"To Cherish & Defend"

One afternoon last week, a solemn procession in academic robes, headed by the mace-bearing chief marshal of Yale University, formed itself on the New Haven campus. The notables of the procession were mostly Yalemen, deans and professors, and Fellows of the Corporation (among them: Secretary of State Dean Acheson, '15, Senator Robert A. Taft, '10, Connecticut's Governor Chester Bowles, '24). Yale was doing what Yale had done only 15 times before in its 249-year history: inaugurating a president. Yale's 16th: slim, ginger-haired Historian Alfred Whitney Griswold, 43, member of Yale's class of '29, faculty member since he won his Ph.D. in 1933, professor of history for twelve years before he was selected last February to succeed retiring President Charles Seymour.

With the new president in their midst, the notables marched into the vaulted auditorium of Woolsey Hall and there, as Yalemen had done at the opening of the first college building, they sang an old metrical version of the 65th Psalm ("Thy praise alone, O Lord, doth reign / in Sion Thine own hill . . ."). Then Whitney Griswold, wearing around his neck the "president's collar" of 20 gold & silver links and a pendant medallion with the arms of Elihu Yale, received the charter, the seal, and the keys of the university "to cherish and defend." Finally, in the tradition of his predecessors, he stepped to the lectern to declare his credo.

What must a scholar and his university do "in times like these?" Above all, said President Griswold, they must continue to be what they have been. "I do not know who first questioned the [practical] value of the scholar's life; it may have been one of Socrates' disciples who watched his master drink the hemlock. Surely no calling has been so much questioned--and despaired of--since that memorable event; and just as surely none has contributed so much to western civilization . . . [Yet] to whom else do we pin our hopes of ending our periodic reversions to savagery and putting our engines of destruction to creative use? If the scholars of the past had waited for auspicious times to do their work, I doubt that we should be assembled here today. If they should now wait for total war to produce total peace, I doubt that our successors will be assembled here to mark Yale's 300th anniversary."

The job of the universities has been to bring together "the study of the liberal arts . . . with the pursuit of higher education in special fields . . . Thus they both deepened and broadened the higher learning." In a free society, the deepening and broadening cannot stop, no matter what the times. "These are the things Yale lives and works for, in war and peace," said President Griswold. "They are things to cherish and defend in times of war; to fight for, when there is fighting; and to return to when the fighting is over."

Other new university inaugurations:

P: At Chapel Hill, N.C., Gordon Gray, 41, lawyer and onetime Secretary of the Army, as twelfth president of the University of North Carolina.

P: At State College, Pa., Milton S. Eisenhower, 51, younger brother of Columbia's President Dwight D. Eisenhower,* as eleventh president of Pennsylvania State College.

* Commented West Pointer Eisenhower, with his mind partly on the Army-Penn State football game: "This is a wonderful opportunity and to baby brother. [But] I can't wish Milton too much luck Saturday." For Penn State's fortunes against Army two days later.

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