GENTLEMEN OF THE GRADUATING CLASS:
We are at one of those arbitrary stops that punctuate the lives of both men and their institutions. Traditionally, graduation from college has had something of the exclamation mark about it, but today with so much at issue it must also be a question mark.
It is fitting that in our last meeting together as the 1968 Dartmouth academic community we should acknowledge that this has been one of those years when events become the great teacher of mankind. We gathered last September in the spreading darkness of warfare in our cities, in Vietnam and, perhaps most portentously of all, in that inner sanctum we call our souls.
We end the year in the gloom of two ghastly acts of renunciation of man's pretense to being human. Since last September the contagion of violence in thought and speech and deed has spread to every corner of the earth where man presumes to reign.
Events teach different people different things. But who among us now doubts that two inseparable things must be learned by America and soon: first, that there are great needs of equal opportunity and social decency that must be met; second, that there is no need that c'an be well met within a free society by the destruction of that society and the renunciation of man's obligation to be human.
There will be, as there always have been, those who can hold onto only one of these truths at a time, but I leave with you the challenge that we who have been per- mitted the high privilege of rationality must hold to the faith that, come what may, these two things are in truth one and inseparable, now and forevermore.
In an awful and yet wonderful way you and Dartmouth will live by the way you honor that faith, even after thirty.
And now, men of Dartmouth, the word is "so long," for in the Dartmouth fellowship there is no parting.