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The University of California's President Clark Kerr spoke at Berkeley, where much of the student unrest started; it would all be forgotten, said Kerr rather comfortably, by the time the class of '65 held its 50th reunion. At Tufts, Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach declared that he was all for protest as long as it was meaningful, but "it becomes pointless, silly and even harmful when it serves only as a substitute for goldfish swallowing or a panty raid." Katzenbach cautioned against forming rigid convictions on insufficient evidence, and recalled Oliver Cromwell's words to the Church of Scotland: "My brethren, I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken." Presidential Adviser McGeorge Bundy sounded less patient when he remarked at Notre Dame that "often the least learned make the most noise."
There were the familiar complaints about the computerized life. Poet James Dickey warned at California's San Fernando Valley State College that, on the edge of the "anonymous modern abyss, you must develop your private brinksmanship, your strategies, your ruses, your delightful and desperate games of inner survival, whether they take the form of Batman comics or whistling Handel's Water Music, enabling you to live perpetually at the edge but very much on your own ground." It was Yale's President Kingman Brewster who perhaps best expressed the mood of the commencement speakers. After warning against "the self-pity now popularly dubbed alienation," he praised the students' concern for social justice, but reminded them that "the ugliness of the radical" is no different from the "ugliness of the reactionary." Both share "the sin of arrogance," which is freedom's enemy. He concluded by revising Barry Goldwater's famous campaign dictum: "Intolerance in the name of freedom is no virtue; patience in the name of justice is no vice."
Were the young listening? Probably not. The last word may belong to the student speaker at Yale who some time ago summed up the situation with a cliché of his own: "We are the leaders of tomorrow—how does that grab you?"