Valedictory to 1955

MEN OF THE GRADUATING CLASS: We have finished the business we set ourselves to do together four years ago. You stand at the point of leaving. We prepare to turn back. For you as for us, your teachers, it is the moment of truth when we are full with the emptiness of knowing that in going you can take nothing with you but yourself.

What you are, you are and at this point there are no words known to me, for changing that by even a jot. Words are often used at this time to tell a young graduate about the shape of things ahead in the wide, wide world where for a while you worry about tooling up and later about runnine; down. But such forecasts are rather out of fashion at the moment and if I rightly judge your mood on this, it is "don't tell me—let me guess. And so I shall.

But if you will permit one more word about the experience of "going to college" that is now behind you, it is this: education is nothing unless it is used. Whatever else you fool yourself about, don't fool yourself about this—after all the courses, good and poor, after all the honors and the flunks, after all else in college that was or was not just right, after all this is behind you, as now it is, the only thing that is decisive about any college education is the follow-through. No college education, literally none, is ever either so good or so poor that this is not true. Your sense of self-interest will take good care of the rest, but the quality of your liberation as a brother of man and as a son of God will be seen in your daily follow-through on those things that even the least accomplished among us must now know is within his grasp as a graduate of Dartmouth.

The choices of life and our confidence are now fully yours.

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