Valedictory Address

“1970 Valedictory Address” (May 1970): 1-6. (UA Case 68, Box 2)

Honoured Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen and Fellow Graduates:

It is my duty as valedictorian to bid farewell to the University of New Brunswick on behalf of this year’s graduating class.

The custom of bidding farewell to the university, like many other things today, is rapidly becoming obsolete. Not only are an increasing number of students returning to do graduate work, but also many graduates will utilize and channel the varied services provided by the university to society. For many graduates, contact with the university will be a lifetime relationship.

What is becoming customary, however, is to centre the valedictory address around some relevant situation confronting us as we stand on the threshold of graduation.

This afternoon I’d like to speak on something which is, and is going to be, of fundamental importance to every one of us and our entire way of life.

There are indications today that we may not be on the right path if we wish to better the quality of life we lead. To name a few of these indicators:

Science magazine recently observed that: “While a greater portion of young people attend colleges and universities every year, crime rates, drug addiction, and illegitimate births are increasing more rapidly”.

The Montreal health department reports that the carbon monoxide level in the air is high enough to damage a Montrealer’s sight, hearing, and brain cells.

The U. S. Senate Subcommittee on juvenile delinquency notes that attacks on teachers in U. S. schools has increased sharply in the last five years, many teachers now carry guns to classes in some schools.

The technology of medicine and health has enabled us to look forward to an increasing average life span. Yet since 1956 that rate of increase has been sharply decreasing.

The threat posed by “pollution today has for the first time forced us to think of the life sustaining environment as a closed system. Urbanologist Danial Moynihan notes that the pollution issue effectively exemplifies the concept that “everything is related to everything”. Stated differently, if one part of our total system of life is affected, other parts will have to change to accommodate it. To name a few example of these complex relations:

Because of the amount of effluent discharged from fish processing plants, more than a quarter of the shell fish in beds along New Brunswick coasts are made inedible.

Physical education at Los Angeles Schools had to be cancelled last year due to lack of Oxygen in the air.

Young Salmon placed in the St. Croix River between New Brunswick and Maine are observed to die within minutes because of effluent from a pulp mill.

On June 22, 1969, the polluted Cuyahoga River at Cleveland actually caught fire and burned, damaging two railroad bridges that span it.

Such frightening examples are not limited to North America alone. Deaths attributable to Emphysema and chronic bronchitis are also rising sharply in Denmark, especially in those areas where air pollution is heaviest. Large tracts of land in Russia have been left devastated by open strip mining.

Many of you will probably remember the old saying that the success of an area could be counted by the number of smoking stacks in it. Today Tokyo city has 75,000 smoking stacks, and the school children there have to wear gauze masks on smog alert days. Traffic policemen have to return regularly to headquarters for oxygen, while oxygen is available to the man on the street for 25 cents per breath.

Underlying all industrial production is the assumption that the market, that is, human beings, will continue to exist. Today, however, there is a real danger that this existence is no longer assured. There predominant theme at last year’s meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, attended by more than 7,000 scientists was that “the pollution of the U. S. has gone far beyond the point where technology alone can stop it”. Dr. Athelston Spilhaus, president of the association, gave a conservative estimate of 50 billion dollars required to foot the pollution bill over the next five years.

Yet we’ve continued to grow: that is, at least the gross national product has continued to grow. But with future costs of this magnitude incurred by past events, the question arises: “How accurate is gross national product as a measure of growth?”

Until this time, business has not accounted for the costs associated with the production of negative goods such as soot, waste oil, and carbon monoxide. Yet we shall very soon have to incur enormous costs to remedy the hazards arising from their production. In effect, we have been living on borrowed money, which is going to have to be paid back within the very near future. Consequently gross national product as a measure of growth has been misleading.

Why is it that the systems which define our way of existence are really the means of our extermination? Every problem, after all, is the result of an underlying case.

Upon examining systems as varied as the North American, the Russian, and the Japanese, one can identify a particular element common to all three: the drive for growth through technologic innovation.

The celebrated British novelist, E. M. Forster, once suggested that it is a science’s proclivity for allying itself with the needs and demands of power that gives it such a potency for affecting change.

When technology is combined with specialization of function, the result is efficiency of production in one specific field on concentration and disregard for most of the others. Thus a steel mill will set about to produce its product in the most efficient manner possible. This means that wastes must be disposed efficiently, usually by dumping them into the nearest stream. In many of the pollution examples cited previously, disaster has often become the price of efficiency.

Dr. Murray Gell-man, 1969 Nobel Prize winner in physics, calls for a basic re-orientation of science and technology. He observes:

“The Problems come about as a product of three factors:

1. Population:
2. The propensity of each individual to destroy his environment:
3. His capacity to do so through being armed with technology.”

All three of these are on the increase today, and must either level off or decreased if we are to survive.

One can distinguish both a direct effect and an indirect effect when technology interacts with society. As an example, the direct effect of automation is increased production, but the indirect effect of automation is job displacement and unemployment. The indirect effect of using studded tires is increased road wear, costing an estimated 14 million dollars annually in the province of Ontario alone. Similarly, we have seen the indirect effects of D. D. T., cyclamates, the jumbo jet, pulp and steel mills, and industrial noise from machinery.

A further factor which should not be overlooked is the way in which our system presently utilizes technology to satisfy a demand. The market mechanism is only able to control one aspect of technologic innovation, and that is the direct effect. “As to indirect effects, the market mechanism proper has no control whatsoever”.(1) The laws of supply and demand inherent in our profit system are slow to react to the need for a better environment. There’s no profit in it. If and when they do react, much of the damage has already been done. The expression “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” certainly applies well here.

How serious is this threat, inherent in our present way of life?

Robert Gomer notes in the “bulletin of the atomic scientists” that

“Many effects of technological change will be impossible to reverse once they have occurred …. We are caught in an evolutionary stream of our own making but beyond our control”.

We all known that change comes slowly and often lags behind need. In an age of increasing technologic advancement, economist R. L. Heilbroner suggests:

“…the coming generation will be the last to seize control over technology before technology has irreversibly seized control over it”

In conclusion: Our graduation class is confronted with problems heretofore never encountered unmatched in both their complexity, and in the vision required of the solutions.

Moreover, the solutions are likely to demand an entirely new restructuring of our way of life. Winston Churchill once remarked: “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us”.

It’s not a leisure society that we’re reading into. We as university graduates shall be charged with giving “New direction to technology, diverting it from that yield higher productive efficiency into areas that yield greater human satisfaction”.

The motto of our university: “Dare to be wise”, has never been more applicable than it is today to the graduation class of 1970.

(1) R.L. Heilbroner, “Limits of American Capitalism”, Harper & Row, New York, 1965