"There Is No Parting"

The President's Valedictory to the Class of 1950

MEN OF THE GRADUATING CLASS:

We are now at what Arctic flyers and explorers call the point of no return. Here the teacher turns back and you must go on.

Tradition and the deepest human impulse impel one who speaks for those turning back to try for a final word of guidance and encouragement to you who go forward.

Such words are never spoken lightly and yet it is a most difficult thing to find a few general words which can bring out the acid bite of experience. An astute observer of human affairs, the late Mr. Justice Holmes, once remarked that "the chief end of man is to form general propositions" and that "no general proposition is worth a damn." If you have reached the point where you now begin to recognize and to feel at home with the garment of paradox which clothes most human wisdom, you are assuredly ready to go ahead on your own.

Let me be concrete. You enter the competition of a civilization in which he who cannot help himself has little possibility of helping others. Yet it is also a culture whose highest idealism teaches that "greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." And it is all not made easier by the fact that the reach of this ideal is not confined to those rare occasions when life itself is at issue.

The reconciliation of these values is the daily work of adult life. And let's be clear about it: a liberal education is no substitute for the most miserable kind of hard labor in this particular vineyard. In truth, the only so-called "white collar" workers in this aspect of life are those who lack those very qualities of thoughtfulness and sensitivity which mark the liberally educated man.

Fortunately, most of us are not short on a requisite sense of self-interest. Our biology seems to take care of that in normal human beings. But the self-interest which protects and propels us forward can also be both a destroyer and a deceiver. The destroying propensity at every level of life of self-interest run amuck is not a subtle thing and needs no elaboration here.

The power of interest to distort and deceive is, I think, today the more dangerous foe of better human relations. To turn the title of Paul Sample's great war painting, in our everyday affairs interest rather than delirium is our best deceiver.

The mature man puts the drive of his self-interest to productive purposes; he does his best constantly to reduce within himself the deceptions and distortion created by interest and he seeks through cooperation to reconcile the conflicts of interest which there will always be in a world of men.

Gentlemen, that is the road we have travelled these past four years together; it is the way ahead and you cannot miss it if only every now and then as you press forward you will pause and look up to see the interest of others as you see your own.

And now, once again, the word is "so long," for in the Dartmouth fellowship there is no parting.

PRESIDENT DICKEY delivering his valedictory to the seniors at the exercises in the Bema.