President's Valedictory

Graduating Seniors Are Given Three Landmarks Against Which to Measure Capacity for Growth

MEN OF THE GRADUATING CLASS:

This is a moment of parting towards which we have all worked together. It is the high point of one of those joint accomplishments and common experiences which alone give meaning to the life of a man as a human being.

For the College, at least so far as it is given any one generation of her workers to know, these annual partings are largely and literally the culmination of her efforts. After a brief pause she turns back to extend her hand again to both those who wait to go on and those who come to her quite literally as fresh men.

But from each of you individually this parting is an indispensable phase of growth towards that full maturity to which men of good will and capacity can aspire. As between you and the College, this occasion has the greater significance for you. Yours is the greater stake in it. Moments of growth far outrank moments of culmination. This must be added: there is no inevitability about your further growth. Many college men have stopped

right here, or even earlier, in their maturing. They stopped and never knew it. There are three useful landmarks against which in the years ahead, if you will, you can gauge something of your continuing capacity for growth and the ultimate realization of maturity.

First, do you grasp the meaning and not merely the appearance of humility? Has its growth in you kept pace with your pride and prejudices—those waste deposits of human living? Are you aware of the fraud in yourself as well as in others?

Secondly, can you accept the paradoxes of life? Do you believe and still have room in your mind for the possibility that the other belief may not be wrong? Can you maintain your faith in the existence of truth in the face of life's contradic- tions? Can you doubt and still act?

of truth in the face of life's contradictions? Can you doubt and still act? Finally, and possibly above all the others, have you preserved within yourself a willingness, yes, even a determination, to see those who follow you here and elsewhere in American life given the same chance as has been yours freely to hear, to think and to speak?

Gentlemen, it will be easy to pass these landmarks by unnoticed; it will be even easier to misread them. At stake will be the validity of your Dartmouth education. We who have been through it with you have no fear. And no men will ever more sincerely wish you well than we who have this confidence and that stake in you.

And now the word is "So long," because in the Dartmouth fellowship there is no parting.

ADDRESS OF WELCOME: Class President Francis R. Drury '4B greets parents at Class Day. He also gave Valedictory to the College at Commencement.