Graduation Address

"Encaenia address by United States Senator Edmund S. Muskie, May 15, 1969" (UA Case 67, Box 2)

I thought that before I saw the program that I would speak to you as a citizen of Maine and of the United States but now I see I have a third role as an alumnus of this great University.

I must say that it is a real distinction to be an honorary alumnus of an institution, which in a sense, is the product of the American Revolution and of the dissent of the displaced establishment of that day.

I have some reservations about what I am going to say to you today, in part because I am not sure that it will improve on silence, and in part because I know that the time I will take to say it stands between the members of the graduating class and the future they are so eager to embrace. But like any American Senator, since you have given me the chance to speak, I am going to use it.

There is always a temptation for a citizen of the United States to dwell on the ties that bind our two countries when he speaks in Canada. That temptation is doubled when a former Governor and a Senator of Maine speaks in the St. John Valley.

But I suspect that today's graduates, families and friends, did not come to this occasion to hear comforting words about our common and undefended border. We have lived side by side long enough to talk of other things. And there are other things. Matters which concern both of our countries, because our experiences are similar, because our lives are more firmly inter-twined by the facts of economics, transportation, communications and a crowded globe, and because we find ourselves confronting similar debates, although the accents of those debates may differ.

President Mackay was good enough to refer to one of our Maine sayings. I would like to tell you another Maine story. It is the story of a young man, a young farm boy of eight who had had very little schooling, and he was asked on one occasion whether he could read. "Well", he said, "when I get to the crossroads and look at the signs, I can tell how far, but I can't tell where to." Well, the dilemma of that little educated young man is the dilemma of great magnitude and always puzzled as to which direction we ought to take to solve them, and this is true of great nations as well.

Both of our nations are concerned about the impact of modern weapons on our chances for survival and their relevance to real security and their impact upon our capacity to meet domestic needs.

Both our nations are concerned with deep divisions within our respective societies, divisions caused by long and tortuous histories of ethnic and racial antagonisms, divisions which demand early solutions, but which cannot be ended overnight.

Both of our nations are plagued by vast differences in wealth, along sectional and social lines, and are hampered in their efforts towards social justice by the pressures of inflation and the difficulty of making appropriate allocations of resources.

Both our nations are confronted by the damage of pollution and the threats of environmental contamination. We have both wasted rich natural resources and we have both done too much to endanger the future health of our people and our societies.

Both of our nations are caught up in waves of dissent, rooted in the gap between promise and performance in our societies and fed by the energies of youthful idealism. The coincidence of age and dissent threaten to open wider the normal gaps between the generations.

Unanswered, the complaints about our societies, as they are, can tear those societies apart.

Unchecked, the attacks on our societies may tear them down.

The origins of each of our countries suggest the validity of those observations.

I share Churchill's view that "if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future".

A university Commencement, like this, is a symbol of the connections between the past, the present, and the future.

We mark our sense of continuity with the past in the mediaeval pageantry of these costumes and the procession.

We pay tribute to the accomplishments of the present in the granting of degrees, even honorary, unearned ones.

We note the importance of the future in our attention to the careers of those who are about to leave the comparative shelter, and I emphasize comparative, of academic halls.

There are many practices in our universities and in our societies which ought to be changed, whatever hallowed traditions have been attached to them, because there is much in them, in what they represent, in what they practice, that justifies skepticism and cynicism.

Irrelevance, in courses and requirements, is intolerable in an age of rapid change.

Insensitivity to society's needs is a rejection of the university's obligation to those who need its leadership, and exclusion of dissent and of student participation in the development of university policies is a denial of the search for truth.

The vital question is not whether institutions of learning - and other public institutions - should change, but how they could change.

In a democratic society we have provided the means for change, but we have not been able to eliminate the pain of change, and I am not sure we should, because it is the pain which cautions against unreasoned and heedless disruption of the body politic.

So long as interests conflict, as they will in a free society, not every group can have its own way. But a truly representative democracy provides some assurance that every legitimate interest is able to make itself heard at the seat of power and that no identification group of citizens is consistently turned away empty-handed.

Fundamental wrongs and fundamental conflicts will in the end produce turbulence and bitter protest in spite of the best of governments, and if the wounds are deep enough, it is both cruel and futile to tell the injured man he ought not to scream, out of consideration for others.

The nub of the problem of dealing with protest and demands for change is in making certain that our democratic institutions are capable of responding appropriately, without destroying themselves and with destroying the protection they offer to all segments of society.

And that problem is even more touchy in the case of universities. I am not sure that a university should be like a political government, and I doubt that a university can function as an educational institution if it rests on some form of egalitarian democracy in which every administrator, faculty member and student has a vote. But I also doubt that the foundations will crumble if universities were made more representative of their students in matters which vitally concern them.

The demands of students, as well as those of other segments of our societies, are closely bound up with the sense of alienation which accompanies increasing size and complexity in our institutions. It is not enough to vote, if the results of that vote are swallowed up in a giant mass. And within the movement toward efficiency there must be room for variations and for individual action within the university and every other institution in a free society.

The storm about us, and it is a storm, reflects the needs for that kind of change, but this is a democratic wind that is blowing and in the long run the unsettling effect of such a wind is better than a calm, because it is out of ferment that we achieve creativity.

So I am not distressed that we have dissent and I am not afraid of institutional reform, even if it displaces me, but I am concerned that the dominant, democratic impulse we see may be subverted by other impulses which are also very much in evidence.

These other impulses are reflected in the undemocratic objectives of some protestors and in the tactics of other protestors which jeopardize our democratic institutions.

In the United States we have always recognized an inherent tension between democratic values and moral absolutes. Our Bill of Rights, for example, is a tangible embodiment of principles which protect the fundamental rights of minorities against the encroachment of even overwhelming majorities. The American Constitution also guarantees the right of minorities to bring their views to bear on majorities.

Any plausible concept of democracy requires the protection of those rights. What troubles me is the apparent assumption of some protestors that a minority may rightly inflict almost any affront on the interests of others short of death and mayhem, in order to impose its own views, and the only criteria set by such protestors is their own conviction that their cause is just.

As an ultimate philosophical proposition one may not be able to refute such an assumption, but I do believe it is a travesty of any workable notion of democracy.

The democracy we have in Canada and the United States was not produced by a fight to the death for morally unimpeachable principle of democracy. All of the arguments for democracy that are being made today were well known at the time of the American Revolution. We are democracies because we, and our common parent, have absorbed into the representative process each group which is sufficiently numerous, organized and insistent to make those who are already represented both morally uncomfortable and physically insecure.

The process of absorption has taken a long time and it is not yet complete in either of our countries, but more violence and more disruption in the name of a moral absolute would not, in my judgment, have hastened the process.

I recognize, as do we all, that disruption, violence, and the threat to tear down institutions can communicate in ways that most articulate and persuasive argument cannot. But if the objective is to preserve and perfect a democratic society, there are strong arguments against a routine resort to physical force as a means of communication.

No society, no university, can satisfy the needs of its members if every dissatisfied group regularly mounts the barricades to demand redress of real or imagined wrong. As long as our societies are diverse, and as long as their members' interests conflict, it is impossible to meet all arguably just demands instantly.

And so to argue for some tolerance of delay in the correction of apparent wrongs is not to plead against conscience. Neither is it an attempt to downgrade the very real wrongs which exist in our societies. It is, however, a reminder that democracy can choke on too many non-negotiable demands. If every wrong, of whatever degree, demands a holy crusade, we shall have many crusades but little peace and less freedom.

In times past, such an argument was relatively easy to sustain. It was part of a doctrine. Today it is not so simple, because in this day of instant communication every grievance can be converted overnight into an instant national cause, even more rapidly than an unknown senator can be transformed overnight into an instant national figure.

"Freedom now!" is the battle cry, not only of Black Citizens in the United States, whose freedom is long overdue, but also of countless groups who never knew they were in chains or who were diligently breaking their chains through the slow processes of pressure, persuasion and hard work.

Modern communications are an extraordinary windfall to anyone with a legitimate grievance, but hey put unprecedented strains on representative institutions, because the demands come at once with equal force and constantly. They insist on being satisfied now, or society must pay the price of disruption.

That's the challenge and there is no sure or easy way out of that kind of a dilemma if we insist on instant response. We cannot smash the televisions or break the presses and we know that wrongs once uncovered cannot be hidden away again. So what do we do to respond to our sense of conscience, compassion, and concern and still work in an orderly and rational way to improve our societies?

Our representative institutions have no choice but to accommodate to the steady onslaught of legitimate demands made on them in the name of justice, but if their every failure to provide an immediate response is met with disruptive protest, it is equally clear that these institutions cannot survive. And that is what is going on in the campuses of our countries -- that is what is going on in the cities of the United States.

Let me give you this word of warning. Recent history does not give us any cause to believe that truth and justice are more likely to triumph in a battle fought in the streets than in the so called "market place of ideas". When the battle is fought with words, libertarian and egalitarian ideas have a decided advantage but when the battle is fought with fists and weapons, such ideas are likely to lose.

This suggests that those of us who value representative democracy, those of us who value the traditions of academic freedom must learn to use our communications systems to stimulate needed change at a faster pace than in the past.

The same communications which can create a moral cause and mass protest overnight can also do much to hasten its acceptance in the society at large.

That's our challenge. It's the challenge of this and other universities who are no longer just educational institutions but social instruments for change.

The business of a university is to expand knowledge and to expand our capacity to use that knowledge constructively. As the university sends forth its graduates, so must it send forth the ideas of its faculty and students as a force for good in the society which created it.

Where the university is united as a community of mutual respect, responsive to new ideas and adaptable to changing times, it can help produce a healthy and continuing ferment of ideas and public opinion.

Our dangers, in this day and age - and I want to emphasize this as we look at and are disturbed by unrest - come not from the multiplicity of ideas and opinions, but from their suppression. Mackenzie King put it well in these words. He said: "Government, in the last analysis, is organized opinion. Where there is little or no public opinion, there is likely to be bad government, which sooner or later becomes autocratic government."