University Day 1982

. . . . . Good morning ladies and gentlemen and welcome to this to this university day ceremony commemorating the hundred and eighty ninth anniversary of the beginning of the University of Chapel Hill. The laying of the cornerstone of Oles on October the 12th, 1793. And now it's a great pleasure to bring to you the chairman of the faculty, Professor Darius Beds. .

On the sundial in the Moorhead Rose Garden appears the statement I count only the sunny hours. The history of a great university counts the dark hours as well as the lighted ones, our slow adjustment to racial integration, the speaker ban law, the hiatus and occupation during the Civil War for example, as well as brighter moments. Today we are one hundred and eighty nine years old with a dappled history of light and shade and a propensity for light. And today our keynote address by an expert in larger histories will direct our thoughts to the future toward the year 2000. Professor William E. Luktenberg came to our faculty in July after a distinguished thirty year career at Columbia University where he held the duet Clinton professorship in history. A specialist in recent American history he is ranked number one in his field in the United States.

Among his many books, the most acclaimed is probably Franklin D. Roosevelt in the New Deal. He has been an elections analyst for NBC and advisor for the Kennedy Library, a trusty of Smith College, a professor at Harvard, president of the Society of American Historians, well I could keep on with the list and it is a long and dazzling one. It is a very bright honor for us all to hear and for me to present our stellar colleague, Professor William E. Luktenberg. Mr. President, Mr. Chancellor, Dean Betz, distinguished alumni, platform guests, colleagues, students and members of the Chapel Hill community. Once upon a time when I was a boy in the water melon days of the 1920s, which to me seemed but yes today, but to my students are in the early paleolithic age.

The year 2000 appeared indescribably remote, a fantasy's majoria light years away, but the dawn of the 21st century is now little more than 17 years from us. On the way toward that day, we shall pass more than one milestone. In another 14 and a half months, we shall reach George Orwell's 1984, not long after the 200th birthday of the American Constitution. We shall also have a birthday of our own. In 1993, we shall be celebrating the 200th anniversary of the laying of the cornerstone of all the east. Each of these events will provide an occasion for taking stock and no one of them is likely to be altogether separable from the others.

When we come to assessing the state of this university, we may well find that the approach of the year 2000 will create special difficulties. For a millenarian mood is hostile to the spirit of a humanistic enterprise, built over centuries, and meant to endure for centuries. Moreover, it seems highly probable now that the year 2000 will be viewed in a manner uncongenial to the life of the university, which prospers in an atmosphere of confidence. To be sure, some will anticipate, with gratification, the advances the next century will bring. The conquest of dread diseases, extraterrestrial travel. But many intellectuals, as they look back on what this century has brought, how the bright hopes of the year 1900 were blighted, Auschwitz, Hiroshima,

and as a view pictorial representations of the Ant Hill society, of the megalopolises of the future, will contemplate the 21st century with foreboding. This is a presentiment already widely shared. If there is a single posture that appears to epitomize our attitude toward the inevitable arrival of the year 2000, it is the averted glance. The indicated pattern of response has been set by our behavior with regard to the first of the milestones we reached, the bicentennial of American independence in 1976. In our journal for New Year's Day, January 1, 1976, the Washington correspondent, Elizabeth Drew, recorded, it is our bicentennial year, and we don't seem to know how to celebrate it.

There is an uneasiness about celebrating. Our history began so grandly, and it doesn't seem so grand anymore. We seem to have been more confident 200 years ago. The world was newly minted then, now it is older, and complex beyond comprehension. The bicentennial date arrived at a particularly inappropriate time. From 1961 to the bicentennial year of 1976, we had four presidents. The first was murdered, the second dared not run for re-election, the third resigned to escape impeachment and removal, and the fourth succeeded him only because the vice president, who had been the heir to office, had resigned in disgrace.

In a column entitled The American Dream, Anthony Lewis observed, one of the oldest and most persistent visions of America, at home and abroad, is as the inheritor of the future. James Bryce, after his visit a century ago, wrote that American democracy was of interest because its institutions were regarded as those towards which, as by a law of fate, the rest of civilized mankind, are forced to move. The legal, called America the land of the future. How hollow these phrases ring today, Lewis remarked, hardly anyone believes that American political institutions are about to sweep the earth.

The democracy on the American model, he quotes a prominent diplomat as saying, is where the world was, not where it is going. It has become commonplace to observe that America has come to the end of something, that it has reached a terminus. Many of the analyses, with which we are familiar today, go beyond this, to say something more, that we are doomed. This prognosis of doom has two aspects. One is the notion that America is doomed because the world is doomed. As in Robert Frost's poem, about fire and ice, we are given a choice of scenarios for disaster.

There is the possibility that the world will end in nuclear disaster. And with the proliferation of nations joining the nuclear club, that peril has risen. Not long ago, the bulletin of atomic scientists moved ahead the minute hand on its clock, closer to the hour of midnight. But this is not the only script for disaster. The first report of the club of Rome warned that the final limit to growth would be reached within a century. And a director of the Sierra Club announced, we have already run out of earth, and nothing we can do will keep human kind in existence for as long as in other two centuries. Over the still longer run, there are the most dire predictions. From thermal pollution, that by overheating the earth will make it uninhabitable, to a new glacial age, literally Frost's fire and ice.

This prognosis of catastrophe has a second aspect. The apprehension that the United States is doomed, not because it is part of a doomed world, but because of America's own internal weaknesses. When I taught at Oxford during the turmoil in the United States of the early 70s, posters in travel agency windows in Great Britain urged, see America while it lasts. And in 1970, the mayor of our nation's largest city declared, the country is virtually on the end of a spiritual and perhaps even a physical breakdown. So deep were the fishers, he said, but for the first time in a century, we are not sure there is a future for America.

I think a joyous occasion like this mornings may be an appropriate time for introducing a note of skepticism about such pronouncements. Too often, the literature of doom has about it a quality of fetishness. Everybody is into doom. As Hans Magnus Ensensberger observed, we are well on the way to becoming connoisseurs of collapse. The recognition that there is something all together to solemn about some of these preachments is what lay behind the comments of one of America's foremost observers of cultural mores, Woody Allen. In his parody of a speech to the graduating class, Woody Allen declared, more than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads.

One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. The danger of a fatalistic pessimism is that it is self-fulfilling that it saps the will of democratic societies to cope. It has the effect not of inspiring us, but of lessening our determination to address those terribly serious problems that we must solve if the predictions of the doom sayers are not to be fulfilled. The eschatological mood is especially hostile to the life of the university, which builds on the expectation that it is worthwhile to undertake works long in the making because they have a fair prospect of coming to fruition.

Eric Erickson has commented that an essential ingredient in American strength of identity is a sense of anticipated future, and it is vital that we continue to nurture that sense in the university as in the nation. Yates' father, the painter John Butler Yates, once said, hope, the great divinity is domiciled in America, and that quality is truly bone and marrow of our national character. On this point, no one has conveyed the historical perspective better than the historian Richard Hofstadter.

The United States Hofstadter once observed was the only country in the world that began with perfection and aspired to progress. It is indeed hard to imagine a thriving democratic society or a thriving university community that does not aspire to progress, no matter how sensitive we must be to the troubles that plague us. Our lot is not an easy one, but to suppose that we are the first generation to face grave challenges is self-indulgent. Often we look back wistfully to the Victorian age as a time when life was more secure, but consider this sentence, there is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. That sentence was written not by an American in the 1980s, but by Matthew Arnold at the zenith of the Victorian era.

Certainly life could not have been easy for those men who assembled some two centuries ago to attempt the untried experiment of our first state university in the very infancy of a republic that many in this land and abroad doubted would survive. Yet they had the courage, the imagination, the faith to lay out a campus by the popular on New Hope Chapel Hill, to erect buildings, to attract faculty and students, to set the foundations of a university whose future greatness they could not begin to foretell. For many of us, Chapel Hill in the 1930s seems an age bathed in golden sunlight, but it is well to remember that when Frank Porter Graham took over the presidency of this university, the United States was in the trough of the Great Depression, that led many to contemplate the end of our civilization.

When John Maynard James was asked whether there had been anything like the Great Depression before, he replied yes. It was called the Dark Ages and it lasted 400 years. Hard times dealt an especially heavy blow to this university. Even in the prosperous 1920s, the University of North Carolina was given less money to spend than any other member of the association of American universities and by a wide margin. Worse would still to come. In the first year of the Great Depression, the university's budget was slashed 25 percent. In the following year, another 20 percent.

This was the grim reality Frank Graham fell heir to. Yet it was in these dark times that the University of North Carolina won the admiration of the entire country as a center of thought and under Graham's inspired leadership as a beacon of liberty and civility. It was in the Great Depression that the university created the general college and the schools of public health and library science, that the remarkable southern historical collection was created, that the University of North Carolina press enhanced its extraordinary reputation, that the Institute of Government under the Aegis of Albert Coats was born, that Howard Odom published his masterpiece, Southern Regions of the United States, that the whole nation was talking about the Rupert Vances and the Paul Greens.

So outstanding was the record of the University in those years that we confront a problem of a different order, not that we may become paralyzed by the prospect of doom, but that we may become mesmerized by nostalgia for that earlier time and dispirited by the belief that the great days of the University lie in the past. This is a mischievous notion. For as great as the University of North Carolina was in the 1930s, it was not as great as it was to become. The University that did not admit blacks was not as great as it was to be. And the University that did not admit women to fall and equal status was not as great as it was to be.

These are accomplishments of which the generation that brought them about may be as proud as a generation of the 1930s for its accomplishments, and these are accomplishments that have yet to be finished. We would be most faithful to Frank Porter Graham and to those who worked with him, not by making an idol of the past, but by carrying the ideals of an earlier day into the future, to the year 2000 and beyond. In his inaugural address, President Graham said, we would work in this region and build here one of the great intellectual and spiritual centers of the world.

And so he did. But this is a task that is never complete but always to be completed. The University of North Carolina developed its enviable reputation because it was a university committed to freedom of expression. A university committed to serving the region, the nation, the world. A university that honored creative scholarship. A university that encouraged experimentation. In short, it developed its reputation because it was recognized as a progressive force. And it will maintain that reputation so long as it continues to be recognized as a progressive force. That cannot be done by incantation alone. When John Kennedy was criticized for not mobilizing sentiment behind his program, he responded that when in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Onglundauer boasts, I can call spirits from the vastly deep.

Hotspur answers, why so can I? Or so can any man? But will they come when you do call for them? Nor can it be done by denying the seriousness of the problems that have called forth the prophecies of doom. It will require all of our resources of intellect and spirit to succeed. And to such an effort, this university has much to contribute. Even with the best of efforts, there is no certainty of success. But as we approach the mileposts that lie ahead of us, from now to the year 2000, we should be deterred neither by premonitions about the future nor by illusions about the past.

The question is not whether our problems are formidable, where they surely are. And whether we have the courage and the wit to contend with them. If we do, we may still find that what that son of this university, Thomas Wolf, once wrote, may yet turn out to be right. The true discovery of America is still before us. The true fulfillment of our spirit, of our people, of our mighty and immortal land is yet to come. Thank you very much.

That, sir, is a noble message, and we are most grateful. And I think, ladies and gentlemen, you can see the kind of leadership that comes from this faculty. Let us now rise in St. Carcassant. Let us now rise in St. Carcassant.

The University Day, 1982, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Chancellor Christopher Fordham presided over today's ceremonies, with featured speaker William Lektonberg, William Rand Keenan Jr., Professor of History, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This is Bob Rederson, for WUNC, Chapel Hill.