth into an anxious world--a world not sure what to expect from them.

Alienation & Freedom

Troubled by the "campus revolt," some speakers tried to outploy it through the flattery gambit. President James Hester of N.Y.U. saluted the graduates as "the generation of hope." Others used the sympathetic approach; at Maine's Nasson College, Bel Kaufmann, author of the bestselling Up the Down Staircase, pitied the young because they "no longer have heroes to emulate or rebel against. We have the non-hero acting out his non-deed on the giant stage of the absurd." One speaker simply counterattacked by telling the young that they are not as smart as they think they are. Said Dean Bayless Manning of Stanford Law: "You are already threatened by intellectual obsolescence."

The University of California's President Clark Kerr spoke at Berkeley, where much of the student unrest started; it would all be forgotten, said Kerr rather comfortably, by the time the class of '65 held its 50th reunion. At Tufts, Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach declared that he was all for protest as long as it was meaningful, but "it becomes pointless, silly and even harmful when it serves only as a substitute for goldfish swallowing or a panty raid." Katzenbach cautioned against forming rigid convictions on insufficient evidence, and recalled Oliver Cromwell's words to the Church of Scotland: "My brethren, I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken." Presidential Adviser McGeorge Bundy sounded less patient when he remarked at Notre Dame that "often the least learned make the most noise."

There were the familiar complaints about the computerized life. Poet James Dickey warned at California's San Fernando Valley State College that, on the edge of the "anonymous modern abyss, you must develop your private brinksmanship, your strategies, your ruses, your delightful and desperate games of inner survival, whether they take the form of Batman comics or whistling Handel's Water Music, enabling you to live perpetually at the edge but very much on your own ground." It was Yale's President Kingman Brewster who perhaps best expressed the mood of the commencement speakers. After warning against "the self-pity now popularly dubbed alienation," he praised the students' concern for social justice, but reminded them that "the ugliness of the radical" is no different from the "ugliness of the reactionary." Both share "the sin of arrogance," which is freedom's enemy. He concluded by revising Barry Goldwater's famous campaign dictum: "Intolerance in the name of freedom is no virtue; patience in the name of justice is no vice."

Were the young listening? Probably not. The last word may belong to the student speaker at Yale who some time ago summed up the situation with a cliche of his own: "We are the leaders of tomorrow--how does that grab you?"

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