Graduation Address

"Five Challenges to the Class of '61" (18 May 1961). (UA Case 67, Box 2)

Mr. President, Your Honor, Mr. Premier, My Lord Chief Justice, My Lord Bishop, Distinguished Graduates, Fellow Alumni of this Day and Friends,

It is customary, I know, on occasions so pleasant at this, for one to begin with an expression of the sense of honour and of gratitude that receiving the degree affords to the recipient -- particularly if he has the chance to make a speech at the same time. The difference here Mr. Chancellor, is that I am not only sincerely aware of the honour that has been conferred upon me but I make no apologies for being quite happy to "sing for my degree" however short or raucous the tune may be. No one in academic life can avoid experiencing a quiet sense of pleasure at the considered decision of his peers when that decision leads to the classical intonation "honoris causa". Our profession has its own status symbols. At the going rate of Canadian university salaries, improved though now they may be, those symbols do not yet include the rolling country estate, a fox hound membership or twin screws on the high seas. But they do include, very much so, letters strung gently out at the end of one's name, footnotes to academic acceptance and so on to a modest immortality. I am honoured, Sir, and delighted to join the family of New Brunswick graduates whose colours I shall wear whenever my own university needs bright support.

A McGill teacher need not be reminded that this University, the descendent of King's College, pre-dates his own place of learning by a number of years. Nor can he be unaware of the very special contribution to the spiritual and the technical life of the Maritime Provinces that New Brunswick has been able to make for several generations. In organic chemistry you have been a leader; in forestry studies only yourselves and British Columbia have any organized approach to this important Canadian resource area. And I am not unfamiliar with your extensive collection of Maritime historical materials and of Canadian literature in general, unequaled perhaps at any other university in Canada. But most of all I am sensible of the central role, that from its first days, this University has played in providing major focus for the intellectual and spiritual energies of an educationally-conscious people, to the point where today as one walks through the halls of McGill and sees the number of New Brunswick graduates on the staff of some departments, one thinks of McGill as an extension of Fredericton. And so, Sir, I am delighted and honoured to be with you today.

Now I suppose I must make that speech. There is I know something quite different about a convocation address when compared with the usual classroom exercise. You are today a captive audience for the last time. Without fear of retribution you can afford candour and a jaundiced view of the performance. Never again will any of you really have to listen to me and for most of you, never again will you have to sit under compulsion and hear another professor. Therefore, this moment, on the edge of freedom, is scarcely the time to impose upon a long-strained patience. But then I know you have cultivated over the years certain important defences, the most important one of which, I should think, is that high student art -- the art of not listening. You are too far away most of you for me to really see the glazed look in your eyes as you dream of tomorrow or other enchantments. And I shall not be offended if in the course of these few remarks I sense the shifting distance between us providing at least, that for one or two moments I reach you across the gulf of our parting ways.

In a sense this is a sacred occasion, yet it is too happy a moment to be diluted by "pontification". All of which reminds me of a "pontification story", for in these hallowed precincts my mind is directed to the case of the newly appointed dean of the faculty of divinity at a distinguished Canadian university. He was a rather precious fellow, fresh from some respectable United Kingdom appointment and not yet accustomed to our refined colonial ways. At a meeting of his fellow deans and the principal, he said, unexpectedly, "What do I do about confidential documents? I simply don't know where to put them." His brother deans were somewhat startled at the notion that Divinity had confidential materials strewn about the files and raised disbelieving eyebrows. At that moment when all might have been lost, the principal himself, a very wise man and not without wit, said "ah, Mr. Dean -- in your faculty, there must be two classes of documents -- 'sacred' and 'top sacred'".

In whatever I have to say from here on, I can assure you the security element is at a minimum.

Mr. Chancellor, Ladies and Gentlemen, the graduate of 1961 finds about him a generation that has become almost inured to chronic crises. Yet he can detect certain specific challenges to him as a graduate that this decase has crystallized for any observer possessing insight and courage. I see therefore, Sir, five challenges to the graduate of 1961. Let me suggest that they are the Challenge of Excellence; the Challenge of Obligation; the Challenge of the Two Cultures; the Challenge of Fear in the Thermo-nuclear Age and, finally, the Challenge of an emerging trans-racial Brotherhood.

The Challenge of Excellence ought to need little emphasis. We should leave a university already imbued with the value of excellence as an almost unconscious guide to every aspect of our private and public living. Yet perhaps some emphasis is required because the anxious and hurried pace of this century tends by its very anxiety and speed to distract from concentrated effort and to dilute by that distraction the quality of the result. It is no use denying that much undergraduate work in Canada simply does not have the rigour, the standard, the achievement, that most teachers would like to see there. This is not to suggest that Canadian students are not capable of the excellence of their counterparts anywhere in the world. It is merely that in the context of North American life, in this generation, severe standards have too often yielded to other values. Nor is this a criticism of extra curricular activities. I remember spending much of my time, I think not unprofitably, on many of these undergraduate attractions from a university newspaper to a debating union, from a dramatic society to student government. Every one of these functions may strike a chord that vibrates for years to come and may produce a high note of later achievement as a talent matures.

But, in the end, the marginalia of university undergraduate activity is not substitute for the central core of academic effort guided by the demands of excellence. It is now almost common cant to compare ourselves with the reported intensity of student standards in the Soviet Union and to engage in a self-warning "mea culpa" by stressing the threat of losing the competitive race for the respect of new peoples coming on to the stage of modern history. I do not know whether this comparison, lately so emphasized by a number of students of Soviet education, is justified or not. But if there is the slightest reason to think that we compare unfavorably with the emerging standards of the Soviet world, it should give us more than a momentary pause in responding to the shock of that comparison. Yet in the end we should choose excellence for excellence' sake and not as a by-product of the cold war transplanted to the field of education. Let this generation of Canadian graduates, therefore, reassert the prime value of excellence for its own sake and carry that value as the distinguishing mark of their approach to life and to action as they leave these privileged halls.

The Challenge of the Two Cultures has been made a subject of concern through the dramatic juxtaposition placed before us by C.P. Snow. He would have us believe that our universities and our cultures somehow are unable to bridge the growing gulf between the men of science and the others -- the men of letters, of behavioural studies, the men of law, of divinity. He urges upon all of us to find in our education, as quickly as possible, new bridges so that minds may comfortably move back and forth between law, letters and the new physics and chemistry, those micro- and macro-sciences, from the atom to the Cosmos, that are re-fashioning not merely the physical world but the consciousness of mankind itself. Now what I have to ask today is how true is this allegation of intellectual schizophrenia to which Snow has directed his experience and his artistry. And I should add one other aspect of his argument, namely, that the dominance of science in its effect on power and politics, should create new areas of political action for the working scientists. Indeed, Mr. Snow has gone so far as to suggest, to the American Association of the Advancement of Science last January, that the scientist should disobey his government when in his own belief government policy is wrong in view of the scientific dangers to mankind that result from such policy.

Now those of you who come today with parchments attesting to your scientific learning and those of you who bear the more ancient letters of the humanities, must surely wonder whether the Snow thesis deserves the fears it has generated and the intellectual "treason", so to speak, that it encourages in the citizen-scientist. On both of these matters I find Snow, the artist, more literate than I find Snow, the scientist, sensible. For it is not true that there has always been a gulf between technical branches of human knowledge. Why pretend that the era of atomic physics and the new cosmology poses any different intellectual challenge for comprehension among the varied disciplines than did the older physics as it penetrated slowly into the work and mind and physical experience of the early modern period. From Copernicus to Keppler, from Gallileo and Newton, down to the era that has now dramatized this gulf in Snow's eyes, there surely has been, always, the difficulty for the humanist to comprehend the technical language of the rigorous and abstract learning characteristic of the higher science.

And what shall we say of Snow's politics and his desire to create a new kind of "political-scientist". Who can subscribe to his thesis that the scientist with his magical and dangerous instruments ought to make decisions about their application independently of political leadership. This is the kind of vanity which even the lawyer does not permit himself -- and he, after all, has some experience with the arts and crafts of government. No class of citizen has a monopoly of insight. Some may know from their disciplines more about the details of danger, but all of us have had out imaginations stretched by a generation of holocaust and we need no courses in the high physics to teach us the magnitude of violence that is on our doorstep.

Let us value all the disciplines. Let us see the unity in all thought, but let us not pretend that such unity is easy to come by or that it has in any case been part of the usual equipment of educated men since differentiation in knowledge became acute and serious, at least with the Greeks, and from then onward.

Now to the Challenge of Obligation. Your class will leave here with the community's substantial investment in your training, an investment that far exceeds the fees you have paid. And more than fees, there is the investment of spirit and concern and deep interest of teachers and administrators, of benefactors and graduates, all of whom have made this institution the vibrant, meaningful experience it became for you. To that extent your graduation marks perhaps the end of one phase of a relationship with the University, but clearly it signifies the beginning of another. From now on the question for you should be -- ask not what the University can do for you -- ask better what you can do for the University?

Some graduates tend to cut these ties a little casually considering how significant those ties have been in forming and informing the mind and character of the graduate. Do not succumb to the temptation of easily forgetting the past and the obligations that past has created. You will feel more deeply fulfilled by remembering that the University is a living, ever-changing entity; that it needs the good-will and support of all of its graduates and that for a long time to come private no less than public funds are indispensable to meeting the immensely varied needs of higher education in our day.

And so the Challenge of Fear in a Thermo-nuclear Age. Has any generation every really faced the strange mixture of hope and despair that marks our day. The language of politics has become the language of survival. Something of the joy of living has been clouded over by the spectre of the nucleus harnassed to the engine of war. The vocabulary of dying has achieved a new lexicon. We speak of human mega-deaths to match the size and the horror of bomb megatons. We shrink from the terror or error. A slip on a radar screen, when human judgment mistakes the contours for an enemy may invite the pressing of a button that could send a hemisphere to oblivion. War if it ever had its gallant posture, is no longer chivalric, but in a strange way again only barbaric through the sheer indifference and scope of the annihilation process.

In 1961 the graduate cannot escape the moral and political dilemmas posed by the prospect of thermo-nuclear warfare. There is no hiding of the head. Every one must face up to the great decisions and so far one's intellectual capacity permits, the debate is one in which we all must participate. This means, for all practical purposes, that on the high questions of defence and foreign policy, whether they touch the possession by Canada of atomic weapons, the rate and character of disarmament, the future of NATO and NORAD, or many of the other issues so relevant to our security -- on all of these we all must undertake as responsible a share as the human condition demands. Franklin Roosevelt's hopeful phrase of the 'thirties that we have noting to fear but fear itself, should be retranslated for the 'sixties to read "fear may be the mother of wise action" -- for surely it is action of the highest political skill that we shall need for the next decade if the political tensions and the arms race are somehow to be brought within manageable limits so that men may breathe securely again.

And, finally, the Challenge of Brotherhood. I would suppose that nothing so strikes the social eye in our time as the inevitable and increasing association of men from all sectors of the planet with each other. Indeed more than association. A new intermingling of the peoples has begun on this small sphere we call earth. Colour, race and culture, religion, language and thought, for so long barriers between men, are falling before the perspective of universality. I suggest that perspective comes from at least three directions. It comes from the press of technology, vastly accelerating images and communication so that no longer is the remotest village a stranger. It comes, secondly, from the intensity and speed with which less advanced peoples, hidden behind their ancient ways have come to join, as new sovereign states, the main flow of contemporary history. And finally, it comes from a new moral dimension itself, emerging from war, ideological competition and, perhaps most of all, from our very need for each other if we are to survive. For men everywhere seem now to feel they have some kind of kinship and responsibility, the one toward the other.

How else explain the powerful impact of the Human Rights doctrine on international politics? How else describe the sense of obligation of the northern, developed areas of the world for those less developed, an obligation that transcends "cold-war" competitive rivalry and somehow expresses a felt need to share in "operation bootstrap" now undertaken by most of mankind? 'We are not yet each other's keepers', with the full biblical injunction implied in that ancient question. But we are on our way to a deepening sense of duty which is expressed in our economics, in our politics and in our law. Some day soon certainly not less than one percent of our gross national product will have to go for the assistance of the less developed peoples. Some day even that figure may have seemed a pittance as the intertwining affairs of all mankind make more meaningful than ever the flow of help and of training between all states and men.

Mr. Chancellor, Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen, these five challenges are only my private arithmetic and no doubt to them others could be added just as significant, perhaps more so. But at least this group of fundamental concerns to the graduate of 1961 must somehow mark the tone and temper of his day. And from that day, or perhaps out of that day, there may come yet another day when these challenges for the most part have been met and when man can say to fellow man -- I am obliged, I fear no and I shall keep with you forever.