Valedictory to 1965

GENTLEMEN OF THE GRADUATING CLASS:

You have now completed the experience we call "going to college." The full personal meaning of that experience is rarely known to any of us; it is never known to any man until his understanding both of himself and of his fellows has ripened with the warmth of wonder and withstood the bitter days.

Up through the college years a young man is largely a derived thing. He is an as yet rather loosely joined combination of unexamined appetites, inherited characteristics and acquired requirements of parents and teachers. From here on that combination will shape up or settle down into your own unique human individuality from which in their turn your sons and daughters and perchance thousands of others will derive something of yourself.

Except for the ways of the Lord that surpasseth human reckoning, it will be hard for any man among you not to make "a go of it" and most of you will make "a good go of it." That will be pleasing to us as it will to you, but, gentlemen, if you do not aspire to more than that, Dartmouth's purpose will be far from fulfilled in you.

Your senior year marked the death of a man in whom the human spirit found perhaps its greatest fulfillment in our time. For your company in. all the years ahead I give you the challenge Sir Winston Churchill gave a weary but happily victorious England in May, 1945: "There is still a lot to do ... you must be prepared for further efforts of mind and body and further sacrifices to great causes if you are not to fall back into ... the craven fear of being great."

The "fear of being great" is more to be feared by good men because it is insidious than because it is craven. It is the seed bed of small lives and squandered talent. In its lowest form this fear smells of meanness.

Gentlemen, whatever else you abjure in Dartmouth's name, abjure "the craven fear of being great."

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