New Prospects, Old Values

During commencement ceremonies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, the institution's president, Father James Loughran, accidentally tumbled off the podium. After Loughran climbed back up unharmed, Commencement Speaker Peter Ueberroth, chief organizer of the 1984 Summer Olympics and now baseball commissioner, brought down the house by awarding him a 4.5 in gymnastics.

Elsewhere across the nation the annual commencement rite climaxed a season of . other ups and downs in academe. Protest was up, including more than 1,700 arrests at Cornell and Berkeley in demonstrations over university investments in corporations doing business in South Africa. At some big state university systems, grades were down: tougher standards cut the number of A's more than 4% at Cal State and 3% at Penn State. Old-time values were up: University of Wisconsin-Madison students voted Mom and Dad their No. 1 heroine and hero (runners-up: Mother Teresa and Jesus Christ). Law school and medical school enrollments were down after a boom of nearly two decades.

In a season of notably tough-minded women commencement speakers, Northern Ireland's Betty Williams, co-winner of the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize, told graduating seniors at Quinnipiac College in Hamden, Conn., "Men have made enough mess of the world, and it's about time they moved over." At Texas A& M, Democratic Senator Lloyd Bentsen was more ecumenical in his exhortation: "You are our best hope for the future," he said. "Don't blow it." A sampling of the season's other commencement addresses:

Oil Executive C.H. MURPHY JR. at the A.B. Freeman School of Business, Tulane University in New Orleans: " 'Commencement,' I judge, derives from the assumption that today's watershed in your lives marks the beginning of experience. It simply isn't so. Life's most meaningful experiences are those of early childhood -- experimentation with fire, ache of first grief, joy of love returned, and the other side of that coin, anguish of affection repulsed. So far as adult experience is concerned, to one who will bear a few of its stripes to the grave, it seems a thing to be avoided. Thomas North put it pithily in his introduction to (Plutarch's) Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans: 'Experience is the schoolmistress of fools.' North meant that those persons, individually or in association with others . . . unwilling to study history are condemned to relive its tragedies."

Author and Columbia Teachers College Professor DIANE RAVITCH at Reed College in Portland: "You have just completed what is widely regarded as an elite education, not because only an elite deserves a liberal education or can benefit by a liberal education, but because fewer and fewer American students are actually receiving an education of comparable quality and breadth. A liberal education is founded on the premise that knowledge is power and that ideas move the world. Or, this idea is expressed in what is known as the Law of Selective Advancement (a relative of Murphy's Law): 'The person who knows "how" will always have a job. The person who knows "why" will always be his boss.' "

Entertainer PEARL BAILEY at Syracuse University: "Well, you'll want to go out with your degree and get yourself a job. Don't go out with your diploma in hand and say, 'I am going to be an executive.' I run into them every day. Half of them can't spell. Can't spell. Can't read. Can't write. So if you walk out of here with a diploma in your hand, you better walk out of here with something these professors put in your heads too. And retain it, or you're going to be in bad trouble."

South African Poet and Northwestern University Professor DENNIS BRUTUS at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst: "I speak as one of the oppressed in South Africa. I reject and transcend the racial categories that are imposed on us at the present time by an oppressed system, and I speak to you on behalf of the people of South Africa. It is customary to make dire predictions at this point to the graduates in order to prepare them for what is referred to as 'the real world.' I decline to do so. Not that I could not make dire predictions, but because I think it is artificial to separate the campus from the community. The pressures are no less real here. Perhaps a principal difference is that away from the university, idealism is less acceptable and compromise becomes commonplace. And so, if I were to choose a particular concept for this occasion, I would focus on survival and on the survival of humane values."

Television Commentator BILL MOYERS at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas in Austin: "If you would go forth from here to serve democracy well, you must first save the language. Save it from the jargon of insiders, who talk of the current budget debate in Washington as 'megapolicy choices between freeze-feasible base lines.' (Sounds more like a baseball game played in the Arctic Circle.) Save it from the smokescreen artists, who speak of 'revenue enhancement' and 'tax-base erosion control' when they really mean a tax increase . . . Save it from the partisan deniers of reality -- who now refer to the physically handicapped as 'differently abled' -- and from the official revisionists of reality, who say that the United States did not withdraw our troops from Lebanon, we merely 'backloaded our augmentation personnel.' "

Atlanta Mayor ANDREW YOUNG at Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Mass.: "As I ; drove back to my hometown in New Orleans (after graduation), I passed through the state of Georgia and I was afraid to stop, for Georgia was perhaps the worst place in the United States in those days for a young black man to be alone at night. And if anybody had ever said, 'Son, you better slow down in Georgia, you're going to represent Georgia in the Congress of the United States; you're going to be an Ambassador to the United Nations, named by an ex-Governor of Georgia who's going to be President of the United States; and then you will come back to be mayor of the city of Atlanta' -- the only thing I could have done would be to recommend them to the nearest mental institution."

Former Secretary of State HENRY KISSINGER at the University of South Carolina in Spartanburg: "We hear very often, with the advent of the new Soviet General Secretary, calls for a meeting between our President and the General Secretary of the Soviet Union. This reflects a profound American temptation to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry and that relations among nations are like relations among people. But the problem is not so simple. Tensions that have persisted for 40 years must have some objective causes, and unless we can remove those causes, no personal relationship can possibly deal with it. We are doing neither ourselves or the Soviets a favor by reducing the issues to a contest of personalities."

Democratic Presidential Candidate WALTER MONDALE at the University of Minnesota Law School in Minneapolis: "Having seen the inner workings of our defense system, there is no one who believes more than I that there is information which must remain absolutely secret. We have espionage and treason laws to handle such situations. But I also believe that journalists, academics, public servants and whistle blowers have just as much right to free speech as do the high officials who call reporters into their offices and leak classified information in support of Administration policy. The danger isn't just in censorship. It's in the threat of censorship. Those in power are not the ones who will be prosecuted under an official secrets act. The defendants will be those who have challenged them to explain themselves, to reconsider their policies, and to tell the truth."

New York City Opera General Director BEVERLY SILLS at Smith College in Northampton, Mass.: "When I told my father I wanted to be an opera star -- not an opera singer, you understand, but a star -- he said, 'The best thing that could happen to you is that you will get married early and have babies because nice women don't go on the stage. If you don't get married early and it looks as if you are going to be an old maid, well then, we will think about college because then at least you can be a schoolteacher, which is a very respectable profession for any woman.' My mother would say to my father, 'The girl wants to be an opera star.' And my father would say, 'The two boys will go to college and be smart; this one will get married.' And my mother would say, 'No, the two boys will go to college and be smart; this one won't be smart, she'll only be an opera star.' "

U.S. District Court Judge HAROLD GREENE at George Washington University Law Center in Washington: "There is also in this country a strain of violence and vigilantism apart from the law, which stems from the civilizing of the wilderness not long ago as historical time is measured. If all these strains are to be contained, if centrifugal forces are not to tear the nation apart, there must be centers of gravity apart from the shifting political majorities. The law, represented by its guardians, the judges and lawyers, is one such fixed star."

Secretary of Education WILLIAM BENNETT at Assumption College in Worcester, Mass.: "Happiness is like a cat. If you try to coax it or call it, it will avoid you. It will never come. But if you pay no attention to it and go about your business, you'll find it rubbing against your legs and jumping into your lap. So forget pursuing happiness. Pin your hopes on work, on family, on learning, on knowing, on loving. Forget pursuing happiness, pursue these other things, and with luck happiness will come."

Ornithologist ROGER TORY PETERSON at Bloomsburg University in Bloomsburg, Pa.: "Many people go through life as though they are wearing blinders or are sleepwalking. Their eyes are open, yet they may see nothing of their wild associates on this planet. Their ears, attuned to motor cars and traffic, seldom catch the music of nature -- the singing of birds, frogs or crickets -- or the wind. These people are biologically illiterate -- environmentally illiterate -- and yet they may fancy themselves well informed, perhaps sophisticated. They may know business trends or politics, yet haven't the faintest idea of what makes the natural world tick. We have biologists, of course, and biochemists. But we really need more bio-engineers, bio-lawyers and bio-politicians."

* Washington Post Executive Editor BEN BRADLEE at Scripps College in Claremont, Calif.: "In its lay -- or nongovernmental -- form, press bashing is most apt to show up in the form of libel suits. The Philadelphia Inquirer has no less than 21 libel suits filed against it today. We have had a big one going with the former president of Mobil Oil. Four judges have considered it; two have ruled for him and two for us, but unfortunately for us, the last two were his. It is on appeal now, and our legal bills alone have already topped $1,275,000. Not insured. The chilling effect is considerable, believe me. I consider myself to have my share of guts, but the next reporter who comes to me with a story and tells me it will cost me $1,275,000 to run it, better have himself one hell of a yarn."

Southern University system President JESSE STONE at Southern University in Shreveport, La.: "In our efforts to open up new vistas of learning for our youngsters, we made certain assumptions that have not been proven. One was that, in direct competition with white students, black students would work harder. That did not turn out to be the case. Another assumption was that blacks and whites would learn positive things from each other and, as a result, take each other more seriously. The fact is, under integration, too many whites still find no value in black culture except music, the ability to dance and perform athletically."

Democratic Vice-Presidential Candidate GERALDINE FERRARO at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Mass.: "When I applied to law school, a university official asked if I was 'serious' -- because, after all, I was taking a man's place. No professor could be caught dead today saying to a female student that she was taking the place of a man. First of all, that professor could be a woman. In fact, if she were at Wellesley, you can bet her department chair would be a woman. More important, the greatest achievement of the women's movement has been to transform our expectations. Today in America, women can be whatever they want to be. We can walk in space and help our children take their first steps on earth. We can run a corporation and work as wives and mothers. We can be doctors, and we can bake cookies at home with our six-year-old future scientists."

University of Utah Professor and former Secretary of Education TERREL BELL at Longwood College in Farmville, Va.: "I can't emphasize too much the critical importance of the reform movement now under way all across America. We have a / will and a determination to strengthen our schools and our colleges and to make them even better than they are, and I urge you graduates to do your utmost after you leave here to be strong advocates of American education. Run for the school board. Get involved. Help those who come after you to have the opportunity that you've had. I'd also emphasize to you graduates that you need to be committed to learning and to self-renewal for yourself . . . There's only one thing worse than an old fogy, and that's a young fogy."

Actress ISABEL SANFORD (The Jeffersons) at Emerson College in Boston: "I think the most important part of a college education isn't so much what you learn academically, but what you learn about life -- and about yourself -- during your four years at school. You grow up so much during that time. You enter college young, somewhat naive and willing to learn. You leave, four years later, older, wiser and about $40,000 in debt. You have been through a lot."