June 5, 1967

"Remarks for Class Day,"
by David B. Truman
Dean of Columbia College

President Kirk, members of the class of 1967, honored colleagues, and guests: Our participation once again in an ancient ceremony of ending and beginning, if it amounts to more than hollow form, should be an occasion to reflect upon those things that bring us together and to examine as we can those that might break us one from another and so destroy what gives us common purpose.

When we first met, forty-five months ago, I spoke to you about challenges to your promising talents and suggested that meeting these challenges demanded more than an act of will. It was my purpose then to persuade you that constructive response to persistent challenge is a process of successive choice, each instance containing little of resolve, but each, and hopefully the whole, resting upon increasingly sensitive and informed discrimination.

Today I should like to return to that theme. Not for the same reason, since your presence here testifies to your competent responses to the challenges of the College, but for a larger relevance and a more urgent one.

The capacity to discriminate skillfully becomes more essential to a man and to a society, even as the times make it more difficult To differentiate between the genuine and the merely plausible is relatively easy in a simple society undergoing no rapid change. Conventions, predictable responses, and accepted beliefs provide a stable structure of assumption and expectation by which choices are guided and consequences anticipated.

Complexity and rapid change, such as we now see around and ahead of us, weaken convention, erode belief, and make skillful discrimination more uncertain precisely when it is most needed. Such times, as no others, test the qualities of humanity. They can and, if disaster is to be avoided, they must evoke fresh powers of rationality, for they also can produce an abandonment of courage, an indiscriminate rejection of all that is, and, hence, a heedless indifference to consequence.

The signs of discrimination's jeopardy are many, but none is more clear or more menacing than a rapid extension of our foolish penchant for bipolarity from matters of trifling import to areas of the gravest consequence. To classify all people as either "with it" or "not with it" and tastes as either "in" or "not in" is silly, undiscriminating, and essentially harmless. But, in reaction against frustration and bewildering change, to impose such bipolarity upon a wide and important range of human experience is to abandon discrimination, to renounce rationality, and to embrace disastrous failure - individual and collective.

These signs are with us. For twenty years we have been asked to see and we have seen most of the world as "either- or," either Communist or anti-Communist. Those who wish to stand aside must be either "neutral for us" or "neutral against us." Thus forsaking discrimination, we make no careful distinction between those who indeed may intransigently attempt our destruction and those who may be prepared on other grounds to seek with us a different accommodation. Caught in this bipolarity, we are led to see any such accommodations as incipient betrayal and to seal ourselves against ambiguous but rational solutions.

Or look in another direction. Much of the contemporary theater, as the discriminating critic, Walter Kerr, reminds us, reflects and even advocates an "either-or" posture that insists man must have immediate perfection, here and now, or, since that must be denied him, he must denounce the search for perfection as illusion and the hope of improvement as a fraud. That bipolarity leads to a futile, utopian totalism or, more likely, to formless inaction. "We will," in Kerr's words, "match the indecency of the universe with our own immobility, like a child refusing to eat its dinner and going, in deeply satisfying self-pity, straight to bed." I want today, however, to examine a less cosmic case, involving the university - your University and all others worthy of the name. The bipolarity here grows primarily, as we all know, from the anxieties and the passions produced by the war in Viet Nam. It insists not only that each of us as an individual must be either a "hawk" or a "dove" but also that the university, as a corporate entity. must choose one side or the other not simply as a collective citizen, making its resources available to the society and the government, as requested and as in its judgment, its own requires, a matter that has its own complexities, but rather as a direct political advocate. It is this latter demand and its failure to discriminate that I ask you particularly to reflect upon.

The contemporary university, especially in the United States, is an almost wholly novel institution. From being an enterprise only marginally important to the society, primarily concerned with the general education of a small elite, and hence principally a transmitter rather than an innovator, it has become over a few rapidly passing years a primary national resource, concerned with education and training on a broad front, and, through it members, functioning as a major source of innovation and of criticism in the society. Innovation and criticism-and the two are not always easily distinguishable - are perhaps the most distinctive modern marks of the university.

These activities of university members are essential - increasingly essential - to the society. That they may be performed, the society in effect has made of the university a kind of privileged sanctuary in which its members may engage in unhampered inquiry and discussion, the prime values upon which our academic communities are built. Such a setting is the only kind congenial to the performance of these crucial functions. Large, hierarchically structured organizations - increasingly typical of a complex society - afford limited hospitality to criticism and innovation,which makes the performance of these functions in some sector of the society indispensable to its capacity to change and adapt.

These functions, however, are fraught with hazard. They have consequences, often direct and visible, for the society, for opposing interests within it, and hence for the university itself. In consequence, the privilege of sanctuary is conditional - the terms more demanding for their being largely implicit. I shall look at two of these, the first obvious, the second less so.

First, existence of the sanctuary assumes that the university community will so conduct its affairs that teaching, learning, inquiry, discussion, and all associated activities are free of disruption and interference, from within and from without. An academic community that permits some of its members to make it a battleground rather than a forum of inquiry, a political staging area rather than a setting for criticism and dissent, risks violating the freedoms of its other members and abandoning the terms of its existence.

Second, the privilege of the sanctuary implies that the university as a community, as a corporate body, will not become an advocate in the political marketplace. Here is the most serious threat of a heedless and undiscriminating bipolarity. For if the university as a community assumes the advocate's role, it will itself have breached the boundary between it and other social institutions, it will have abandoned any difference between it and the usual contenders in the political arena, and it will be obliged to accept the fortunes of the political game as they are obliged to. When political fortunes change - and they will change, in the future as in the past - the losers can expect to have their opportunities restricted and their activities regulated by those on the winning side. It will then be too late to invoke the privilege of sanctuary, too late effectively to protect the unpopular critic and the radical innovator, and perhaps too late for the academic community to set its own standards of membership. The university cannot simultaneously both stand apart and assume the role of political advocate. The two are incompatible.

The stakes include more than free inquiry and critical dissent as rights that are to be valued for themselves. They also encompass the society's essential need of the functions that the university, and probably only the university, can perform. Without those functions the university would itself be transformed and the society seriously weakened.

These are not, I submit, idle speculations. No society, certainly not this one, is proof against crippling a support upon which, in the long run, its strength depends. This country has not seen the last recurrence of McCarthyism or its equivalent, nor the last occasion fostering an intolerant political orthodoxy. It will have need of these sanctuaries, strong and uncorrupted.

This issue is not the only or even the most urgent on which you need to exercise the capacity for skillful discrimination, though it is one that is close to you and important. The calls for such skill in many other areas are, in fact, certain to increase. If I could hope for one thing from you and for you, it would be that you may maintain that capacity alive, and sharp. It is a mission worthy of your talents.

Good luck. Keep the faith.