Four Years

Four years as an undergraduate. A division of time in which, we are told, we soak up something of the essence of civilization and the forces that make us and keep us free. Yet how often does one of the products of this Four Years come home from the office, open his collar, and complain that he is too tired to read a "worth while" book? How many college graduates-or specifically, Harvard graduates-regard the Four Years as one particular phase of their lives, to be approached, digested, and then forgotten in the exigencies of the "real, concrete" side of life?

Regardless of what this year's graduate will take with him away from Cambridge, he will have shared in an experience participated in by relatively few people: the first year of a new Harvard President. It is said that Nathan Marsh Pusey was chosen in an effort to re-affirm the spirit and values of a liberal education, particularly in how it applies to these Four Years. It seems to us that in the space of a little less than ten months President Pusey has given the idea of liberal education a needed scrubbing and polishing-especially in a time when the two words are so bandied about, usually in little more than lip service. Addresses, on commencement days especially, often seem so cut from platitures that they are stiff, rigid, lifeless things. Yet during the course of this first year, Nathan Pusey has outlined succinctly the principles on which a graduate could well model the course of his life. Some of the things he has said, we think, bear repetition here.

"It is our task not to produce safe men, in whom our safety can not in any case lie, but to keep alive in young people the desire to dare to seek the truth, to be free, to establish in them a compelling desire to live greatly and magnanimously, and to give them the knowledge and awareness, the faith and the trained facility to get on with the job."

A different place, a different day, the President was careful to make clear that the "job" he had in mind was not, could not in most cases be earth-shaking or momentous:

"Original thought is not necessarily novel or strange thought, but only thought that one has made one's own by pressing it out, by forging it in one's own head."

A new emphasis was placed on the less rational processes that are part of creativity:

"If ever out speaks to young people, or any people, it must speak through the instrumentality of the whole person."

The educated man must at least be conscious of religion: "There is something more to life than knowledge. This is where an immersion in religion, as well as in all the arts and humanities comes in."

Another element equally important is the courage of one's own convictions. Not only a person, but also a university, must have this courage if it will be great. In a time of hysteria, there can be no surrender to the fear and to those who cause it.

"It would be a sorry thing if in resisting totalitarianism we were to accept the counsels of the frightened and adopt its methods.... Our job is to educate free, independent and vigorous minds capable of distinguishing truth from propaganda, and truth from half truth and lies..."

Four years as an undergraduate. It is quite an arbitrary length of time. While it may enclose the beginnings of a search for both a past and a future, if the beginnings are real it cannot possibly enclose the end.

"... The true end of a liberal education is greatness."