As a trustee of st. Scholastica, I welcome this opportunity to meet with the faculty students relatives and friends on this happy occasion. I know that this means a great deal to the families of those graduating this afternoon. And I hope this is a memorable occasion for you and that you will go away with renewed confidence in the quality of the education. You have received here on your hopes for the life you will have before you. I cannot claim that's what I shall say. This afternoon will fit particularly. Well in the situation of Saint Scholastica. High as a matter of fact as a trustee holds that much of what I have to say does not apply to the faculty to the administration or to the student body of this college. But I think that I speak with some confidence and saying that what I have to say fits all to accurately in the nation as a whole. And I would ask that you use your own judgment and applying my remarks are to the situation of st. Scholastica as seems to you appropriate. The present age in America and in most of the West is perhaps best described as an age of bewilderment. It is marked by a pervasive sense of loss alienation and indirection. In every age and in every society men have known personal tragedy. Many generations have witnessed the destruction of family social class or Nation. But we like the Greeks or the 5th Century BC have witnessed the climax and accelerating deterioration of an entire culture. In the span of Socrates Lifetime sophocle and Order gave way to your deputy and chaos and two aristophanic division. Leadership passed from Pericles to Asia bodies Prosperity gateway to wretchedness and power to ruin. In the span of our lives change has been even more rapid and more pervasive consequently. Although we have not yet experienced General destruction and ruin despite our clothes call in the Syracuse and misadventure in Vietnam. We have suffered a far more serious loss of meaning and direction. Change appears to have devoured the entire fabric of tradition on which meaning and significance in our own personal lives depends. In the loss of tradition, we find a diminished identity and we have to search for our identity. the loss of our identity both individually institutionally and nationally the reason why we're so unsure of it results more than anything else from the scientific and religious revolution of which all of us are more or less consciously aware and which all of us have inherited for good Oreo. It is not something that any of us has planned. It is something that has happened to us. The theoretical advance of modern science from the Renaissance forward had little influence in everyday life until scientific discovery gained a technological expression through the Industrial Revolution there after the loss of the Common Man was transformed for the debased or improved by the transition from cottage industry to mass production. The development of transportation for example seemed entirely one of progress until the 1940s when the destructive and disruptive effects of automobile and air travel first became obvious since the 1940s. We have witnessed the state of decay of American Transportation and the growing blight of automobile and air travel the concreting cementing polluting the spoiling and depletion of America rather than explaining the ones hidden costs are now fully manifest. In medicine, however, the results have been more salutary scientific medicine has removed the element of magic and Tara from our daily lives germ Theory displaced are earlier belief that illness is caused by doubles or by someone Conjuring us. We freed ourselves from any superstitions that have burdened mankind for literally thousands of years. We stopped carrying little sacks of asphidity around our next to protect us from anyting from plague to common cold. Through the advancement of scientific medicine we have learned that there is no protection from the common cold. Scientific medicine developed new and exciting drugs that made it possible for the first time to ignore many natural laws affecting Health since 1940. The protection against infectious diseases has so increased the generations following have lost any acute awareness of the natural order. You speak of natural law to a child or to an expectant mother in the 1930s made good existential sense, because the mother might die in childbirth or the child might die of mastoiditis mastoiditis sinusitis typhoid diphtheria pneumonia or the variety of infectious diseases for which there was then no satisfactory cure. Mortality in childbirth infancy and childhood is memorized in the older graveyard of this nation. Scientific Medicine by diminishing the danger of infection removed our sense of caution and transform the age distribution of a population. Most people today under 30. We're not brought the fear of death by their first serious illness They never thought they were going to die because nature enforces certain basic laws. They rarely pray anymore if I should die before I wake because the chances are excellent that they won't. They all night vigil over a patient struggling against a disease to the point of Crisis is virtually a relic of the past. The avoidance of reality the avoidance of Nature and its laws in the area of Health has literally transformed the consciousness of those alive, especially the young leaving us with a Debonair indifference to Nature and the natural law. With the loss of this exemplary experience of natural order our ability to recognize laws or truths of nature in less obvious contacts has been diminished. More recently with the development of contraception in the pill and the legalization of abortion. We have avoided additional aspects of reality. We are now able to avoid the physical and social consequences of certain personal relationships. But we have given insufficient attention to the concomitant adulteration and alteration of the relationships themselves. Are inadequate attention to the comprehensive network of Social and physical effects of contraception is indicative of are avoidance of social no less than physical reality. Think of a society in which intimate relationships are coming place. A generation of affluence unprecedented in world history, but not to endure much longer has resulted in similar avoidance or an awareness of economic reality. Consider a society in which artificially aged and worn blue jeans sell for more than brand new ones. The Ragged blue jeans that one generation war with resignation and looked forward to replacing are the same blue jeans that the next deliberately goes out and buys. This is a straightforward consequence. I should suppose. Excessive affluence and an additional verification of Adam Smith's law of supply and demand a predictable Market phenomenon in which abundance deflates while scarcity inflates. the younger generation finds a special value in the costumes of poverty and disarray simply because these aspects of Life have become far scarce are for the children of the middle-class been good clothes and co- just as French Aristocrats at the time of the French Revolution took great delight and dressing his cousins and cavorting about in bucolic Rose are affluent young people affect the costumes of poverty for in their Horizon. The poor are little more than a romantic abstraction. The avoidance of intellectual and metal reality reaches its climax, of course in the drug culture defended with scholarly pretense by Andrew Weil in his book The Natural nine. The essential feature of stone thinking that is thinking under the influence of drugs is withdrawal from all but idiosyncratic experience. If one could derive meaning in life and talkin solely to oneself and if we ignore the important point of the social dependence of all talkin, there might be a case for drug-induced thought and drug-induced culture. Get the fascination with drugs and the question begging character of their description as psychedelic are facts worthy of Catholic validation. They evidence this culture is further avoidance of reality. They are probably withdrawal symptoms in themselves. We see more than General avoidance of personal reality in the development of encounter groups and then they're being dignified intellectually through Departments of psychology and which the concepts of privacy and personal dignity are either debased are rejected entirely as total strangers meet to reveal everything about themselves as if there were no such thing as an indecent exposure of the mind and the psyche as if we could allow ourselves to be known by just anyone as if we can be known by just anyone. Note the difference in the Theology and in the anthropology of the encounter Group movement and the Christian church. An ancient Collective the church says in part almighty God unto whom all hearts are open all desires known and from whom no secrets are HID Etc contrast that collect and its conception of man and of God with a Theology of the encounter Group movement. It is one thing for a person to reveal himself openly and freely before an all-wise all good and all-powerful God. It is quite another to reveal oneself in the context of an encounter group openly and freely to just any old stranger whose name and who's competence one does not know. As a matter of fact Caribbean cruises were designed for precisely the same purpose. They are less expensive at least is therapeutic and substantially more dignified. The avoidance of reality in these various aspects physical social economic intellectual and personal. Altra substantially the role and responsibilities of our colleges and universities in the present age. Our role is likewise altered to buy the change and decline of other institutions most notably the decline of the home and the decline of the church. It is not the task of the college is not merely to redirect the interest and concern of students to those aspects of physical biological social economic and personal reality from which in this culture. They have been encouraged to withdraw. It is also the college's new responsibility to fulfill the role of family and church by providing instruction in ethics Civility and Parenthood. Over a. Of 21 years. I measured in a classroom the decline of the knowledge of the Old and New Testament by students in an undergraduate ethics course that I talked for several years at Yale University and then for several more years at the University of Texas. The importance of this decline in the knowledge of our religious Heritage can scarcely be exaggerated it in the cage far more than the absence of theological sophistication or party. The classics it means that the documents that have bound this nation together as a culture the classics of the judeo-christian tradition are no longer shared by our people. No one can make any sort of biblical allusion with understanding unless a movie has been made of it. It expresses more than the decline of the church as an effective educational institution. It also points to a lack of concern with the most important and early as fundamental perceptions about man and his relationship to society and to the universe perceptions which at form the backbone of Western Civilization for 3000 years. I'm think what it means to those who are not Geniuses and who much must nevertheless Express their emotions. In an effective way at critical times in their lives. What does a young person do on the occasion of the death of his best friend? When you can no longer turn to a religious tradition are to a secular cultural tradition. When for example he cannot recite the words of David and lamentation for Jonathan are the words of Achilles in lamentation for patroclus. No, there's a young person must be a genius and be capable of developing inarticulate expression of his suffering for himself. whereas before he could express his grief by virtue of being reared in an effective thoughtful and profound tradition. The seriousness of these avoidances and declines is revealed with compelling force in a series of social and political vignettes. They it seems to me exhibit or abandonment of the most Elementary Common Sense as a culture older and the younger generation and doesn't withdrawal from reality that borders on a belief in magic or at least a grotesque exercise in fantasy. At the height of the Watergate inquiry for example didn't white house chief of staff now commandant of NATO Alexander Haig theorize that the Nixon tapes must have been erased as the result of some Sinister Force. hasn't there been a striking Revival of us of astrology throughout Western Europe and the United States particularly among college students didn't father Dickinson University two years ago a point Alexander Abraham a certified voodoo priest equipped with herbs dried leaves and assorted fluids up to teachers first course on Vudu, Must we not have abandoned all common sense to be reassured by Mr. Nixon statement quote. I am not a crook in the quote or I missed a Ford statement quote. There are lots of people dumber than I am in the boat. Hasn't the country generally swallowed the Kissinger Nixon fantasy of the Todd and the Ford fantasy of success Atlanta. Stock. Where is the evidence of the taunt? Where is the evidence that Russia has released the tension of its War making bow? Insult in the SALT Treaty Nixon agreed to limit the arms of the United States and to let the Soviet Union continue building and improving there's any call that a Triumph? Will unilaterally insisted that they would not be allowed to upgrade their smaller icbm's but the Soviet Union did not accept our unilateral in systems next Madrid despite the Soviet refusal to go along that. We would not increase ours despite the Soviet existing superiority and throw weight. Nixon approved allowing the Soviet Union to achieve a vast superiority by upgrading their muscles in their present stock and by creating Moon Superior in both quantity and quality. And in order to please the Soviet Union and in order to encourage the toward which may have had some domestic political value. Well, accommodating American grain dealers Nixon permitted the scandal of sweet deal a deal made on American Credit so that the Soviet Union could continue to finance the production of War materials while we Supply the Soviet Union with bread if not butter. In order to preserve the illusion of date Aunt Kissinger and Ford have not told the American people of deliberate Russian violations of the psaltery the direct Soviet involvement in the Yom. Kippur War, for example How do you explain aside from the American public's belief in fantasy? Our confidence in the president and the Secretary of State who have kept silent on the following Russia's unauthorized conversion of light intercontinental ballistic missiles in the heavy ones Rush's violation of the previous agreements on verification procedures necessary to assure that they are conforming to the treaties that we have signed with them. For example Russian out interferes with our satellite photography of their missile sites. The only way that we can know how many there are or whether they're building new ones. Russian Opera events are telemetric surveillance of their test flights of their new mirv Warheads. We cannot no longer measure their development. We no longer know what their force will be or how accurate they have become. They talked in short is a figment of our imagination stimulated by a PR campaign of a former president designed to distract the nation from his Watergate activities. It is continued by President Ford who perhaps seems not to understand. Had we don't and don't we have to believe in magic or at least fantasy to believe that President Ford can combat inflation by adding $3 a barrel to the price of oil. I made this remark at the time that that President Ford first proposed this and I noticed now that the Shah of Iran has taken out a full-page ad in the Washington Post are pointing out that the OPEC nations must not have increase the price of oil as much as they should have because the United States has discovered that they can tax the price at its current level. How can we suppose that we are combating inflation by contributing to it? is it not truly shocking that at this late date and our civilization after triumphs of Science and Theology and Technology, we should be preoccupied with witchcraft on the one hand astrology on the other and humbug in between this at present is the Legacy that the parental generation offers to the new one graduating from college. Correcting the defects of this Legacy define the role in part of the graduating class, but they also Define the continuing responsibility of our liberal arts colleges for the future. Our younger generation are graduating class is not usually referred to as disadvantaged and yet I am convinced it is it is a generation that has been reared in affluence a. Of affluence unprecedented in world history. And affluence far from being an advantage to the human spirit is as juvenile rightly said more ruthless than War. We have provided ourselves and our children with luxury, but we have mindlessly ignored goals and motivations. In our preoccupation without doing with with the outperforming and overachieving our grandfathers and grandmothers. We and I need my generation have been a very busy generation absorbed in many activities and rarely concerned with the qualitative assessment of our achievements rearing our children and affluence. We have left them in moral and spiritual ignorance. For the most part we have reared our children to be happy without making too many demands upon their time or hours. And by happy we have meant nothing more profound than personal immediate pleasure. Suspicious, so I'm really bored by the judgments of priests rabbis and ministers. We have entrusted our children to television for their basic theological and moral instruction. Well, we might have ejected the presence of controversial materials in the public schools. And while the people of West Virginia for example want to revise textbooks. We are the people of West Virginia have very little concern for the content of television. And for what he's shown on television to children from Age 2 or 3 on up. Our children are not been corrupted by the teachings of Karl Marx are the teachings of the Old and New Testament of the teachings of Homer or by reading The Federalist Papers. They have learned and they have been corrupted by the TV gospel. Enjoy yourself the manufacturers of Schlitz having a license to produce beer, but no licenses theologians. Nevertheless say quote you only go around once in life. So you have to grab all the Gusto that you can What qualifies a beer manufacturer to make this theological claim? And apparently truth-in-advertising does not require them to demonstrate this credential. Advertisers know that children have a lot to spend so they teach them that they have a lot to live and that Pepsi has a lot to give including teeth decay. They teach that Schaefer is the one beer to have when you're having more than one and they also teach us and our children that it would be on American to have anything less than too much. Enjoy yourself immediately and continue enjoying yourself clearly is the gospel television gives no indication of the social or personal price of enjoyment as a way of life the program it so enthusiastically pedals. Self Indulgence in anything and everything it is suggested is alright provided it gives pleasure and promotes business. Television reminds us even to enjoy bigotry if you don't watch and emulate that fun-loving Archie Bunker until you do Archie Bunker has done more to make George Wallace presentable than any Factor educational Factory in American life. He has done more to a road the the incredible Morrow advances of Martin Luther King and other of our great spiritual leaders of the six days than any other figure in modern America bigotry can give you pleasure there for bigotry is good Violence by the way can give you pleasure there for violence is good watch until you enjoy everything or anything from racism to murder to rape to Mayhem. If any of these experiences lead to indigestion remember that too can be an occasion for pleasure with Alka-Seltzer. Immediate self-gratification even at the price of economic medical social our personal irresponsibility is good. The watchword is enjoy. With this basic. Of Marlon struction, we have prepared ourselves and the Next Generation for disaster. And apart from the transformation about Educational Systems. And apart from the transformation of the lifestyles and life habits of graduating classes all over this country. We will face disaster pleasure has been promised will pleasure be forthcoming. Can we deliver on the promises that we have allowed commercial mass. Media to make on our behalf both in programmes and then commercials? Compromising gratification and insisting that the primary obligation of every person is to enjoy himself no matter by what means television has given instruction that has influence the older no less than the younger generation. Everyone in America has been profoundly influenced and shaped by 25 years of Television morality. The View that you have a right to whatever you can get and whatever you want provided only it makes you happy is the morality of Watergate It is also the morality of many who commit mindless pointless crimes of violence in Imitation of cruelties first witnessed on television. In this complex and frightening context colleges must Define their major educational responsibilities and the graduates from college must have find their responsibilities for the coming years of their lives. Our task is to lead a return to reality and to design curricula and to present life habits that will bring an end to the avoidance behavior of recent years. In the last decade, we have witnessed a substantial loss of faith in and dedication to social intellectual and moral responsibility in the faculty of many of our colleges. This is not true. I hope for the faculty of st. Scholastica, but it is true generally. Have the faith in these ideals these social goals must be regained. Our faculties must retain the clearest perception of those purposes that bring them together. But bring them into contact with students the purpose of transforming the young into mature self-fulfilling socially responsible human beings. Human beings were capable of exercising clear independent rational judgments person to advance in knowledge and understanding of the physical world of human society and of History. Person to understand the achievements of perception and presentation of imagination. Persons who share the enthusiasm and excitement of Discovery. I do know the excitement and importance of teaching. these goals properly bring people together in an academic community and give it meaning and purpose but the intangir bility of these goals is such that faith in them as easily lost and once lost almost impossible to regain Student Center that Lee can also lose track of these goals that bring them to college and become mistakenly preoccupied in ways similar to those that distract faculty. Faculty and administrators must have the authority to expect Excellence from students who work with them. The authority of teachers is a direct function of their competence. The more competent. They are the more easily they can make claims on the time attention and effort of their students. Are colleges cannot sustain an effective teaching program unless they are staffed by persons and recognize themselves as mentors to students. No less than his teachers. Students are concerned to know if there are living human beings who really care about the ideas and ideals professed it by the academic Community if the intellectual program is merely a facade with no implications for the way anyone lives. This generation of students is not going to be impressed. 3 years ago at Boston University, we hired a man named Brookshire who was amazingly crippled. You got a full-size head, but he had a body that was only 18 in long. He sat in a funny curled-up position in a wheelchair smoking a very large pipe. With a remarkable intellectual capacity. He was little more than pure spirit. And yet I doubt that we ever appointed a fighter teacher. Imagine what it was like for a group of students from Massachusetts, Long Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania to explain to Brookshire that they had problems. Imagine the effect on students to come face-to-face with the courage in the Vitality of this man. imagine complaining to him about a grade the propensity to feel crushed are broken by trivial disappointments is naturally to be expected from a generation whose priest and money has been a television set. To dispel the false expectations of our generation. We must have teachers of competence and personal Integrity teachers like Brookshire. And our graduating class must recognize respect and try to encourage the appointment of such teachers whenever they encounter them wherever they find them. And we must hope that the graduating class will in turn become parents who will demonstrate to their children that character and vitality are essential. No teacher can affect the lives of his students and no power can affect the lives of his children. Unless like Brookshire they give meaning to courage integrity and intellectual curiosity by the embodiment of these values in their own personal lives. In a liberal arts college the humanities must be expected to play a central role. But the humanities are not to be defined in terms of the subject matter are there subject matter and thus exclude science while concentrating on literature history and the like the humanities are to be defined regardless of subject matter in terms of a basic concern. The humanistic concern should provide every college and university and it has a simple part in the life of every human being. And this time of accelerated change with concurrent confusion uncertainty and anxiety the wilderman. We have an obligation to cope intellectually and spiritually with a world that no one fully understand. In the flux, we must recover articulate and explain our few precious and invidious verities birth. Love suffering Joy. They spend the range of our concern as humanists. They spend the range of our concern as human beings. The intellectual tasks of a college and the intellectual tasks of all of us as individuals is to transmit these better at these in their full richness in their completeness in there ecstasy and our tragedy either to our students are to our children. We touch the lives of our students. And our students will touch the lives of their children when we contemplate and discuss these verities that are also Mysteries. They are the proper concern of the humanities weather in science. Social science letters are the Arts. The college and the university the college and the individual human life. Army year in which students and faculty are taught and parents and children learn and encourage one another in self-realization. These are places where students and parents and children while being prepared for Creative work in some field or merely trying to hold a job come to self consciousness and awareness of personal potentialities through the confrontation of poetry drama music history philosophy religion literature science the wide areas in which every individual is privileged to explore and to test himself. The material of the courses in college must be used to bring our students to a fuller awareness. of their potentialities and of the Grandeur of human existence and they in turn must use this material later in life to further develop their own personal existence. This will lead of course do the full awareness of the inevitable risks that life involves and The Limited ways in which the individual can win in this losing adventure of life. The test of our colleges and the test of our college graduates is properly a test of the humanities and a test of the humanity of each one of us. Until recently Educators were recorded the full Authority and responsibility of parents toward their children. And at some colleges they may still be in general. However, college faculties and college administrators have advocated this role. It seemed prudent over the short run but I'm giving up this responsibility as parents to the students in our charge administrators and faculty have forfeited a part of their calling. We tried to forget but we inevitably exercise parental influence and responsibility over our students in consequence. We often demand less of ourselves, then we should. Although in loco parentis is now suspect as a Doctrine the college must continue to Bear major parental responsibility for its students just as students who graduate from college must bear parental responsibility for their children. Like true parents The Faculty of colleges fear above everything else the death of their children even while we as faculty and administrators prepare for that possibility. Parents hope that their children will live after them. But parents always faced annoying awareness particularly in a culture saturated with automobiles drugs guns and television that they may live longer than their children. Recognizing these dangers a parent hopes that if one of his sons or daughters procedure in death that that son or daughter will not die before he learned something of the meaning of life. It is the idea of a young person dying without any sense of what's going on. That seems most cruel. And trying to teach the humanities in trying to face essential responsibilities and trying to return to reality the college is trying to teach each student something about the meaning of life. It hopes that each student will be able to say I'm glad to have lived and I'm glad I'm alive no matter how short my life Maybe. Perhaps cherishing life and following Yates. The student will ask what made you dream that I could come gray hair? Butcher by the way, could not come gray hair two years ago. Brookshire are exemplary teacher died of influenza. His life was short. His life was intense, and it was purposeful. There was no religion known to man that could prevent Brookshire from dying and yet Brookshire had within himself, but courage to be a happy and a fulfilled person. And if he had it within himself. It is within the reach of any man. He had the dignity and the determination. To love is a fulfilled person. And he possessed and exemplified the grunger appropriate to man. The humanity succeed and our colleges and our University succeed in my judgment. When confronting man with his approaching death and eliciting the dread appropriate to that end, they encourage in him in celebration of life to invest with passionate seriousness in Enterprises and in an existence that will not last. Men the humanities and the college's flourish and no other way. This is our purpose our relevance and are necessity when we meet this responsibility. We meet the crisis that faces us if we fail this responsibility we fail in life. We failing all that we have in this age of bewilderment. It is important that we retain a clear sense of the humanities and their purpose in our lives whether is faculty as Educators as parents or as members of a graduating class. We must come to terms with our own humanity and live courageously and fully without a Vestige of self-pity that is appropriate only for those who do not know what man has endured and what through faith and through concern. He willing to her and can enjoy her in the future. I am confident that this graduating class. So the College of st. Scholastica will find its way in personal integrity and then personal courage to vigorous thoughtful purposeful and fulfilled living. Thank you.