Commencement

Last week the class of 1941 began to graduate. If the class was aware that it was on the verge of beginning battle for a great cause, it gave no sign of such awareness. The commencement season started quietly, in a mood in which tension and apathy were strangely mixed. The mood showed itself most clearly at University of California, where the biggest graduating class in its history (4,117) staged the university's 78th commencement.

California's students had voted 2-to-1 for conscription, favored aid to Britain, two months ago threw an American Student Union chapter off the campus for isolationist agitation. The graduating class well knew that many would soon be drafted; they were prepared to do what had to be done. But few had volunteered for military service.

Said John McPherson, president of the student organization: "A fellow with the ambition to come to college has the ambition to go on; he doesn't want to have to just junk his education." Robert Williams, president of the graduating class (who himself had applied for admission to the Naval Supply Corps), added: "We were all brought up to hate war. Now we're suddenly told to forget all that, that we should plunge right into it, and we don't feel ready to blindly follow.

Here we are just graduating and ready to burn up the world. Sure, we feel that we can contribute, but we want to get something back for it."

P: While an American Legion band played God Bless America and an unprecedented array of flags whipped in the breeze, the class marched with undergraduate light-heartedness into Berkeley's California Memorial Stadium, commemorating the sons of California who died in World War I. Then they sat down to listen to a final message from their tall, vigorous president, Robert Gordon Sproul.

"I find my responsibility very heavy," began President Sproul.

". . . Your class goes out from the university into a world of crisis and crucifixion. . . . For years you have been schooled by your elders, by me and others like me, to distrust force, to abjure violence, to abhor war. . . . Inevitably confusion of mind and reluctance of action have laid their paralysis upon you. . . . It is not surprising that some of you are skeptical or cynical of the rationality of fighting to defend ideals, to defend democracy. . . . [But] the time has come when we, too, must enlist in the battle for freedom's preservation.

One thing seems clear. In the world that you are entering, there will be short shrift for weaklings or for fools, whether individuals or nations. Would you, as individuals, hold fast the integrity of your being? Then you must, each of you, oppose to the challenge of totalitarianism an unconquerable will to live--or die in freedom and with honor."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.