1970 Opening Convocation

When Hampshire College opened its doors in the fall of 1970, it was the hardest college in the country to get into. There were almost 10 applicants for every available place. The campus was brand new--it had one dorm (Merrill), the Library, and Academic Building I (later named Franklin Patterson Hall). Other than Stiles House and a few barns, that was about it for buildings, though others were under construction. The faculty and staff were also new (at least to Hampshire), and many policies and procedures were still being developed.

On Oct. 3, 1970, the college community came together with its friends and supporters to celebrate its opening. On a perfect fall weekend guests and residents gathered for seminars, speeches and a "community kite fly". Among the speakers was poet, academic and statesman Archibald MacLeish, whose memorable address began, "There was a time, not longer ago than an assistant professor can remember, when the innovation of a college was a routine occurence..." and ended, "We may be present at a greater moment than we know." In the course of the talk MacLeish praised Hampshire's commitment to the development of self in society through liberal education, a commitment which continues to this day. Silvio Conte, long-time representative to Congress from this district, also spoke, and Franklin Patterson was inaugurated as the first president of Hampshire College. A booklet, Reflections of an Inaugural Convocation, was produced shortly afterwards with photographs, programs, and the texts of some of the speeches. Using newly developed video technology, the festive event was recorded and saved for the college archives. Years later, for the 25th anniversary of the college, we sent the old format videotapes to an archival restoration service, and they produced a VHS copy that we showed on the Magic Board in the library that anniversary weekend.

The Opening of Hampshire College, an address by Archibald MacLeish
There was a time, not longer ago than an assistant professor can remember, when the innovation of a college was a routine occurrence to be recorded, if at all, on page eighteen or twenty of the Times back among the retrospective exhibitions and the amateur performances of the B Minor Mass. Colleges provided education. Education was a good thing. And good things weren't news.

They still aren't but the rest of the equation is out of date. Universal agreement that education is a good thing ended with the invention of the Silent Majority. Nothing, according to those who have been able to penetrate that enormous apathy, distresses the Silent Majority as much as a college unless it be a college student. And as for college students, there are even some of them who share the Silent Majority view. The best college, in the opinion of certain outraged gentlemen at Columbia a few years back, was a closed college--preferably burned.

That kind of intellectual reorientation alters even a newspaper's notion of news. Whatever the opening of a college may have been back in the cheerful days of the Great Depression or the two world wars, it must now be regarded as a major event: not merely news but drama and even melodrama--another fleet of costly buildings, another cargo of irreplaceable books, another crew of hopeful teachers and ambitious students and courageous administrators launching themselves into the eye of the hurricane on a voyage as daring as Magellan's with the wild sea ahead already strewn with wreckage and haunted by confused, faint cries.

I have no idea, of course, what the Editors of the Times will think of the college opening we witness here today or on what page they will report it but I know very well what our emotions ought to be. We should see ourselves as gathered, not on the comfort of folding chairs under an autumn tent in a quiet inland valley, but on a promontory steep as the Butt of Lewis from which we peer into the driving sleet for a last glimpse of brave departing sails.

I persist in my metaphor not for the metaphor's sake but for the truth's. What is new, and newly exciting, about this occasion is precisely the sense of departure, of adventure, of voyage. We are now in the sixth or seventh year of what, following the mellifluous Irish, we might well call The Troubles--meaning, of course, The Troubles in the University. And the opening of Hampshire College is the first action I can think of seriously aimed at doing something about them.

Down to this time, universities and colleges have acted defensively if at all. They have treated The Troubles as private, or at least internal, ructions between their students and themselves, and have attempted only to gird themselves for each Putsch as it came along. Parietal Rules have been modified not to say abolished. Administrative procedures, meaning disciplinary procedures, have been altered. Relations with the community have been reconsidered and frequently improved. A few changes of a public-relations, rather than a scholarly, significance have been offered in the curricula. But no important, positive efforts have been made by those best equipped to make them, which is to say by university and college faculties, to determine what these famous Troubles actually are or how they affect--should affect--the University's undertaking to educate the young.

We have been hearing, in the last few days, about the development of new police methods for academic use, including body guards for presidents and the F.B.I. on twenty-four hour alert. We have seen a good bit of faculty linen, not all of it well washed, hung out to dry. We have learned that there are still courageous Chancellors prepared to battle not so courageous Regents to the verge of coronary and beyond. But the only confident educational pronouncements of this troubled time have issued, not from the Colleges or universities, but from Mr. Spiro Agnew. And all Mr. Spiro Agnew has had to tell us is that the whole thing is the doing of wicked boys and girls egged on by "the disgusting and permissive attitude of the people in command of the...campuses." By which Mr. Agnew means that the Troubles would go away if only the trouble-makers were eradicated...

This unfortunately, is a conclusion which fails to satisfy. Those who know most about these wicked boys and girls--the men and women who teach them--are pretty well agreed that, far from being a generation of criminal delinquents, this new generation of the young constitutes the hope of the world--such hope, that is, as this raddled, soiled, abused, exploited world still has. The contemporary young have their faults, obviously. They include in their number the usual shoddy elements familiar to every undergraduate generation: the campus politician, the adolescent marching and shouting association and the plain bad actor--together with a new phenomenon, a certain scattering of young exploiters of the idealism of the young for whom there is no adequate epithet. But by and large the contemporary young are nevertheless, and have been for some years back, the most deeply concerned, the most humanly committed, generation we have seen in this century with the single exception of the returning veterans of the Second War.

But though it is fairly clear to those who face these facts that Mr. Agnew's simple explanation explains nothing but Mr. Agnew, it is still true that no other explanation has been forthcoming. No one--no one at least in a position to do anything about it--seems to have asked the next, the crucial, question...until Hampshire. If Mr. Agnew is wrong--if The Troubles cannot be blamed on some sudden, mysterious plague of viciousness affecting an entire generation of the young--where then shall the blame be put? How are we to explain the restlessness, rebellion, indignation, violence in college after college, university after university, from one coast of this country to the other and in Europe as well as the Americas, Asia as well as Europe?

This would seem to be the one inescapable question of the time, and particularly for the teachers of the time, for the scholars, for the faculties in all of their disciplines. If The Troubles are not "student troubles" in the simple-minded Agnew sense they must be something other than "student troubles." They must afflict the universities and colleges, not because the university, the college, has a particular relation to the young, but because it has a particular relation to something else. But what else?

The established faculties have not told us, but Hampshire College, struggling to draw first breath, has faced at least the question and has hazarded an answer of its own. It sees the "something else" with which the university, the college, has to do, as something existing not within the academic pale but outside it in the time, in what we used to call the world. The Troubles, that is to say, are not disciplinary troubles whatever the politicians, the hard hats and the middle-aged generally may say about them. Neither are they, as the more romantic of the young believe, "revolutionary"--meaning political--troubles. They are troubles at the heart of human life, troubles in the culture itself, in the civilization, in the state of the civilization--troubles which cannot be cured by ranting at the government, however misguided or misdirected government may be, or by sending in the national guard, whatever the provocation, but only by restoring the culture to wholeness and to health--which means, by restoring the precarious balance between the society and the self which defines the culture at any given place or time. And that restoration, Hampshire College believes, is the business of the college, of the university.

I may not be summarizing the College's beliefs precisely for the crucial word, culture, means more to me, I must confess, than it seems to mean to learned men quoted in Hampshire's working papers. But on the essential question, the question of the responsibility of the college, of the university, I am not, I think, far wrong. Hampshire proposes--explicitly proposes--to accept for itself a responsibility for the restoration, for the maintenance, of the difficult balance between society and self. And in that acceptance it seems to me not only courageous but entirely right. That balance is the business of the universities and colleges.

Individuals--thinkers, organizations of thinkers, philosophers--can help. A true statesman, another Jefferson, even another Wilson, would be a Godsend. But it is the university, the college, which must bear the brunt of the responsibility because it is the university, the college, which is the trustee of the culture, the trustee of the state of the civilization, the trustee of the means by which the civilization descends from the always disappearing past into that eternal becoming which we call the present.

And it is as trustee of the culture that the university has failed in these years in which the culture has lost its human values and deteriorated into a mere technology which exploits knowledge as it exploits everything else, using even science itself not as a means for the advancement of civilization and the enrichment of life but as a ground for gadgetry and invention regardless of the human value of the thing invented, so that the triumphs of the epoch make no distinction between the glories of modern medicine and the horrors of modern war. When a civilization can declare tacitly and even explictly that whatever can be concocted must be concocted regardless of the human consequences, we are already far into that disatrous epoch for which Yeats provided the image and the name:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer, Things fall apart, the center cannot hold...

Hampshire College, to its eternal credit, has dared to face Yeats' vision and the reading of history which underlies that vision. It has accepted as the critical contemporary fact the failure of the balance between society and self and has found the reason for that failure in the dehumanizing of the culture on one side and the dehumanizing of the self upon the other: the conversion of a once diverse and fruitful human culture into a crassly technological semi-culture, and the withdrawal of the withered self toward the uttermost wilderness of the self--toward that desert of solipsism in which some ghostly modern selves already wander. Moreover, having accepted the failure of the balance as the underlying ill, Hampshire has gone on to make the restoration of the balance its explicit undertaking: it has committed itself "to a view of liberal education" (I am quoting) "as a vehicle for the realization of self in society"--and it underlines the in.

It is a measure of the decline of the human in this sorry age that, far from resounding as a declaration of the obvious these words ring like trumpets--like the first courageous trumpets we have heard since The Troubles began. What would once have been a platitude becomes a call to arms. It is only, of course, in society that a self can ever be realized--in what John Keats called the arable field of events. But what would have been self-evident to the Father of the University of Virginia comes as a shock of blinding revelation to the generation of the depraved Los Angeles murders and the cold-blooded tortures in Connecticut and the brutal killings in Ohio and Mississippi. We suddenly see, as we reflect upon those words, what the self which has turned its back on society can become, and what society can be without the sense of self.

Our generation is the first in American history to understand what Daniel Webster meant when he cried, in those dark decades before the Civil War, "Liberty and Union, one and inseparable, now and forever." Even Emerson misread him. Emerson rejected "Union" in that context as the young today reject what they have christened, the Establishment. Liberty was all that mattered--human decency--the freedom of the slaves. But when the Civil War finally came Lincoln took his stand where Webster had taken his--upon the preservation of the Union. For without the Union there could be no Liberty. And this, as always with Lincoln, was no such shrewd political calculation as we know so well today. It was human truth. Yeats's truth. Without a center that can hold, "things fall apart...The falcon cannot hear the falconer." Without a center that can hold, human liberty becomes an inhuman liberty to mutilate and murder. Without a center that can hold, freedom becomes the opposite of freedom.

Only when freedom is as human as humanity is free can a nation of free men exist. Only when the balance between society and self is both harmonious and whole can there truly be a self or truly a society. Hampshire has been founded on that proposition.

I do not know, ladies and gentlemen, how it is with you, but as I think for myself of this all but impossible commitment, and as I look around at the faces of the men and women who have made it, I feel a surge of excited hope. In a time like ours, it is only the impossible commitments which are believable, for only the impossible commitments are now worth making. If the probabilities of the future overwhelm us there will be no future which men, as we have known men in the past, will wish to live. It is precisely the probabilities--even the certainties--that must change. And only education can perform that miracle.

I think we may be present at a greater moment than we know. (p.2-4)