Valedictory to 1964

MEN OF THE GRADUATING CLASS :

This moment of ceremony marks the completion of a task. The terms of that task were set mostly by others: your teachers, the competition of your classmates, and also by that self-selective fraternity, the ancient brotherhood of good men. You alone, however, met those terms.

At every level of academic achievement there are magnificent men among you and, as always at every level of talent, there have been a few whose performance as men is down among the "also rans." You know some of both, and perchance you know the deep, disguised anguish of being all too well acquainted with one of the "also rans" in the human race - up to now.

There are, I think, two things that can usefully be added to all that Dartmouth has tried to say to you about the man you might be. The first is the hopeful truth that there is not one "long-shot" among you who could not fulfill himself as a person with a man-sized, self-administered dose of Dartmouth standards taken over a lifetime. Heroic treatment, you say, and we who love you as our own can only answer, "yes." It is never too late to be that kind of hero to yourself, but it will be much later each tomorrow.

The other thing to be said is that whatever your talent, whatever your position, whatever your guise, the world will find you out as a man. The world that finds you out may be a small one, and it just might not include your employer or even the minister. But, gentlemen, it will be the world that matters to you: your wife, your children, others who rely on you, and above all, yourself. If there are those among you, as we believe, on whom the larger world will rely as it finds you out, you will know the glory of adding more than one man's mite to the worth of all men. Whether this glory or a lesser role is to be yours, we ask only that you may never be free of knowing the man Dartmouth would have you be.

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