Valedictory to 1952
President Dickey's Farewell to the Graduating Class
MEN OF THE GRADUATING CLASS: A college Commencement is one of the occasions in life when the emphasis is most genuinely on kind words and fond hopes.
The kind words are for you who have earned them. Four years ago you took up here the business of higher learning. Today marks the close of this phase of that business, and whatever else has happened, you now have had some experience with the fact that learning is really up to you. You have measured yourselves as individuals and as a class against the standards of Dartmouth. It is due you to tell you that as a group you have measured up to those standards as well as, or better than, any class in the modern history of the College.
From here on out, gentlemen, so long as one of you shall worry the earth, Dartmouth will be measured by your standards. And that fact brings us to the fond hopes of this day. These hopes, like the kind words, have been earned. You are their custodian and yet they belong not to you. They belong to those who earned them: your parents, your teachers, all of us here and elsewhere who have cared greatly about you and what you should be.
These hopes are not for telling; they are now either built into what you are or they are nothing. But it is also due you to say this much more. These hopes for you are all that Dartmouth retains in return for all that you received from her. They are all that she wants because they are her stake in the eternal proposition that good men in the future, as in the past, will honor the pursuit of truth, the love of beauty, and the brotherhood of man under a freely chosen concept of God within the reach of every man's humility and beyond the grasp of any man's knowledge.
Beyond that, there is just this more personal word: these fond hopes are not merely the store of an impersonal college; they are the only capital a teacher's life creates;, they are life's best reward for the Dean who puts down his heavy duty this year after seeing thousands of boys across the threshold to Dartmouth manhood; believe me, gentlemen, you are our treasure and in the words of the Scriptures, there will our hearts be also.
And now, men of Dartmouth, as for all others before you, the word is "so long," for in the Dartmouth fellowship there is no parting.
1952 TOLLS ITSELF OUT OF COLLEGE: Richard M. Watt, Robert D. Brace, secretary-chairman of the class, Herbert R. Drury, and Bernard J. Lewis, new class agent, with the 1952 Bell which was rung on any and all occasions during Commencement weekend and which the class plans to bring back to Hanover for reunions. The bell originally came from a Georgia slave plantation and is supposed to have been brought north by some of General Sherman's men.
PRESIDENT DICKEY with Dean Neidlinger before the start of the Commencement academic procession the last one which the Dean led as Chief Marshal.
