Valedictory Address
Mr. President, Governor Sununu, Trustees, Faculty, Honored Guests and Graduates:
Career Insights, a national magazine billing itself as "A Reference for Achievers," sits in the Career and Employment Services Office here at Dartmouth, and in similar offices around the country. Its latest Issue carries a full-page advertisement from Paine Webber, a major New York brokerage firm, which reads:
In the 60s / the word was love. / In the 70s, / it was peace. / In the80s, / it's money. / We can help you make it
With all due respect to the esteemed chairman and his monetar- ist colleagues, I have to believe that upon our graduation, we cannot afford to be concerned exclusively with expanding our personal share of the national money supply.
Yet, powerful economic and social currents increasingly com- pel us toward a survivalist mentality. Few individuals today have not felt threatened by a pervasive sense of a world gone awry; a world of waning personal values, worsening economic condi- tions, and increasingly militaristic international relations.
The temptation is to respond by turning inward; by shunning concerns for the outside world, and by concentrating on our own immediate success and happiness. The particular manifestation of this temptation among students is an increasing demand for "vocational pragmatism" in their education. We are led to be- lieve that an education is an investment; an investment which yields returns only to the extent that it supplies skills which are immediately and lucratively rewarded in the marketplace. This is the mentality to which the ad appeals. Unfortunately, it is a mentality which has proven itself acceptable to many individuals within our society. Even more distressing, however, is the pres- ence of this mentality here at Dartmouth, a liberal arts institu- tion. Inevitably, this short-sighted perspective is destructive. If we ignore the potentially tragic social problems of our time, yet remain naively optimistic about the prospects for our own lives, we are simply following that path which Dr. Arthur Levine has described as "going first class on the Titanic." The use of the phrase, "in the 80s it's money," implies that we have embraced the current wave of pragmatism, abandoned the idealism of the preceding decades, and have boarded Levine's Titanic.
If society is to escape this sinking ship, its citizens must resist temptation and prove the ad wrong in its assertions. They must take on the challenge of combining pragmatism with idealism. As members of the Dartmouth community, we should be particular- ly prepared to accept this challenge. A prominent goal of our liberal arts education has been, and continues to be, instruction in the value of pragmatism in conjunction with, not to the exlusion of, idealism. Indeed, throughout our four years here we have been called upon to be women and men of broad social vision. A. Bartlett Giamatti has referred to this social vision as the "civic goal" of a liberal arts education. Our charge has been to develop our skills with a civic conscience; to recognize that those skills are wasted if used only for individual benefit.
As we face a world where idealism has become increasingly deemphasized, we are challenged to maintain that civic con- science. To do so, we must accept that our pragmatism may not have been as well harmonized with idealism as it should have been while we were at Dartmouth. We must also recognize that the task can only become more difficult. An academic communi- ty is unique in its openness, introspection and flexibility. Leav- ing Dartmouth we must actively resist the pressures which call us to sacrifice our values, integrity and honor for the sake of personal aggrandizement. If we as individuals, and society at large, are to prosper fully from our liberal arts education we must ultimately have the courage to say:
No thank you, Paine Webber
