The First Commencement Address

Franklin Patterson delivered The First Commencement Address on May 22, 1971.

I am now ending my fifth year as Hampshire's first President, and I may be forgiven if I speak to what I think the College is not and should not be, what it is and what it should be at this moment in time, when our first phase is coming to an end. For the sake of brevity, let me put these things into two simple statements.

To begin with constraints, there certainly are some things I think Hampshire is not and should not be. Without expecting a tidal wave of consensual enthusiasm about these views, I think you should know them, and I want the record at the end of my fifth year to show them, for whatever the future may find them worth. Time today does not permit me to explicate these matters, but only to mention them. I will trust to your generosity of mind and spirit to supply the rationale that might be behind each of these, even if you don't find yourself in agreement with them.

1. For one thing, Hampshire is not, and I think it should not pretend to be, divorced from the long, and at best great, tradition of disciplined free inquiry and expression, struggled for and built by people and institutions before our time. It is highly unlikely that Hampshire will either survive or, what is more important, have a really useful role in students' lives or the society, if it assumes with unconsciously arrogant naivete that it can exist meaningfully outside the great tradition of disciplined free inquiry and expression. Our task as an experimenting college is not to turn our backs on this tradition, but to enlarge it and help give it new life.

2. In line with this, Hampshire is not and should not pretend to be an apocalyptic or utopian New Jerusalem in which none of the hard-won standards of mind and art need apply, on the assumption that all that matters anymore is a subjectivism in which reality is whatever one says it is. Hampshire is not, and cannot as an institution of learning, be dedicated to turning the egocentric predicament into an educational philosophy.

3. Intellectually and artistically, learning at Hampshire cannot be excused from the tests of validity and quality that disciplined free inquiry and expression must face everywhere if they are to mean anything. Being an experimenting College does not mean being without an essential structure that reflects the responsibility of scholars and artists, nor does it mean being without standards.

4. Further, in keeping with the tradition of free inquiry and free expression that Hampshire continues, this College is not and should never be an instrument of politics to be used by anyone--Right or Left or Center--who thinks he has a monopoly on truth and who claims a right to bend the institution and its people to his special dogma or unique, revealed wisdom.

At the heart of the matter these are some of the things that I see Hampshire must not be. One other thing, beyond but integral to the central search for truth and beauty in the house of intellect and art, is that Hampshire does not--and should not--and cannot--exist in a value vacuum.

To say that the College must not be anyone's instrument of political power is not to say that the College and its people should be or are uncommitted to moral values. It is a special and dangerous nonsense to argue that an institution of higher education must be like a political party, expressing and seeking to enforce conformity to moral values by political means. I find that those who argue so are usually armed by an abysmally ignorant self-righteousness and quite prepared to argue for the death of the college and university as free market places of ideas and values. When they speak, one hears again the voices of those who killed academic freedom in Germany under Hitler, in Italy under Mussolini, in Spain under Franco, and in all the Communist countries--always claiming that academic freedom was a threat. As indeed academic freedom always is a real danger to any tyranny of the Right or Left.

Hampshire, in deed as well as words, is not uncommitted to the valuing of life, of the quality of human relations, of the sentient self, of human justice, of the hard search for community, and other things. Our College does not stand in a value vacuum or without commitments to man. But the College must not be seduced or bullied into acting as though such commitments require the institution to move towards political conformity, or towards the effort to use political power, or the warping of free inquiry and free expression to fit anyone's party line. Precisely the opposite must be true. Hampshire faces a far more complex double challenge: first, to protect the integrity of free learning from those who arrogate to themselves the deadly presumptuousness of true believers, ready to stifle disagreement because They alone know the truth; and second, to make the College's undergirding moral commitments visible in our lives and effective in society without turning to a power politics which would corrupt or destroy our central educational mission. (p.2-4)