Duke University - Chanticleer Yearbook (Durham, NC)

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Charles B. Johnson, Ed.D. Assistant Dean of Trinity College position of the secure and the baffling is as old as man. It represents two things for us in the university world — the way formal knowledge grows, and the way the individual mind works. In each case, we reach toward what we do not know from a center of knowledge; but we modify and we change that center by our very act of reaching beyond it. In our own mythic and religious past, Adam and Eve are, I suppose, the greatest ex- amples of this constant, reiterated human event; but it is central to the hope of any great teacher, any great art- ist, any great scientist, any great prophet. The heartland for any of these dis- tinguished human beings is the im- mediately known, fully loved world — the world of our most intimate ex- perience. It has about it a sense of security, a sense of abiding attachment and constantly reaffirmed meaning. In a university the ritual heartland of life is Matriculation Day, Founder ' s Day, Commencement; its intellectual heart is the security of the honestly inquiring mind, which has the right to feel at any time confidence about the great traditions of learning, and the great traditions of civilized human conduct — no matter how these great traditions are called into question by the madness of some particular mo- ment. But this assurance of the known and loved is, as you realize, only half of the university world. In order to main- RoBERT B. Cox, A.M. Dean of Undergraduate Men tain our confidence in our own great traditions, we must revere them on the one hand and test them on the other. This is the law for any truly democratic society; it is more than law for the university. It is the breath of life; unless we put ourselves con- stantly to the test in the quality, the range, and the hungering variety of our work, we do not deserve to exist. We cannot be merely a snug, com- fortable, pleasant place, the place it is good to come i)ack to because it has never changed. We are obviously the place of constant returning, but equally we are the new, the untried, the hoped for and not yet found. Between Eden and Paradise lies the university world; it lives by memory, it lives by hope, and it lives through its faith in a promised land of insight and knowledge, which is never to be fully possessed. What power in the university holds this heartland of knowledge and this frontier of discovery together? The second of its unique talents, I think — a talent for reconciling to one another immediate confusions of knowledge and steadily more complex, and yet more coherent, ideas of order. One major element of Western society is embodied in this battle between growth and stability. In the last 5,000 years we have found ourselves again and again at critical points in our develop- ment; and we are at one of them to- day. Over and over we have had to find more complex ways of living, or C. HiLBURN VVOMBLE, Ph.D. Assistant Dean of Undergraduate Men 17

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trinity college FoUoiving is the complete text of the inaugural address President Knight de- livered at the Indoor Stadium. This is a moment of great and sombre privilege for me. I shall do my best to fulfill your expectation: I shall even try to surprise you once in a while, if I can, by doing more than you expect. But I cannot pretend that I look upon this day with the same festive eye that I bring to a spring morning or a fall afternoon. The nature of our world, and the place of a major university in it are such that no man can look on them, indeed, without a sudden catch at the heart. This would have been so even without the brutal events of the last few weeks; events which force us back to our primal convictions, and are the starkest example of that age-old struggle between civilized and bar- MowARD A. Strobel, Ph.D. Assistant Dean of Trinity College baric, between the sane and the mad, which has always been the arena of a university. Today I want to talk about the arena for a few minutes; but I do not want to do so by telling you what great things we shall accomplish. There is a kind of trivial arrogance about this, an idle boasting that has no place in our world. We shall simply do our best; and today I want to suggest what that best includes and why it is Barnky L. Jones, B.D., Ph.D. Assistant Dean of Trinity College so important to our society and to ourselves. T here are some obvious rea- sons for us to accomplish here every- thing that is humanly po.ssible; we have an obligation to .several thousand able students, and we have an equal obligation to the research, the public service, the support and stimulus of the arts and sciences which have be- come the nearly automatic concern and responsibility of American academic communities. But these enterprises, im- A Alan K. Manchester, Ph.D. Dean of Trinity College portant as they are, do not stand alone; and unless we understand the true heart of university life, its teaching, its research and its public duties are likely to become stereotyped, conventional, finally dead. Where, then, shall we turn if we are to understand the enduring best of the university? To those great patterns of thought which animate the human mind and spirit, patterns which lie beneath and beyond the standard aca- demic enterprises of our day, just as they surrounded the academic world of Huxley, of Isaac Newton, of Thomas More, Augustine, Aristotle or Plato. These are, as I see it, the patterns by which both the university and indi- vidual creative mind work when they are everything that they might be. The first of them can only be caught in an image, I think, the image of the unknown frontier on the one hand, and on the other, the heartland, the abiding community. As a metaphor, a bright dream and a reality, this op- 16

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college of engineering we have had to perish in the effort. Those societies which sUpped into darkness would not, or could not, reconcile the changing demands of his- tory and the unchanging demands of indi idual human life. We ourselves, in our tiny fragment of time since the 18th century, have fought four major wars which were the tragic outer signs of our disorder and our attempt to deal with it. But we meet the same issue constantly in the rise and decay of cities, of industries, even of individual families. In the university world, a need to face both the turning points of history and the pivotal, disrupti e moments of human thought is the most relent- less of the tasks laid on us. And we have a duty, furthermore, to develop the very ideas that will be so trouble- some as we assimilate them. A city or a country often has the problem of growth and change thrust upon it; here in the university, we create the very problem which we have to solve. To be quite specific and quite aca- demic for a moment, my own discipline faced a generation ago the question of what was the most important about the study of literature. Was it the biography of the writer, or was it the inner, somehow independent life of the work he wrote? The truth, of course, turned out to be neither of these ex- tremes, but a new synthesis in literary studies, a demanding new kind of insight about the art of literature and about the societies which literature embodies and brings to conscious, understanding life. If we had not moved to this new level of complexity, however, we would have seen the de- cline of the whole discipline. No thoughtful man would ha e continued to spend time on it. And the same burden of synthesis is laid upon every other discipline of the mind, every individual faculty mem- i)er, and upon every university that pretends to real accomplishment. At our point in time, for instance, we are faced with the need to nourish the arts equally with the sciences - not at the expense of the sciences, but equally with them, and indeed by means of them; we are faced with the need to mo e into areas of study that our col- leagues a generation ago did not even imagine; and as a result, we are faced with a need to sec much of university life oriented to the solution of complex interdisciplinary problems rather than James L. Mkriam, Ph.D. Dean of the College of Engineering toward the mere continuance of tradi- tional disciplines and felds of study. The university that ignores these shifts of concern will be second rate 20 years from now. These are not fads of the moment; they arc a bold attempt to master the fantastic momentum of human knowledge by coming at it in some new ways. As you look at a major university today, you may not think of this mastery as our most critical Charles R. Vail, Ph.D. Chairman of the Department of Electrical Engineering problem, but it is; either we explore and bring to useful order the wilder- ness of new knowledge, or we shall no longer be an effective force in our society — and all our brick and stone will simply build a memorial to our failure. In this attempt (which our whole society must make) to bring order into its world, the university has a third contribution to offer. It can support the most difficult of all human enterprises — one even more demanding than the constant assimilation of knowledge which I ha c just described. This dif- ficult enterprise is the revisiting of basic reality itself — that rare discovery of the radical order in experience, a discovery which goes so far that it becomes simple again. Simple is a de- ceptive word in this setting, however; four of the best examples of this special quality in our century are Einstein, Yeats, Whitehead and Van Gogh. These men have in common one thing; each of them, in revisiting a IS