Of Reason & Revolution

The majority of graduates undoubtedly received their degrees with the usual mixture of relief and pride, anticipating graduate work, careers--or the draft. But many of this year's college and university commencements were surrounded by a palpable atmosphere of tension. Conscious of their newfound power, students eyed their speakers with more than the usual contempt for cliche and platitude. Wary orators appeared to treat the graduates of '68 with respect rather than condescension, and pleaded, in effect, that they reason together as adults. What many of them wanted to reason about was the phenomenon of student unrest.

Commencement speakers generally applauded today's activist students for their idealism and courage. "You have reminded us that our powerful nation runs the risk of becoming a callous and self-righteous, indeed, a bullying nation," declared Peace Corps Director Jack Vaughn in an address at Fresno State. "You have warned us that our social and political institutions show signs of congealing into unresponsive and bureaucratic establishments--you have caught our affluent society in the act of becoming a smug society." Speaking at Connecticut's Fairfield University, Lawyer Edward Bennett Williams paid students a high compliment. "Through the scientific genius of my generation," he said, "we have made the world a neighborhood. Now, through the moral and spiritual genius of yours, we will make it a brotherhood."

New Organs. Even spokesmen for institutions troubled by the student assault conceded that some goals of the protesters were valid. Speaking at the University of Pennsylvania, CBS Chairman William S. Paley, a Columbia University trustee, admitted that he "questions the soundness today of the old theory of trustees as a small, self-perpetuating group of interested laymen, many chosen for life, into whose custody the full character and conduct of the university are reposed." At his university's commencement, Columbia Historian Richard Hofstadter heartily agreed that "powers need to be reallocated, new organs of decisions and communication need to be created, greater participation of students in university decisions are bound to come. We are at a crisis point in the history of American education."

At Notre Dame, Cornell President James Perkins contended that U.S. society and the universities must heed the romantic reformers.

The answer is not "to smash them or to call for more law and more order, but to inject all our institutions with a new spirit, ready to serve a progressive will. You cannot have progress without some order--but you cannot have order without making it progressive."

But many speakers warned that continued disorder and the use of violence are self-defeating tactics in seeking university reform. "The power of an impassioned minority to disrupt is great," Under Secretary of State Nicholas deB. Katzenbach advised the Stony Brook campus of S.U.N.Y., "but not as great as the power of a determined majority to repress." Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. said at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York that "on balance, the world stands to gain from student protest," but he took issue with the New Left creed, which has inspired much of the campus disorder. "It represents an assault on rationality in politics, with its dismissal of free discussion and its conviction that violence will mystically generate policy and program. If men or mechanisms were infallible, there would be no need for persuasion; but because they are not, the discipline of consent is indispensable to civilized society."

Progressive Will. Making his valedictory address as the chancellor of U.C.L.A., Franklin Murphy noted that past generations had accented learning and achievement but ignored feeling, while the philosophy of '68 seems to be based on "sentio ergo sum--I feel, therefore I am."

Murphy warned that "you cannot build a society on feeling alone. Only a proper blend of reason, action and feeling will build a better world." At Brandeis, retiring President Abram Sachar urged students to develop a "special kind of quiet courage: not to be driven into impulsive or capricious action, and to learn to live with crisis, since that is the only way you will live through it." Students worldwide, he said, "have been at the very heart of the greatest and most promising revolution in human history. And when revolutions come, they inevitably tear into the valuable, the precious and the sanctified as well as into the obsolete and the useless." He told students to "get off the mourner's bench; you must not cloak yourself in the mantle of a wailing Cassandra. The great revolution represents birth pangs and not death throes, the life force and not the death wish."

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