Valedictory to 1951

President Dickey's Farewell to the Graduating Class

MEN OF THE GRADUATING CLASS. We have spent four years together fashioning a pattern of life and learning here at Dartmouth. This Commencement ceremony marks the deliberate breaking up of that pattern. For the College another full cycle of life has been completed and for you a new stage in growth has been reached. That, I think, is the essence of it and I become more hesitant each year about any attempt to interpret, let alone garnish, that essence with words.

It is natural enough, however, at this moment of pause in the business of life's learning to run your finger lightly over a few of the tentative nicks which you notched in the gun stock of your character these past four years. In the years ahead the feel of these deepening notches will provide comfort, confidence and courage even in the nights of lonely trouble which are ahead for the best and the bravest among you.

Here on Hanover Plain, in the sight of Dartmouth Row, and in the surrounding North Country, a man learns something of beauty almost in spite of himself.

In this community of teachers and scholars and in the recorded presence of all that the mind of man has ever known, you have learned that he who scoffs at intellect and knowledge is one who least understands how little we know.

You have seen in our time, as in every time, the futility, indeed, the eventual evil of seeking to enforce either the acceptance or the rejection of ideas by the suppression of ideas.

You have witnessed on the campus and abroad in the land the living truth of the words in which Mr. Justice Holmes reminded us that "the epithets you apply to the whole of things . . . are merely judgments of yourself."

You have also learned that in a sense every moment of life is its own reward, and yet in a larger sense you know that a special reward of this day is in the fact that you have met a tough assignment on its own terms. Whatever else escapes you about the meaning of this moment, I hope you may hold onto that, because within that simple fact rests the promise of your capacity to become a mature human being—a cooperative man who can deal with the universe on its own terms. Gentlemen, your Dartmouth experiences are only beginnings, but, never doubt it, they are the beginnings of a good man and a worthy life. From here on the size of that man and the worth of that life are yours for the fashioning. Our pride in your performance, our confidence in your promise, and our wishes for all good fortune go with you all the way.

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