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PLANTATUM.EST.
SECUS.
CURS
MEN &
TANQUAM.
.AQUARL'M.
& NEW
50th Anniversary
Connecticut College
Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019
https://archive.org/details/fiftiethannivers00unse 5
ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY
3 1833 06500 5495
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974.602
N42CD
Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration Publication
CONNECTICUT COLLEGE 1911 . 1961 New London, Connecticut
Contents
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INTRODUCTION DOROTHY BETHURUM Professor of English RECENT TALKS TO THE COLLEGE ROSEMARY PARK President
ADDRESS TO FRESHMEN, 5
September 24, 1960
YOUR COLLEGE EDUCATION: OUR
MUTUAL RESPONSIBILITY 11
ASSEMBLY, April 27, 1961
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CHARGE TO THE SENIORS COMMENCEMENT, June 11, 1961
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THE PROBLEMATIC INHERITANCE OF THE WEST 31
F. EDWARD CRANZ Professor of History
A CRUSADE AND SOME CRUSADERS 51
MARY FOULKE MORRISSON
Secretary of the Board of Trustees
Introduction
T THE FIFTY YEARS of Connecticut College's existence may be no more memorable than a similar span of time, say from 1770 to 1820 or from 1175 to 1225; but they seem so, probably because the ac- celeration, almost beyond comprehension, of most of the social and scientific processes that make up our mode of life has forced upon us an unusual consciousness of change. In fact, our present time is un- avoidably aware of eras, their shape and timing, and much given to assessing the past to account for the present. In this respect 1961 dis- plays the symptoms of crisis. They are not thus far the symptoms of panic, and if they escape becoming so it will be because we look so- berly, courageously, and as intelligently as possible at those features of our culture that alarm us, and at those that encourage us.
The faculty and administration of Connecticut College are at- tempting to do just that. As we debated what sort of publication might best celebrate our semicentennial, we thought of publishing a collection of faculty lectures, or of faculty articles, or of lectures given at the College during the current year. In the end it seemed best to focus on addresses by three members of the College representing the faculty, the Board of Trustees, and the administration. Professor Cranz's paper on "The Problematic Inheritance of the West" was de- livered at the opening assembly of the second semester of the College in February, 1961, and it seemed to the committee on publication so basic an appraisal of our present position that we thought it highly appropriate to publish it in this collection.
In the course of the year Mrs. Mary Foulke Morrisson, for 37 years the devoted Secretary of the Board of Trustees, delivered at the Col- lege, on a foundation set up in her honor by the League of Women Voters, a lecture dealing with the struggle of women in the country to secure the right to vote. Mrs. Morrisson was herself an important member of that crusade and has been all her life active in the politi- cal world. Because she deals with her subject in the humane and civil- ized spirit that has made her services to education so valuable, we thought we could not do better than let her lecture appear here.
Finally, the person best fitted to give some account of the present state of the college, President Rosemary Park, is here making that re- port. It takes the form of talks she has made in the course of the semi- centennial year to various groups of students-her opening welcome
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to the freshmen who entered in September, 1960, her short speech at Commencement, June, 1961, and her report on the changes in the curriculum made during the past year. Two achievements make the past year eventful for the College, the successful completion of the campaign for the Anniversary Fund, and the revision of the curricu- lum. Both of these are reported in President Park's speeches; but to give significance to the curricular revision, we are reprinting also, at the request of many alumnae and friends, a statement she made sev- eral years ago on the aims of the curriculum. These aims have not changed, and this address, with the details of the revision, should give a good account of our present educational ideals and practices.
This small volume is designed as a report to all alumnae and friends of the College on its present condition. It is purposely modest in scope and will not by its size or format represent fifty years of edu- cational effort. We think it is better so, for what outward representa- tion of a college can be made? That society, as Masefield said, where "the thinker and the seeker are bound together in the undying cause of bringing thought into the world" can be represented only by the minds which have been touched by it.
DOROTHY BETHURUM, Professor of English
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Address To Freshmen September 24, 1960
ROSEMARY PARK, President
T HOSE of you who have read our catalogue very carefully may have calculated that this entering class is the forty-sixth class to enter Connecticut College. You have come to us from all parts of the country, from all types of schools; your parents have many different ways of earning their livings, and you will have different aspirations about what college may bring to you. But today and on this occasion we are all, I think, united in this, that we feel a bit nervous. We here at the College are a bit nervous because we want to make a good im- pression on you and we want you to like us. And you, whether you be freshmen or foreign students or transfer students, you are all prepar- ing to undergo here a major transplanting in your life.
You have been used to having your roots down in a certain kind of soil; you have expected the light to strike you from a certain angle, and heat was provided in a given amount. Now all of a sudden you are moved out of that protected hot house environment, and you must learn to put your roots down into a different kind of soil and expect light to come from different angles and in different quantities. You know that when plants are transplanted there is a time when many of them seem to fade a bit, and I think we are much more sensi- tive than even the most sensitive of plants. So perhaps it is natural that for all of us there may be a little time when there is a little fad- ing. If you go through such an experience, please remember that it is perfectly normal, and then remember that only the sturdy plants are chosen for transplanting. I can tell you without violating any confi- dence that the experts who chose you to come here out of all the girls who wished to come saw something in your record which made them feel that you could profit by being transplanted here, that you could earn our degree.
Now when you undertake a transplanting, I am told that it is a wise idea to keep the plant in the darkness for a while, but with people exactly the opposite is desirable. People transplant better, I think, if they are enlightened about the process, if they have some idea
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about what is happening to them; and so for the next few minutes I want to try to undertake this enlightenment, to ask ourselves what it means to be coming to college at this time in your personal lives.
Some of these answers are very easy. The first one, of course, is that you are coming to college at a time in your life which will never come back again, because you can learn more easily now than you will ever be able to learn again. What you will learn here will stay with you all through your lives. One might almost say that in these next years you are undertaking the interior decorating of your living for the rest of your life. You are determining whether it is to be sparse and nig- gardly or whether it is to be rich and varied and vibrant. One of the most moving stories I remember hearing from soldiers who had par- ticipated in the last war was that of a man who had undergone soli- tary confinement in a Japanese prison camp. When some of us who were talking with him asked him, "How did you preserve your sanity through all those months?", he said, "What I decided at the begin- ning was that I couldn't do it unless I had some kind of mental activ- ity and so I tried to remember everything I had ever learned, from poems and hymns and psalms and multiplication tables all the way down. Sometimes," he said, "I spent weeks trying to get one word that didn't quite fall into place from something I had learned years ago." Now most of us will never have such an experience. At least we hope so. This is an extreme case, but after all a good deal of any adult life is a kind of solitary affair. What are you going to live on in those solitary moments? Now I think this is that chance to furnish, to in- terior decorate that life, for you will never again learn so easily and what you learn will never stay with you so long.
Another thing which is true about this time in your personal life- your opinions are not yet fixed, they are not yet frozen. For instance, you may come to us politically a good Democrat, and you may decide to leave us a "rock-ribbed Republican," as they say. You may come in a fundamentalist with regard to your religious beliefs, and you may leave us a Quaker. Many of you will cherish the same beliefs on leav- ing us that you had when you entered, but you will have a better reason and a greater understanding of what those beliefs mean.
Another point which, I think, is valid: your imaginations now are more ready and more active to feel sympathy than they were a few years ago when some experiences and things were not really real to you; and they certainly are more active than they will be later, when disappointments of various sorts may have blunted your sensitivity.
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In short, all the growing ends of your life, whether we are talking about them from an intellectual point of view or a social point of view, these growing ends are strong and active and receptive now, and they never will be more so than they are today. So all of us hope that you will wish to spend these years with us in acquiring capital on which you are going to live the solitary moments of your life.
This is a particular time in your personal life, but of course it is also a particular time in history. We asked you to read a number of books-books which we would like to use as the basis for discussion with faculty and with students. Now some of those books I am sure you found very difficult. You may not even have been able to finish some of them. But whether you found them difficult or not, if you read them carefully, there certainly must have been areas which you found troubling to you. You will have noted that there were many facts in them with which you had not been acquainted, but you will also have noticed that the authors were less concerned about those facts than they were about the possible interpretations of them. And you will have observed that there seemed to be no right answer. In other words, these were not detective stories, for which of course there always is one right answer. They were asking, these books, questions about what is important for a man to live by. How does he make his choices? How does he make his choices in his individual life, and how do groups of us make our choices? What do we as groups think important? What has happened to our thinking on a personal level and on a group level since the great scientific and tech- nological revolutions which you and I have lived through?
Now these books, books like these, could only have been written to- day, at a time when so much is happening in so many different areas and so fast that no single human being has a chance to digest it and understand the whole meaning of this time. It was best described, this time of ours, in a few sentences in the Presidential address given this summer in London before the Royal Society. Some of you will realize that the British Royal Society, the most honorable of all those societies throughout the world devoted to scientific research, has been in existence now for 300 years. The President of the Society, in com- menting on this fact, said: "In achievement, the three hundred years since the founding of the Royal Society have exceeded all the infinite wastes of evolutionary time. By the scale of human events, these years are the fullest and longest in existence." In other words you are com- ing to college in a time of long years. Fifteen new nations or new
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states were admitted to the United Nations last week. Moon shots, mammals projected into space, drug therapies for mental illness- these are only a few of the most extraordinary things which have hap- pened in quick succession. Truly, truly the world did not use to be like this. It is an exciting time, it's an incredible time in which you are preparing to live, to live in a new role.
When I say that phrase, I am sure that a number of you will say, "Oh yes, I have heard that before about the new world, but I will just wait around and let them show it to me. I don't take this seri- ously." For such an ostrich attitude, my next remarks are not in- tended. More of you, I think, when I use that phrase, will be think- ing something like this: "My life is complicated enough as it is, trying to decide what to do, what to think, what I ought to try to be like, and here she gets up and says that it's going to be more complicated, more difficult. How can I live in such a time?" And you would, I think, honestly be filled with a certain disquietude and fear. All new generations have asked such questions, but I honestly believe that no new generation has more right to the disquietude than you. As I said before, there is no right answer to the problems of fundamental im- portance which we raise today. And even if I knew it, I would not try to give you the answer, but I would like to make this suggestion.
You will have noticed, if you analyze your ordinary conversation and think a bit about the background of that conversation, how many words, ideas, concepts we use for which we really have no proof. We use words like "forever," "eternal," "timeless," though we have no proof for such concepts. We are talking here about a different di- mension of time, not the time of your personal lives, not the time of history, but something we feel goes beyond those two. We see this in a small way when we all admit that ideas live longer than the people who formulate them or that works of art created thousands of years ago give to us a similar thrill of pleasure to that felt by the folk who first saw them. This, I think, allows us to suspect that for each of us there is a possibility of connection somehow to an area of existence which can persist beyond time. Now your education helps you in your intellectual development, it helps you in your social develop- ment, and here in this strange area which surpasses in importance either of those it gives you, if you are successful in finding the experi- ences which point in that way, the courage to persist in a time which is unexampled in complexity.
To pretend today that the process of living or that the transplanta-
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tion which you are all going to undergo here is easy would be com- pletely wrong. As I said at the beginning, you can pretend that this new world doesn't exist, that you don't have to exert yourselves, that you don't need to try to get your roots down into a new kind of soil and situation, that you don't have to brace yourselves. You can pre- tend that if you like, and all that I would answer you with is a sen- tence from one of Oliver Wendell Holmes' opinions. Justice Holmes said: "It is required of a man that he share the action and passion of his time, at peril of being judged not to have lived." This judgment "not to have lived" is one that none of us would wish to see or hear passed on our lives, no matter how self-centered we may be. So just from that point, aside from whatever social value you may be to the community, we have an obligation to make the most of our personal lives, at this really momentous time in history.
In doing that, in preparing to take your place in this kind of world, there are in college two very important hazards which you will meet; and in conclusion I want to speak very briefly about them.
The first of these is that you will be inclined, tempted to think of yourselves as too young to take responsibility for your education. And I hasten to add that you are not completely to blame for reacting in that way, because everybody in America likes to be younger than he or she really is. In most situations this kind of deceit is only rather a pleasant and amusing thing, but in your situation to pretend that you are too young to take responsibility and primarily to take re- sponsibility for your education is really a fatal error. After all, no one can put your roots down for you. And I would remind you that in other civilizations you at this age would be married, supporting fam- ilies, or at least providing food, seeing that they had shelter, and building the morale of a family. The Dean of Freshmen summed this up rather well in another connection when she said that we have in this country colleges for women, not girls. In other words, you are physiologically and mentally able to take the responsibility for pre- paring yourself through education for your future.
The other hazard is similar to this one. The other hazard you meet is briefly that of your sex. Here also there are lots of current mislead- ing theories. There is a kind of feeling that girls ought not to be too bright, that they shouldn't study too much. They ought not to like mathematics and science, they shouldn't understand politics, and pos- sibly they should have no sense of humor. There are many answers to this point of view, and I won't take them all up. I will mention
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only two points. You may have seen the other day the prediction by the Undersecretary of Labor that by 1970, which would be six years after you have graduated from Connecticut, two out of every five women in this country will be in the labor force of the country. In other words, they will not be sitting on any satin cushions. That is one point which you may wish to think about. The trend is in that direc- tion, and your question ought to be: "What kind of preparation have I got to contribute to the economic life of this country?"
The other thing which is even more general and more apt to hap- pen, and you will probably laugh when I say it, is that most of you will probably live to be a hundred. Even, I think, the most romantic of you would agree that sex differences are not as important after sixty as they are before. So I would only draw this conclusion from that statement: that if you want to keep from being a stuffy old bore for forty years, that is, between sixty and a hundred, then you've got to learn to be something now. In other words, you can't rely on pre- serving either your youthful charm or your feminine allure through a hundred. To be young and feminine at sixteen is no achievement. To be a respected person at sixty is. Those are the two hazards, then, which I think you will run into in many forms as you start your college career.
But here you are in any case at the most exciting time in history- going to college, surrounded by the good wishes of your parents and friends, about to make new friendships, friendships that will last for you through the years, about to see new relationships in the things that you have learned and learning new things, furnishing the in- terior of your lives, and again with the assurance that the life that lies ahead of you will surpass in scope anything we have ever known in its complexity. So on this occasion we of another generation envy you, and we pledge you as your parents or your faculty friends our help and our guidance. We hope that you will make a successful transplantation to our College and that from it you will acquire the characteristics and qualities that will make you into a sturdy citizen of this world, where you will, I am afraid, unfortunately, live to be a hundred.
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Your College Education: Our Mutual Responsibility September, 1957
ROSEMARY PARK, President
T HIS EVENING we are going to talk about education, a word with which you are familiar, a process on which we are em- barked, you and I and all of us here, but perhaps we view it from dif- ferent points of view. If you are taking a journey of any consequence, it is helpful to meet someone who has made a similar trip and to have that person point out some of the things you might look for.
I remember very well as a young girl taking a trip down the Rhine with an elderly man and woman who were friends of my father's. This elderly man spent most of his time looking for old newspaper clippings in his luggage until his wife said rather irritably to him, "Now, George, here I brought you all this way and you are not look- ing at the castles." I do not want to have this happen to you, to have you pass some of the most magnificent scenery in the world and not see it because you are concerned with some triviality.
So this evening I want to say something about what happens to you in these four years here, admitting that it will happen at different rates. During this first year, you are in a transition from an educa- tional institution which probably treated you as younger than you actually were to an institution which treats you as older than perhaps you are. Now this kind of difference will appear not only in the type of subject matter which you have a chance to study, but also in the method in which it is offered to you, in the kind of teaching; and you will notice too a difference in your interests and in your response to what is presented.
If I may begin with the last point, the kind of interest that you may show: most of you will find out, as the year goes on and as you go into your next year, that there are new aspects to familiar subjects which suddenly appear. You may discover that French is something quite different from what you thought it was in secondary school, or Eng- lish has aspects that had not occurred to you. Suddenly you are in- terested in a way you never were before.
A Chance to Make New Discoveries
And then, of course, you will be studying new subjects, things you never have had a chance to look at before, or even know about-
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things like philosophy, psychology, or sociology. And you may dis- cover that you suddenly enjoy reading about these things even though you were not one particularly interested in reading before. This comes about, not because you were blind before, not because you had not had a chance to hear this about English or French or his- tory or philosophy, but simply because you now bring a little more experience, you have lived a bit longer, your senses and your wits are sharper than they were before, and they hear different overtones, things take on a new meaning. Because this kind of thing happens, it is important for you in your first two years to elect many different subjects. Your interests may change as you grow and develop; and you should have a chance to try all sorts of things, not just to take the program that your parents and your former teachers think that you would be interested in.
Several years ago a Freshman and her parents came to visit me with this problem: "The College requires a course in natural science but our daughter is not interested in science. She has no particular ca- pacity for it, whereas she does have a very great gift for languages, and so we are requesting that she be permitted to take a degree with- out studying science." We discussed this back and forth, but eventu- ally it came down to the fact that this was the College requirement, that we thoroughly believed in it, for reasons which I will give you presently, and Mary would have to take science. With considerable grudgingness she elected chemistry. The end of the story is that she took a doctor's degree in chemistry and is now an instructor in the University of California.
Therefore I say, give yourself a chance to make these new discov- eries and do not think that, because you have not been interested in the schools where you have been before, that you will not be inter- ested now.
Now, as for the method: You will discover, of course, in many of your classes, that there does not appear to be any right answer. There is the answer that you give, the answer that your friends give, and possibly the instructor's answer, and there may be another answer in the book. Some of these answers are more adequate, or more likely, than others, but all of them, you will observe, require some defending by other facts. And all of this, I think, means a different sort of re- sponse on your part. The questions are not, for the most part, to be answered with simple, easily memorized answers. Memorizing is an important aspect of any learning, and that continues to be true in
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college. It is also true that you can memorize more easily and more readily now in these four years than you will ever be able to again, so for goodness' sakes, memorize anything that you think is going to be useful to you. But rest assured that simple memorizing is not enough. You do need to know the facts, but you need to be able to play with those facts in order to defend the answer you have given. This is the important change, I think, in the kind of method which you are go- ing to meet as you go on in your four years of college.
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