Voices of Commencement

From the rubble of a violent semester came themes for commencement speakers across the U.S. Most dwelt on factionalized America and the need for reconciliation between young and old, black and white, left and right. New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay echoed the predominant plea by calling for a "new center" in the country's politics. Speaking at Williams College in Massachusetts, he rejected rigid "attachment to the simple and the absolute." Lindsay espoused "not a compromise between the uncompromising extremes, not a compromise with our conscience, but a commitment to rational change by rational means." He added: "The revolutionary defiles the flag and the reactionary deifies it. Both offend reason and common sense."

The Big Lie. In the eyes of Harvard President Nathan M. Pusey, however, the revolutionary is the bigger offender. In a moving baccalaureate address, which evoked his personal agony in coping with Harvard's turmoils, he blamed campus disruption on faculty and student extremists "who would like to see our colleges and universities denigrated, maligned and even shut down." In Pusey's angry view, such agitators--specifically, the S.D.S.--use techniques akin to those of the late Senator Joseph McCarthy, for whom Pusey served as a favorite target. He cited the Hitlerian tactic of "the big lie"--in this case, the radicals' claim "that the university is a hopelessly bigoted, reactionary force in our society which serves the interest of a hideous military-industrial complex."

Among the results, Pusey said, were the S.D.S.-inspired furor over the presence on campus of a Dow Chemical recruiter in 1967 and this year's insinuations that Harvard's Center for International Affairs is engaged in "complicity with our nefarious Government." It is clear, he said, that "the old McCarthy technique is at work again, but this time--it is a sorrow to have to acknowledge it--by our own, and in our midst." Pusey urged his graduates to "refuse to succumb to cynicism or hopelessness. It is a long way around," he said, "but it is the civilized way, and the only way for those who have come truly to understand the role of humane learning."

"I may put it this way," Pusey concluded. "There is a world of reason, modesty, charity and trust in the midst of, and opposed to, the oppressive and contentious world of deceit, anger, vilification and self-righteousness now made so manifest all about us again, as 20 years ago, by would-be exploiters. This former world is created and precariously maintained in all generations by civilized men, a world for which in the depths of our hearts I am sure we all yearn. What I have wanted to say to you today is simply that, in my view, as Harvard men you are called to serve that world."

Though Yale President Kingman Brewster Jr. is no less a defender of the world that Pusey envisioned, he took a rather broader view of the current student generation's motives. Speaking to Yale's seniors, Brewster decried the inaccuracies of political labels, especially as they have been tossed about on campuses recently. "To call those who are not destructively militant 'moderate' grossly understates the widespread exasperation and outrage with injustice," he said. And "to call them 'liberal' tags them with a wishful gradualism which belies the depths of their impatience." But if labels are necessary, he continued, perhaps a term like "due-process radical" would suggest "that the tactical acceptance of working for change through the system does not imply an acceptance of the whole system. Forbearance to use violence does not connote complacency; militant impatience does not require violence in order to prove itself." Brewster took pride in pointing out that most Yale students "have taken the measure of the wilder extremes and found them wanting."

Common Humanity. Not all speakers appealed to understanding and common sense. Borrowing Spiro Agnew's argot, NASA Administrator Thomas O. Paine took potshots at "Potland," which he said is waging "hysterical warfare" against "Squareland." Speaking at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Paine proposed a hypothetical Cabinet for the country, including Timothy Leary (Secretary of Agriculture), Jane Fonda (Interior), Arlo Guthrie (H.E.W.), Ralph Nader (Commerce) and Bobby Scale (Attorney General). Paine asserted that Potlanders were heavily dependent on "foreign aid" from Squareland. His words were generally ill-received. "The speech had one thing going for it," said a Worcester administrator. "It was short."

Many in the class of 1970 itself called for rapprochement. Speaking for his fellow graduates at the University of Texas, John Zammito maintained that "we are too often and too easily trapped into categories. We lose our sense of common humanity, dividing human life into camps." In his view, "There is no youth; there are only children. There is no Establishment; there are only parents. We must throw off the blindness of righteousness, of silence, of rhetoric." Zammito appealed to his peers: "Have we so completely forgotten the love and care of our parents? Have we forgotten our origins? Only when we understand that we are theirs and that they are ours and that this is the only truth --only then can we turn to the restoration of hope." Among other students who picked up that theme was Bonnie Cooke, valedictorian at Davis and Elkins College in West Virginia. "You'll need to be patient with us as we will with you," she told the adults in her audience. "I believe we're in a position to teach each other, but one of us might have to meet the other more than halfway. Who's going to be first?"

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