Conscience or Compromise
THE SENIORS' VALEDICTORY
THIS is perhaps the first time that the president of the senior class has had the opportunity to hold a class meeting during the graduation exercises. However, rather than presenting plans for class activities during the next five years or stumping through the crowd with a request for a free-will offering, I would like to discuss with you this morning a topic that has been on my mind especially and on the minds of all seniors in Great Issues this spring - the question of values.
Today, the world is engaged in a great struggle for world supremacy between our way of life and that espoused by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In our freshman year at Dartmouth, the first Sputnik was launched; since then the race for space has become more acute than anyone could have prophesied even five years ago. Pressure has been placed on science again and again; the need for more scientists, more engineers, and more specialists with greater skills possessed at a higher level of competency has been stressed from every angle imaginable.
We have had a unique experience here at Dartmouth. Intellectual freedom is one name given to the type of undertaking of which we have tasted only briefly. Its manifestations have been many; we have been given new ideas on one hand and we have had our old ideas challenged to their intimacies. As we graduate, the cry for even greater proficiency sends many of us on to graduate school. However, as we strive toward our specialization there is another area which we must not overlook. We are faced with another struggle as serious as the external one with Communism, an internal conflict of human values versus rot.
As President Dickey has so aptly stated, conscience must go hand in hand with competence. Although it has been pointed out that the College's most direct control of student conscience or ethics disappeared when compulsory chapel was abolished, it has never ceased to be a prime aim of the College to develop the ethical man as well as the intellectual man. Considering that one of the best ways to become a man is to be treated like a man, the College in spite of our youth and our tendency to judge too quickly, or too exactly, has considered us men. Now, as we pause between the realm of student and alumnus, it is meet to consider the development that lies behind and what beckons us to the fore.
Our first eighteen years were marked by guidance, the parental guidance we knew as restriction. How different it was to arrive on the Hanover scene and find that the only person to ask you about the night before was you, as you looked into the mirror. That reckoning did not seem like a major ethical decision and perhaps it was not, but one soon found that conscience and self-respect must stand the test of the dawn's early light.
Similarly, for many of us, the exercising of intellectual honesty has had little relevance to ethics. The matter of submitting one's own work has not been overly difficult; in fact, it has been more a matter of course, although adequate reemphasis has occasionally been provided by the student who has been asked to leave Dartmouth because of academic dishonesty.
Then too, we were building our beliefs each time we decided that the college rules were unreasonable or too restrictive; but even as we objected, we began to realize that the freedom for which we asked did demand a corresponding responsibility.
Despite the innocuousness of these choices, some of our colleagues in learning have been faced with very real ethical decisions. For a long time colleges have been the place of the bright young men, the upright ones. Consequently, when the image has been blurred, the publicity has rocked the land. In the past two years there have been several unrelated cases of quite different nature which have aroused entirely different reactions. One involved a young college professor and his acceptance of answers to an apparently competitive quiz program. After a first wave of surprise, the general public settled into its traditional conservative apathy, seeming to feel that what he did was not really so bad, not something that you or I wouldn't have done had we been there.
This spring we have seen another sordid event raked across the front pages of the nation's papers; the basketball scandal aroused considerably greater feelings of wrong than did the Van Doren incident. Because their reputations were not yet built nor their family names part of American lore, the basketball players as individuals will not be long remembered but they will never escape themselves. Their failure to meet their ethical challenge is irrevocable.
But were these acts really earthshaking? Was the country or were the colleges endangered? Probably not... at the time anyway; but I think that it is not necessary for me to point out what such actions could mean if taken as a standard for our entire society. Undoubtedly, Mr. Van Doren and many of the basketball players have had a competent education from teachers well versed in their disciplines, but facts do not make men any more than bricks a building.
It has been stated and restated that our education is just beginning and this must be true; we would have it no other way. To maintain our competence will be challenging and for many very difficult. However, difficult as it may be to keep up with the trade, to maintain one's integrity may be even more difficult. There will be ethical challenges when we leave Dartmouth; in all probability they will exceed any which we have yet encountered.
Even now we do not have to look far to see these challenges. One wonders, too often, if going into business means following the paths of the men so recently in the spotlight for their price fixing in the electrical industry. We have all become well acquainted with the type of corporate image and organization man presented by William Whyte. Perhaps this is why there was so little furor after the initial wave of this recent scandal. Already the issues have been forgotten. The executives were retained in good standing and their actions apparently condoned by the general public. It seems to have been "merely an unfortunate incident."
Are we to become part of mere unfortunate incidents? How many of us are taking jobs just for the prestige or money that go with them? How many of us when faced with a choice of right or wrong will make the ethical decision regardless of personal cost? This is our challenge.
I think that we will rise to whatever level we wish in our chosen fields of specialization. I also believe that we will pursue high ethical standards, but this pursuit will be more difficult. We have had a wonderful opportunity to develop under the guidance of our parents and the College. Their restraint and care have helped us form the basis of all that we believe and are today. We can never thank them adequately. However, as we leave Dartmouth the responsibility for continuing our ethical development as well as our intellectual development rests upon our shoulders. We have the background; the rest is up to us. Only we can be Men of Dartmouth.
The valedictory address being delivered by Harris McKee, who lives in Carlisle, lowa.
