COLLEGE seniors across the U.S. were uncharacteristically silent. The vast captive audience was once again listening (more or less) to the captive but willing speakers. "We're not responsible in the executive branch for anything at home or abroad just now," said Vice President Hubert Humphrey. "Now is the time we all go to commencements." Humphrey, who spoke at six, was considerably busier than President Johnson, who spoke at four, notably about peace. At George Washington University, Secretary of State Dean Rusk defended the Administration's policy in Viet Nam. At West Point, General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, declared that the global mess was "not hopeless," while at Long Island University, Interior Secretary Stewart Udall sounded pretty hopeless about the urban mess. At the University of Iowa, Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz remarked that "commencement speakers have a good deal in common with grandfather clocks: standing usually some six feet tall, typically ponderous in construction, more traditional than functional, their distinction is largely their noisy communication of essentially commonplace information."
Whether noisy or quiet, at least one thing differentiated the speakers this year. Where they once used to stride along roads (long), sail oceans (uncharted), or climb mountains (lofty), they are now in orbit (dizzying). Said Emmett Dedmon, executive editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, at George Williams College: "May the explosions of your generation cut as clean as those which freed the capsule of Gemini IV from the booster engines." Whatever his fellow editors might think of that particular metaphor, Dedmon stated the dominant theme of the 1965 commmencement speeches: the "explosions" of the younger generation.
Nostalgia & Anti-Nostalgia
Commencement cliches, like their Fourth of July counterparts, deserve a certain affection: they express a deep desire for ceremony and remembrance. Behind the tritest phrase, there is sometimes a desperate attempt to reach across the unbridgeable gap and tell the young what age and experience have taught. In that sense Polonius was the model commencement speaker ("To thine own self be true").
Often, today's gowned Polonius ends up speaking only to himself and to his own generation, confessing his own failures or omissions or hopes, and interpreting the world in his own image. Peter Schrag, an official of Amherst College, has catalogued some of the inevitable themes, including the Simple Uplift Speech, which stresses the need for renewed moral vigor, basic virtue and profound verities, along with the Inverted Uplift Speech, which stresses the lack of moral vigor, basic virtue and profound verities. Then there is the Aching Anywhere Appeal ("Anywhere needs your help; the Anywhereians are starving; their country is in ferment; world leadership depends on saving Anywhere").