'Safe Now in the Wide, Wide World': College Editors and Commencement

College Editors and Commencement

[AT no Commencement in the past two decades have Seniors been so harangued as they were this June. But what was going on in the minds of the listeners? To answer that question the Atlantic has called on twelve leading college editors to say what they thought of the 1941 Commencement. — THE EDITOR]

THE morning sun filtered down through the trees and flecked the scene on the lawn in front of Nassau Hall with spots of light. There must have been three thousand in the throng of families, friends, and sweethearts watching the academic procession, in all its pomp and color, move slowly down the centre.
I thought of the Class Day exercises the day before — the Seniors breaking their long-stemmed clay pipes on the traditional half-submerged cannon (the old ties are broken, the Princeton dream is over now); I thought of these Seniors singing on the steps of Nassau Hall for the last time, and the ironic mockery in the familiar words: —

All that had been yesterday. Now Dean Wicks was pronouncing the invocation, asking God to help us ‘set our hearts against the dreary round of hate returned.’ The Commencement exercises had begun.
One by one the Seniors walked up to the orange-and-black-draped platform to receive their degrees, and to hear President Dodds say the words that made them Princeton alumni: ‘Nos adgradum primum in artibus admitto.' As they filed across the platform and back to their seats on the lawn, I thought I could see many emotions, many attitudes in their faces, — burning idealism, cold skepticism, and stages between, — but no abject fear, no self-pity, no resignation.
There were no new or original ideas in Theodore M. Black’s valedictory oration. ‘The old forces of evil are attacking the mind of man and the soul of man with greater vigor than ever before. . . . The ideals we have learned here in the past four years — the ideals of human dignity and human progress, the individual’s freedom to think, speak, and worship God as he chooses — these are the very things for which this weary world has waited for too long.’ Yet the words did not sound like empty clichés; instead, it seemed to me that they struck a sympathetic note, and their vibration did not die at the touch.
Honorary degrees were awarded — among others, to Mackenzie King and to Crown Princess Juliana of the Netherlands. Mr. King said, in accepting his degree, ‘ More than ever before, the universities of North America are the trustees of the liberty of man. I know in my heart there will be no betrayal of that high trust.’ There was something in the way they applauded that convinced me that the Princeton Seniors, too, knew it in their hearts. The breaking of clay pipes and the ironic words of the song seemed unimportant now. This was no lost generation.

I felt as if the spirit of Woodrow Wilson had come back to permeate the Princeton Commencement of 1941. This was not the Princeton that once drove out Wilson for his very liberalism in trying to reform its undemocratic club system; this, I thought, was a different Princeton, recognizing and admiring Wilson’s passionate devotion to ideals, his unwillingness to compromise with the material values that drag men into mud and barbarism.
When the last degree had been given out, the Seniors added their own touch. Spontaneously they gave a rousing ‘locomotive for Juliana’ and then a ‘locomotive for King.’ Then they sang ‘Old Nassau’ and the procession went out, briskly. That was all.
It was then that I thought of President Dodds’s words in the Baccalaureate sermon two days earlier: ‘When one can feel fear and not be afraid he has developed courage.’ Whatever Princeton has not done for its 1941 graduates, it has left them with courage, and without despair. JOHN N. BROOKS, JR.
Princeton University

WHEN the University of Minnesota’s President Guy Stanton Ford — on a rainy June night in a sprawling stadium — spoke his good-bye to 2225 graduates, he said little to surprise anyone. It had been the same when he made his ‘ real message to the Seniors ‘ a few weeks earlier on Cap and Gown Day. On both occasions he talked mostly of ‘service to others’ and democratic ‘ideals,’ a familiar and lofty pattern.
Mildly, he referred now and then to the war: Youth ‘ will not barter its . . . liberties for a place on the wave of a future that reduces mankind to servility. ... If our minds . . . cannot cut through the confusion created by the shortsighted politicians or by the amateur statesmen who find no word of condemnation for totalitarianism or by the timid who play upon old prejudices and blow on the burnt embers of the past — if . . . we cannot cut through all this ... to see the struggle between two eternally divergent ideas of man and his destiny, then let us find our Quislings . . . and ask the dictators to write for our signatures their present version of a negotiated peace.’
Yet this man, who during 1917-1918 worked with George Creel, might have said much more about the war and its meaning to his young listeners. Most of them would probably have agreed with him that it was a war that must be fought. But many of them — and I for one — would have wanted to know how it is possible for the United States to build democracy while fighting this war, or to keep democracy when it is over. We would have questioned the sight of a nation fighting ‘for democracy’ and itself ignoring the liberties and pitiful needs of millions of our own people.
Mr. Ford would not have been unsympathetic to our attitude. He spoke himself of the ‘gap between our national ideals as a democracy and their realization.’ But we should have wanted to hear him say that we must do something now to close that gap — if only to attain ‘national unity.’ We should have liked to hear him reject those who scold that ‘ this is not the time ‘ to consider democracy at home, or in the world.
He did not do this, and perhaps we are wrong. If the nation has committed itself to fighting, and if it is to win, maybe we should not harp too much on our shortcomings or Britain’s sins. To me, however, and to thousands of young Americans, this is a false approach. We want to defend democracy wherever we see it humbled. We hold that a peaceful, democratic world cannot be built on rotten foundations.
So, as we sat in our caps and gowns, there were many more things that we should have liked to hear discussed: how to strengthen those foundations; how to achieve economic justice, social equality, political freedom. In the United States now there is little talk of these things, and less every day. Are they concepts which men cannot grasp? Is there nothing we can do ? We who are in some ways confused and questioning are among the first to deny that.
VICTOR E. COHN
University of Minnesota

WE had heard the Commencement orators speak. Carl Sandburg told us that hard work, self-denial, and effective opposition to inroads of propaganda will be necessary if America is to preserve its hard-won liberty. University President Frank Graham took less than twenty minutes to remind us that ‘to be truly American in the great American tradition is sometimes miscalled un-American. To stand by our historic Bill of Rights is not a subversive activity. The more Americans who understandingly and sincerely subscribe to the Constitution and its Bill of Rights, the better for the University, America, and the world.’
We were but one of seven thousand who heard them speak. We were one of seven thousand who remained silent. We were one of the 675 who remained pensively silent. Sheltered four years in our own secluded democracy, we now faced the world of which the orators had spoken.
Individual reaction in time of crisis is not individual — not individual in the true sense of the word. For the first time in four years there was a feeling of unity among the graduates. Charles Hudson, Phi Beta Kappa and honor graduate, was no different from Weston Wright, the playboy and college drake. Student Body President Dave Hobbs did not feel superior to George Severin, All-American football player and three-letter man. We talked to all four, casually, and their reactions to the future were much the same as ours — uncertain. Uncertain to the degree that none of them were going to be able to fulfill their boyhood dreams — not for the present, at least.
We, of the class of ‘41, feel that the world is eagerly awaiting the graduate of ‘41. Our assignment will be a difficult one. It will be difficult for us to restore the world to sanity. But we can and must do it. Our chief weapons will be common sense, sanity, coolness, impartiality, and, in general, the Christian social and economic principles that we have been taught.
Today the oceans that surround us are no longer barriers, but highways of invasion. Today we have been aroused to a wartime pitch by propaganda that is as skillful as it is deadly and effective.
We must not be led by propaganda schemers, but by our own standards of patriotism and devotion, standards which four years in college should have instilled in us. We must keep a cool mind. We must be true to our government, but also be true to ourselves. We must join in exercising our inalienable right of freedom of speech, for it is only in the exercising of this right that we can retain our freedom. We must join our fellow man in using the collected control so vitally necessary in preventing us from losing our democracy and our fight to preserve it. Whatever field we may enter, these duties — indeed, these privileges — constitute an integral part of the load we must shoulder.
It is this cause — this fight for the preservation of America and American ideals — that the college Seniors of 1941 face. The torch is ours. We must carry it high. And when wars and rumors of wars are nothing but memories we can again turn to the dreams of our youth.
ORVILLE B. CAMPBELL
University of North Carolina

NOT even the hot Indiana sun could dispel the dread feeling on Sunday, the first of June, that war was in the air. It filled the minds of 7500 parents, friends, and alumni who came to see 621 seniors graduate at the ninety-seventh annual Commencement exercises of the University of Notre Dame. Probably the feeling and the scent of war gripped the graduating Seniors more powerfully than the others, for they had been told all spring that the spirit of the present time is the same spirit which had pervaded the campus in 1916, just twentyfive years before.
There had been a war in Europe then, and it had presented an ominous threat to America. Just as today, people had been violently for and against American participation; and, just as today, German submarines had sunk American ships on the Atlantic and made the prospect of war almost hopelessly inevitable for this country. All these things were in the minds of Notre Dame Seniors that afternoon, and they listened attentively, as if seeking an answer to their individual dilemmas.
It was in the face of such a spirit that this year’s principal speaker, the Honorable Joseph P. Kennedy, former United States Ambassador to Great Britain, told his audience that ‘the duty of every American is plain ‘ in the light of the unlimited emergency declared by President Roosevelt. That duty comprises ‘unlimited loyalty [and] a cessation of personal antagonism which the defense and protection of this nation require.’ But, Mr. Kennedy asserted, besides that duty we also have rights which are inviolable, no matter what the emergency. In the very act of pledging allegiance, he said, Americans state clearly that constitutional rights of free speech, free assembly, and freedom of religious assembly shall be maintained in all respects.
Mr. Kennedy’s speech seemed to deal exclusively with a side issue and not with the great central point of the struggle in which we are involved. What he had to say, while it was certainly not invalid, did seem to miss the significance of the present intense activity of the nation. Our national defense effort, which includes aid to Britain as one of its most salient features, has as its principal aim the defeat of the Axis powers. There is no escaping that fact, because if the Axis is not defeated decisively first of all, the efforts of those who are now principally concerned with the preservation of the Bill of Rights in the United States will come to nothing. If Hitler wins, those who are hotly concerning themselves about freedom of speech will find they have been trying to hatch a china egg. At least that’s how it appears to this Senior.
WILLIAM C. MCGOWAN University of Notre Dame

COLORFULLY impressive, but at the same time overly formal, the University of Washington’s sixty-sixth annual Commencement exercises in almost every respect emphasized the undertone of national defense. As one of the 1561 graduating Seniors, the ceremonies to me were clearly indicative of the rôle the nation expects today’s graduates to play in a wartime economy.
In all the speeches, the current of defense preparations brushed aside other concepts. Even the awarding of military honors took precedence over the scholastic. Governor Arthur B. Langlie, Washington, ‘26, emphasized the growing need in America today for capable leadership — youth educated to help guide the destinies of a nation. President L. P. Sieg of the University attacked opposition to draft deferments for college men. But even this seemed to be based upon a desire to mould men more capable of filling key positions during wartime.
To the faculty, to the alumni, and even to our parents, this role we are to play seemed clear enough. But conversely, to those of us who were graduated this rôle is a puzzling and uncertain one.
During Commencement we sat in long rows. The confusion we felt was forcibly amplified when, glancing at those sitting near us, we saw an accounting major going into the army under the Selective Service Act, an engineering student into the Navy, a journalism graduate filling a temporary job in a national defense industry. These talents we have cultivated, the abilities we have developed during our years in college, are to be harnessed — harnessed to sow seeds of destruction in a world not yet recovered from the deadening effects of the last great war.
Ever since our earliest days in school we have been lectured on the futility of war. We have been told that ‘last time’ it was a badly disillusioned America that emerged battered from a brutal struggle. We could not absorb quite enough hatred for war and all it represented. These concepts were drilled deeply into our minds. Thoughts of peace, of the World Court, of the League of Nations, are not easily thrown off.
But now, at Commencement in 1941, we are told our class is the most important ever graduated ‘because of the perilous times ahead.’ We are wondering just what has caused such times, in view of all the preaching for peace we have heard. With talk of ‘leadership,’ of ‘future leaders,’ it is not difficult to surmise where the brunt of these perilous times is to fall. It will rest on a generation fully schooled for peace, not for war.
We are a sorely puzzled generation. Fully recognizing that the Fascist ideology is contrary to our American way of life, we see its inherent danger to all we have aspired to during our years of formal education. Still, at the same time, we feel we should hold to our ideas of cooperation, of mutual helpfulness and collective peace ventures. We should like to devote our new-found talents to peace and not to the destructive engines of war.
Just where does such reasoning lead us? If we hold strictly to our ideals of peace, we are in a sense shirking our duties of leadership when we are most needed. But at the same time does this nation really want a new crop of leaders who have given up the hope of peace? It seems we can be neither all for peace nor all for war.
Commencement leaves the Class of 1941 a confused and puzzled generation. LEE IRWIN
University of Washington

THEY spoke sobering facts at the Cornell Commencement. They said the Society of Light must conquer the Society of Darkness and build a new order based on the four freedoms: Freedom of Thought, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. Most important, they said the world looked to us — needed us, the graduates — to be leaders of the Society of Light.
To a generation that had entered university life four years ago with almost no hope of finding a useful place in the world, this announcement that there was a job to be done and that we were wanted to do it was exciting. ‘Help Wanted’ signs looked good, even if the job was carrying nitroglycerin.
Born in the period of cynicism that followed the World War, and raised in the era of the Great Depression when young people were unwanted, we had been old enough to wonder at the sight of our elders baffled by the laws of economics, and to taste the confusion that swept America as these elders came to realize their crusade for Democracy had been in vain. We had inherited from these elders the cynicism of the 1920’s, and the American ideology of laissezfaire economics.
In these recent years we had undergone a metamorphosis — a metamorphosis which was still going on, but which had progressed far by the time Edmund Ezra Day, President of Cornell University, and Dr. Ralph W. Sockman of Christ Church, New York, spoke to us. Facing a crashing world, and desperate to find a place for ourselves, we had already discovered unexpected relief in the optimism of a university where we had been able to experience a society in which every man achieved according to his merit and ambition, in which the spirit of freedom with responsibility breathed new hope. There we had been able to overcome the cynicism which had become characteristic of youth. Still, approaching Commencement, we were ill at ease, for over us hung the shadow of change — the end of our ideal society — and the spectre of reëntering a world we remembered as hostile.
The 1250 of us who received degrees at Cornell’s seventy-third Commencement heard the speakers call us to live full, wholesome, dynamic lives; to take part in democratic society; to fight to protect and improve that society for the future. For this call we were well prepared. Long ago we had scrapped ideas of fortune and abundant ease. Instead of wealth, we accepted new values: a will to preserve our way of life; desire to improve society; determination to live lives imbued with tolerance and intelligent citizenship, so essential for democracy. We recognized a responsibility to see this thing through, that our children might not have to refight the battle our fathers left.
These speakers were giving us a cue to take part in the building of a world in which no future generation would taste the misery and disappointments of these past two decades. This is the job we want to do. We are happy to have been asked to do our part.
STANLEY EDWARD COHEN
Cornell University

GRADUATING students In the Commencement exercises at the University of Texas were told that ‘the tradition of the South’ — defined in terms of prejudice and romantic unrealism — is delaying Dixie progress; but they did not seem to take to it much. Perhaps their reluctance was natural. There they were, about two thirds of the 1339 graduates, seated in front of the 28-story Administration Building illuminated in the school’s orange-and-white ‘victory colors.’ Overhead was a full moon in an almost cloudless sky. Faces of relatives and friends dotted the semicircular edge of the scene. It was exciting, romantic. Then there was the mere thrill of graduation, achieved after years of study and disappointment. Of course, the awarding of degrees was very formal —just the group certification of each degree class. But there was that certain feeling in the summer evening air. It was unthinkable, unbelievable, ‘unrealistic.’
Quite realistically, though, these Seniors and graduates going out into the world expected to be warned of the mess that the world is in and of what it would mean to them. Some wanted to hear it; some didn’t; all looked for it. They were prejudiced, so to speak.
Instead, Speaker W. J. Cash, associate editor of the Charlotte, N. C., News, dwelt upon why we are the way he said we are: how Southern aristocracy were merely the early birds, how economic interest developed a sentimental attachment for slavery at the same time that it prompted a feeling of racial superiority, how the Civil War only bolstered the protective sensitiveness, romanticism, unrealism.
Of the world today, he started out by saying, ‘We are going to need to approach it both with good will and with as intelligent as possible an understanding of what our tradition actually is.’ Persons who had come to think of the world today in terms of ships and planes and guns and soldiers lost out when Mr. Cash began talking about indentured servants, ‘poor proud people,’ slavery and religion, racial differences, lynchings, class industrialism, prejudiced education.
Towards the end he declared that traditional Southern courage and resolution would only increase ‘renewed sacrifices and hardships’ which the totalitarian menace would occasion, that the humility and the will to analyze ourselves and to cut through, rather than to sentimentalize, our problems would have to be acquired.
He had reached his point, but it was too late. Perhaps partially because Editor Cash is not the speaker that he is writer, his audience had failed to follow his connection between the international plight and the South’s plight. Mr. Cash had actually built up a good case, but his proof was too subtle.
These graduates, steeped in tradition maybe, but forced by conditions to be realistic, felt solid ground when President Homer Price Rainey closed his annual message with these words about the departing group: ‘If I am a judge of their character and of their desires, they are going to fight in every way open to them to preserve the freedom that democracy has given to them — and we wish them good luck and Godspeed.’ Maybe that is sentimentalizing hardship.
JACK B. HOWARD
University of Texas

‘ WHAT can I say except to offer you the good wishes, hopes, and prayers of your Alma Mater?’ asked President Hutchins at the University of Chicago Convocation. ‘What can I do but ask you to lift up your hearts and face the future with the fortitude becoming to educated men and women?’
What he did say, however, and what he did do, were to suggest the most profound and at the same time the most profoundly discouraging message that could have been given the graduates of colleges and universities. He said that, despite disintegrating political, social, and economic institutions, this generation might build new plans and new hopes by preserving its integrity and achieving the true personal freedom which comes through seeking the good and following the dictates of right reason.
Almost certainly this was the only hope which a convocation orator might effectively have held out for the generation that is being graduated into active citizenship. But it was a weak hope and a small solace to tell the graduates that, although stark poverty and ruthless autocracy might come with the future, they would still have freedom to think rightly.
This is not a happy year for graduates. We go into the world pitifully unqualified to face the overwhelming problems we must meet. Whichever course the country chooses, immediate war or a peace which will almost inevitably result in an ultimate war, we shall suffer, and we shall lose, if not our lives, then at least our economic security and subsequently our liberty. We face a period of awful disorganization with mock, shoddy prosperity, conscription, and demoralization, and an era of despondent, havoc-wreaking depression.
It is foolish then, if it is not wicked, for convocation orators to speak resoundingly of the certain and glorious future that we have in the United States. In sober reality, our future is not certain. It is foolish if not wicked for them to call the graduating class to feats of bravery and strength when so often by bravery they mean ruthlessness and by strength they mean intolerance. It is futile, although certainly not wicked, to point out the hope of personal freedom, as Mr. Hutchins did, when few of us arc strong enough to attain that freedom without the previous condition of political freedom.
The expectations of students graduating this June are dismal ones. I have been extremely pessimistic thus far in what I have said, but only because I frankly believe that to have been optimistic would have been to see fantastic and unreal visions. If, however, we are going to continue to struggle through life, we must have more than this pessimism to make our struggle have significance deeper than the mere animal desire for self-preservation.
What we must fight for, what must provide us with incentive to live, is not romantic, nor can it be made into exciting rhetoric. Probably that is why few convocation addresses bore this message, which is not a call to arms, but only a call to quiet resolution. But, had we been writing a speech to deliver to the class of 1941, its substance could have only been this, in all honesty to ourselves: it were wiser for this generation of graduates to accept calmly and forthrightly the burdens they must bear, since only thus can they expect to undo the awful things which are today being done; they must seek what can pass for happiness in such a way that they will add no further burdens to their heirs; they must not give up hope, if only because moments in the past have been darker than the present; they should bear as little malice as they can toward those whose weakness has caused today’s holocaust; and they should learn, if they can, from their fathers’ mistakes.
ERNEST LEISER
University of Chicago

BY motto, tradition, and reputation, Dartmouth College is the ‘college in the wilderness.’ The physical Dartmouth — the isolation, the New Hampshire small-town atmosphere, the wheeling New England seasons — is inevitably a strong influence on the thinking of her undergraduates.
Year by year all of this creeps into the Commencement addresses; a sentimentality, nurtured by the knowledge of friendship and common experience and the presence of the June evening calm, jostles the patterned exhortations to live well and intelligently into second consideration.
But now, in June 1941, the evening calm and nostalgia were shattered. In their place the Seniors had the ills of a very ill world handed to them baldly and insistently, and most of them realized and accepted this as the necessary valedictory theme to their education. Some of them didn’t like to be reminded of their inevitable role in a world in flames. Some of them were querulous at being so constantly reminded of the confusion and insecurity that lie ahead. Some wanted to cling for the last few hours to the safety and protection of the college isolation.
But these were the few. Almost all, no matter what their particular opinion on America’s role in the world conflict, recognized the validity of the challenge thrown to them by both President Ernest Martin Hopkins and the Baccalaureate speaker, President William Alfred Eddy of Hobart: the challenge to accept the obligations of freedom as well as the privileges. They recognized the necessity of taking the full burden of those obligations, taking full share of responsibility for their country’s wellbeing and for the sincerity of their beliefs.
The Senior orations and the reactions of the Seniors to other speeches made it apparent that the Class of 1941 is heavily aware of a time of crisis, that underneath any surface flippancy or irritation its members are sober with the realization of the task they graduate to.
One other reaction ran more or less subconsciously throughout the Commencement exercises. This was an objection. It was an objection to being told over and over again that they were fortunate in being able to play a rôle of such importance in the ordering of human history. They objected because they knew that the role was in all honesty a dirty one and an unheroic one, and one which should be approached not with twopenny catchwords but with what Robert Sherwood called a ‘grim resignation’ to something which should not be allowed to exist, but whose actual existence must be faced. And they objected to the easy transference of today’s problems on to their shoulders, because the problems were of a world they never made. The men who chided them for not seizing at the opportunity to save the world were of the generation who made that world, who played the stock market while that world rotted away.
But, above all, many of them realized what was most important of all, that the focus of their responsibility is more than a simple armed conflict, easily labeled and heavily sloganed. Many of them realized that the basis of their task lay instead with what went beyond Hitler into the future: first, the battle to keep democracy alive and able to progress and cancel out mistakes, but beyond that the unsung and perpetual battle to make living decent and human dignity universal.
Under the solemnity and sentiment of Commencement were the challenge and acceptance — to help keep the democracy and freedom we have, to go on and help achieve the eventual justification for that democracy and freedom.
ROBERT W. HARVEY
Dartmouth College

GRADUATION . . . black caps and gowns . . . multicolored hoods against the afternoon setting of Stanford’s amphitheatre . . . 7000 spectators, families and friends. . . . Commencement . . . hopes and fears . . . unlimited emergency . . . business openings . . . draft numbers . . . homes and families ... all tumbling through 1600 minds on June 15 as Stanford’s largest graduating class took part in the University’s fiftieth Commencement exercises.
And for us who filed across the grassy stage to receive our diplomas from the hands of President Ray Lyman Wilbur the exercises signalized the final note to four years beneath the quiet sandstone arches of the University, and the beginning of a lifetime within the turbulent reaches of adulthood.
From three inspirational speakers, we of the graduating class heard a message outlining the responsibilities which face us in our tasks as leaders in this torn world of today. We heard an admonition from Charles A. Beardsley, ‘06 and former president of the American Bar Association, that ‘work and more work, hardship and more hardship, struggle and more struggle,’ challenge the graduate who attempts to furnish the enlightened leadership this society so sorely needs. And we picked up the gauntlet with a sense of relief that the education so necessary for that leadership had been completed before we were called to assume an active part in the affairs of the nation.
The acceptance of the task of leadership was symbolized during the morning’s Baccalaureate Service when our 1600 voices in unison prayed that ‘our University help to keep alive in the world a recognition of the sacredness of truth ... a growing sensitivity to human need.’
A message from Stanford’s first fifty years extended us by Lou Henry Hoover, ‘98, wife of ex-President Herbert Hoover, ‘95, was crystallized as representatives of each of the forty-nine preceding classes filed two by two into the amphitheatre. And, as we were thus welcomed into the alumni fold, we of the class of ‘41 saw a half century unfold before us . . . and wondered whether the next fifty years — in which the responsibilities of leadership are to be ours — will see peace and a reasoned stability in a healthy world.
‘You will pass many milestones, and you will never pass them a second time,’ observed President Wilbur shortly after we had received the diplomas which marked the passing of the final milestone into adulthood. With him we looked back to the milestones of 1917 and 1918, silently vowed to do as well as those graduates had done, and heard with emotion his parting words: —
‘My faith in you, our men and women of Stanford, is unlimited and my affection unbounded.’
Commencement . . . the time to look forward and to the future. But as faculty and alumni filed away, and left us to our well-wishing families and friends, thoughts of the past four years and the past fifty kept mingling with hopes and desires . . . business opportunities . . . homes and families . . . and with the fervent wish that these might not. set with the sun.
WILSON CANNON, JR.
Stanford University

THE addresses delivered at the Columbia Commencement exercises were chiefly distinguished for their remoteness from the problems uppermost in the minds of the graduating class, and their failure to meet squarely the issues which we of that class are expected to cope with in the near future. What would have been passable Commencement Day oratory last year or the year before — and the New York Times files reveal that one of the speakers actually did use his text of a year ago — sounded starkly inadequate in 1941.
As I listened to Dr. Butler’s address, ‘The World Awaits Another Waterloo,’ I could not help thinking how equally appropriate — and how equally meaningless — the same words would have been at the Commencement Day exercises of 1916. And I realized that nothing in his speech could have prepared that class for the eventualities of the last twenty-five years — any more than it can us for what lies ahead.
The President’s address was naïve in its oversimplifications. His facile analysis of the war in terms of the ‘unending conflict’ between the ‘moral ideal of unselfish service’ and the ‘controlling desire for gain’ completely ignored the historical fact that the ‘ moral ideal ‘ may be used as a cloak for the gain-seeking instinct, as well as to protect what one has thus gained. Our professors warned us against the tendency to think in terms of ‘absolutes,’ which tendency they blamed for many of our present-day ills; and when Dr. Butler resorted to just such ‘absolutes’ in his ideological formulation I felt it to be a betrayal of our training, as well as an insult to our intelligence.
Similarly for Dean Herbert E. Hawkes when he said, ‘I submit that this is no time to emphasize the seamy side of our past or even of our present.’ This plea for nonreflective commitment — in the face of repeated classroom attacks against the ‘emotional basis for belief’ — seemed to me a complete abrogation of the expectancy built up by four years of college education.
Much of Dr. Butler’s address was the wishful thinking of a disillusioned worker for international peace. His faith in the inevitability of a second Waterloo I class together with the resignation of another segment of our population to the ‘Wave of the Future’; to seek refuge in historical fatalism at a time like this is to sidestep one’s responsibility to the generation that must implement the shape of things to come with deeds in the present.
Where the speakers did recognize that their generation had failed ours they were apologetic rather than self-critical, and showed no inclination to analyze the causes underlying their failure. if our elders will not communicate their insights to us, how can they expect us to avoid repeating their mistakes? They have passed us the torch, but there is no light to guide us.
Behind the protection of their ivycovered cliches and ivory-tower platitudes, the speakers ‘faced the future’ while ignoring the present and whitewashing the past; they ‘faced the future,’ leaving us to face the facts and the music.
I. A. L. DIAMOND
Columbia University

I CAME away from my Commencement address feeling that a better mind than mine had been able to express my optimism in the future of humanity. He had recognized the many obstacles which lie in our path. He had painted no rosy picture of a Utopia. He had offered no panacea for the ills of the world. Yet, in the words of Saint John and Plato, he had suggested a course which, if followed by men and nations, could lead to a new future.
Plato’s Republic sets forth the four virtues of the individual as justice, temperance, wisdom, and courage. Plato, however, did not consider spiritual values. Individuals and states must have faith if they will possess the ‘whole armor.’ With faith these virtues provide a means whereby men and states can live in harmony; these ideals offer a firm foundation for future progress.
Graduating Seniors of 1941 have full need for faith and courage. We find ourselves in confusing times. Many of the old standards have disappeared. Our elders on whom we have been taught to depend are as bewildered as we. We find that each day must be lived for itself, because the morrow is so uncertain. We who were taught that war was useless find that our country is almost at war. We who have taken training for peacetime occupations find ourselves called for army or defense work. We who have had dreams and plans for the future must recognize that they may be completely disorganized at any time. We, like our elders, find need for all of the faith and courage we can muster.
History tells us of the continued forward progress of man. At the same time it also recounts the obstacles, miseries, and wars which have beset the world’s peoples wherever they have existed. At no time has this progress been completely checked. We, of the optimistic frame of mind, do not believe that it can be checked. War is not new. Hate is not novel. Misery is not of modern origin. This war, like all other previous wars, will ultimately end. Out of the war must come a permanent, lasting peace. Mankind has wasted too much time and effort in destructive things; all of our energies should be turned toward the constructive. Such a peace will have to be built on a recognition of the rights of the individual. We must help to promulgate the ideals which will lead to such a lasting peace.
The idealism of college students and new graduates is notorious. The older generations are inclined to look with skepticism upon it, for it does not have the wisdom that comes with experience. Many of us believe that the world needs such idealism now as it never needed it before. Perhaps this time we shall have a chance to put some of it into practice. Many doubt it; we hope they are wrong.
JOHN BARTRAM
University of Colorado