" I AM not sure the subject is being taught today at any major American university. I am speaking of the ability to be wrong."

That ability and how to achieve it were the theme of a commencement address delivered by Editor in Chief Hedley Donovan, a trustee of New York University, to N.Y.U.'s graduating class. It is not, Donovan admitted, an easy subject to master: "All it takes is courage, honesty, self-respect, grace--and sometimes a sense of humor helps."

Perhaps a year or two from now, suggested Donovan, it will become clear whether the U.S. policy in Viet Nam will ultimately fail or succeed. Either outcome will bring about "a kind of crisis of integrity in which powerful and influential people will have to consider the possibility of saying out loud that they were wrong. Many of them have never tried it before, and it would not come easy to them. But if they cannot bring themselves to it, I think the American intellectual climate and the whole tone of our politics could be embittered for years.

"Journalists have never been notoriously eager to acknowledge their mistakes," said Donovan. "Many have perfected a smoothway of taking a new position without ever noting that they once held quite the opposite view." As for professors, "surely everyone would agree that the people who should be first and frankest in admitting error would be the academic intellectuals, with their totally disinterested dedication to free inquiry. But the recent record is not reassuring. Perhaps it will be this generation of university graduates, your generation, that could teach Americans how to be wrong.

"I know many students have felt deeply, and spoken up strongly, on Viet Nam. Some of you will turn out to have been wrong. It is in the way you react to that moment, I suggest, that you will get a chance to take another stand--in behalf of a mature and civilized style of public life in America. How to be right is something of an art, too, and some of you will get a chance to show your skill at that, when the Viet Nam results are finally in. How to be right in ways that make it a little easier for the people who were wrong to decide that they were wrong, and make it easier for all of us to turn together to a fresh agenda.

"Looking ahead to that time, we might perhaps begin even now, without in any way restricting the Viet Nam debate, to let a certain measure of modesty and generosity into the dialogue. As to what will or won't work in Viet Nam, we might begin by admitting that we are all to some extent guessing. Nothing is guaranteed. So far as the morality of the policy is concerned, we might do well to credit all parties to the debate with decent motives and a normal sense of human compassion.

"The incredibly audacious thing that a few million people in South Viet Nam--and we Americans--are trying to do, is to defend not so much a nation as the possibility that South Viet Nam can become a nation. It's a very tough proposition. We may fail. If so I hope that I, as one who has supported the policy, will be prompt to admit that we had attempted something beyond our powers. But you know, we may just succeed. And if that happens, I hope that the many thoughtful, dedicated Americans who opposed the policy will be glad to acknowledge that their country is sometimes capable of even more than we should dare to dream."

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