The Class of 1951

At graduation ceremonies across the nation last week, the Class of 1951--some 380,000 strong--settled back on its folding chairs to listen to the traditional advice from its elders. It was, observed President Charles W. Cole of Amherst, rather a special class. "It is in some senses the first truly postwar class, since it entered the university . . . after demobilization was complete . . . It is the first class to graduate into the second half of the 20th Century. It is the first class that will hold its 50th reunion in the 21st Century, in the year 2001." But on almost every other count, this year's commencement orators seemed to agree, the Class of 1951 was not so different after all.

As happens every June, said Amherst's Cole, the graduates were facing a "crisis as usual." Indefatigable Defense Secretary George C. Marshall, with two more commencement addresses on his calendar before he hopped off to Korea (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), had solemn words for the new crop of ensigns at the U.S. Naval Academy: "You have all read that these are critical times, but I am not certain you realize how critical." At Georgia's Emory University, Civil Defense Administrator Millard F. Caldwell agreed: "It is not an unalloyed pleasure to be young in the spring of 1951."

The New Barbarian. Old or new, the crisis, as seen from the speaker's platform, was not all a matter of foreign policy or of dealing with the Russians. The graduates of 1951 would be "facing a far more subtle danger right at home. The question on many of the speakers' minds: What has happened to the individual?

At Houston's Rice Institute, President Lewis Webster Jones of the University of Arkansas warned the graduating seniors: "We are raising our own [barbarian] . . . he mass man, the self-satisfied man [who] accepts as part of the order of nature all the wonderful achievements of his own civilization . . . takes them as given, feels no personal responsibility for the society which has made them possible. He expects to use and exploit them. He prides himself on being the average man. If he admires anything outside himself, it is the 'smart operator,' the getter-by, the fixer . . ."

The new barbarian is not only flourishing, added Roger P. McCutcheon, dean of the graduate school of Tulane University, but seems to be doing so with the full consent of the psychologist. Today, "a lazy student who receives a failing grade is likely to be diagnosed as 'maladjusted.' Similarly, the 'welladjusted' personality rates high in any listing of virtues. The term 'well-integrated personality' is beginning to appear on recommendations, always an ominous symptom."

In fact, said Dean McCutcheon, "it could be that 'welladjusted' people are those who never give any trouble. 'Well-integrated' may mean only a person without any individuality or ideas . . ." Said President Harold C. Case of Boston University, "We have been concentrating on means and ignoring ends, believing that whatever worked was right . . . Moral relativism has entered into our minds."

What could the Class of 1951 do about it all? At Missouri's Park College, President Roy Roberts of the Kansas City Star optimistically answered: "I don't feel sorry for anyone getting out of college at a time when the world is haywire. I envy you the challenge, the future you face, with all its uncertainties."

The Rational Being. But the clearest answer came from Yale's President A. Whitney Griswold, speaking at the university's 250th anniversary commencement in New Haven (TIME, June 11). "I observe," said Griswold, "that you are resigned to a world in which people become numbers on Selective Service and Social Security cards; in which lotteries are illegal except when they deal with human life; and in which the individual, sacred to both Christianity and democracy, sometimes seems to exercise about as much control over his own fortunes and those of his fellow men as a baseball in the World Series.

"I will say this much for your mood: at least it is healthier than the one which attended my own commencement . . . No such disillusionment lies in store for you as awaited us in 1929: come what may, you are better prepared for it. But that is all I will say for your mood. As a philosophy of life, it is as false in its fatalism as our mood was in its romanticism.

"We have not resigned from the human race. Neither science nor technology nor all the deterministic doctrine inspired by them, nor the despotisms that have tried to force that doctrine upon mankind, have succeeded in producing a world that can function without our individual powers of reason, imagination and conscience. We are not mere sponges or plankton afloat on a tide . . . We are rational beings, capable of charting the tide and navigating it, and even diverting and directing it . . . There is no dialectical or technological substitute for the creative individual."

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