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Certain other types could be added to the Schrag list, for instance the Nostalgia Oration, which holds that things were much better (or anyway simpler) in the speaker's youth, and the Anti-Nostalgia Oration, which holds that things are much better (or anyway more exciting) today. Of major importance is the Nostra Culpa Theme: "We made a mess of things, and it is up to you, the young, to do better." Hardly anyone dares to strike the opposite note: "We did pretty well, and you'll be damn fortunate if you keep up with us."
No one any longer speaks in praise of success as such, let alone financial success—although Columbia Professor Louis Milic, a specialist in rhetoric, thinks that if a speaker some day were to exhort graduates to make money "it would be a real show stopper." In most speeches, God seems to be a rather fading presence—except at religious institutions. Duty is rarely invoked, and certainly not with the confidence of Harvard President Abbott Lawrence Lowell, who in 1917 severely told future officers: "See that your men have reason to respect you." Politically too, things have become more complicated since Senator Henry Cabot Lodge in 1919 bade graduates beware of schemes that purport "to make men happy in a moment" and added: "I do not fear Bolshevism but I regard Bolshevists as simple criminalists."
Since World War II, two themes have been dominant. One is the Progress Gap: "Our moral progress lags far behind our technical progress." The other is the Conformity Crisis: "In this age of centralized power and vast organization, you must remain individuals." But where a decade ago the silent generation was urged to make itself heard, where a few years ago the beat generation was suspected of not being concerned with serious issues, the present generation is highly audible and riotously concerned. The old picture of anxious youth going forth into a hostile world has been reversed. It now looks more like hostile youth going forth into an anxious world—a world not sure what to expect from them.
Alienation & Freedom
Troubled by the "campus revolt," some speakers tried to outploy it through the flattery gambit. President James Hester of N.Y.U. saluted the graduates as "the generation of hope." Others used the sympathetic approach; at Maine's Nasson College, Bel Kaufmann, author of the bestselling Up the Down Staircase, pitied the young because they "no longer have heroes to emulate or rebel against. We have the non-hero acting out his non-deed on the giant stage of the absurd." One speaker simply counterattacked by telling the young that they are not as smart as they think they are. Said Dean Bayless Manning of Stanford Law: "You are already threatened by intellectual obsolescence."