Valedictory to 1953
MEN OF THE GRADUATING CLASS: There is little that needs saying at any last moment as between friends. And so it is with us who stay and you who go today. We came together four years ago as teachers and students. We have since worked to-gether in the manner of men at the task of seeing you across the threshold of a liberating education. This threshold separates those who glimpse little more than their own small patch of experience and those who are privileged to harbor the questions which over the ages men have learned out of aspiration and anguish to ask each other and themselves.
Dare I say it to you who are so lately delivered from the dangling sword of examinations fret not about the answers? Most answers that matter flow from the way the question is put, and nothing yields more right answers to the tangled issues of life than asking the right questions. Answers, like rivers, cannot rise higher than their source.
I do charge you to remember that the power which flows from higher education is not automatically beneficent. By bringing within your reach the better answers which other men need in their daily lives, Dartmouth has endowed each of you with some possibility of power far beyond the common lot. I am not clear myself that power inevitably corrupts, but that it will do so unless it is constantly questioned by its holder I think I know full well.
In the larger context, most of you are destined to be the stuff of a nation which once again faces the most ancient dilemma of statecraft: how to be strong enough to be free and yet remain decent enough to be long strong. In the presence of the Nation's President and our other honored guests, each of whom in his own life has given an answer to that perplexity, Dartmouth, with the abiding confidence of the teacher whose work is done, bids you go' forth to the business of being and doing unto others as she sought to be and do un to you.
And now, men of Dartmouth of 1953, as in all the years before, the word is "so long," because in the Dartmouth fellowship there is no parting.
PRESIDENT DICKEY DELIVERING HIS FAREWELL REMARKS TO THE GRADUATING CLASS
