Duke University - Chanticleer Yearbook (Durham, NC)

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fantastically complex tradition of thought and experience, is able to bring out of it a new kind of basic insight about the nature of things. This is the precious simplicity of truly creative thought (and thought is, I suspect, an inadequate word for it); it is the clarity which comes only at the far edge of human accomplishment, but it exists. It is our greatest reminder that all the fragments of thought and experience which are the common ma- terial of our lives can be caught up in some one pattern of coherence, com- JdiiN N. Macdi.h., M.M.E. Chairman of the Department of Mechanical Engineering pleteness and therefore — in the deepest sense of the word — sanity. This kind of sanity is a return to the root of things; most of us are allowed only glimpses of it; but the university must give constant testimony, and must be a constant witness, to its presence in our world . If the process of university life is a constant alternation between frontier and heartland, if the daily task of a university is the assimilation of knowl- edge into new patterns of order, then I suggest that its final, almost mystical obligation is to the recognition, and indeed the veneration, of significance itself. This is the sense in which a uni- versity is most truly a religious in- stitution; within and beyond the welter of experience, it testifies to coherent reality. And it testifies to that reality wherever it can be truly found. For us, the common distinctions be- tween the sciences and the arts, be- tween theology and engineering, be- come meaningless. We do not choose among a good poem, a great bridge, a brilliant equation, a conquered virus; as educated people we owe our respect to them all, and as members of the university community we owe our understanding to them all. From these qualities and loyalties of the university world flow all its prac- tical, public achievements, and all its relevance to our inner lives. The scholar and the student are at the universitv ' s Earl I. Brown II, Ph.D. Chairman of the Department of Civil Engi- neering Edward K. Kravhii.l, M.S.E. Assistant Dean of the College of Engineering heart, not just because our society depends upon educated people, but above all because human beings crv out for knowledge, order and insight. Our kind of education is not, then, just the means to life; it is a way of life. The whole universe is its prov- ince; but it is justified only by what it brings to pass within us. As we come to love equally the bright field of knowl- edge and the dark wood beyond our understanding, as we develop the courage to confess ignorance, and the modesty to articulate true learning, then we begin, not only to under- stand the university but to embody it. And this we must do, we who have the rare privilege of being here. It is the expectation put upon us all, and as I accept my share of responsibility this morning, I ask you to remember your own. For this brief moment of time, we are Duke University. May men say of us in years to come that, every man according to his talent, we made a place of wit, of wisdom, of high civilization and great service. 19

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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

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woman ' s college M. Maroarkt Bail, Ph.D., Dr. iur. Dean of the Woman ' s College Following are excerpts from an ad- dress by Dean M. Margaret Ball at the Honors Clonvocalion, September 30, 196.3. The Woman ' s College was estab- lished to facilitate the education of those students at Duke University who happened to be women — not to draw them out of the larger University community, but to give them the op- portunity to develop their several talents both within the smaller com- munity which is the College and within the larger one represented by the University. The College was created not with the thought of developing a different kind of education for women than for men, but of safeguarding equal access with men students to the University ' s best minds, while providing facilities designed to promote both the Intel- m El.I.KN H. llnc:KABKE, M.A. Dean of Undergraduate Instruction Jane Phii.pott, Ph.D. Associate Dean of Undergraduate Instruction lectual growth and the capacity for leadership of the women members of Duke ' s academic society. . . . As a center of extracurricular educa- tion, the Woman ' s College is, and should remain a place where Duke women, with or without the presence or concurrence of their peers at the other end of the bus line, may con- sider and take positions on matters of interest and importance either to themselves or to society at large — not with the thought that Duke women have the answer to all of society ' s problems, but that as women and schol- ars, they have a valid interest in both the problems and their solution. As an intellectual community, the Woman ' s College has operated, and will continue to operate on the assump- tion that the best road to education for most undergraduate women is through the study of the Liberal Arts. Not because knowledge of the Liberal Arts is a special responsibility of women in an age in which the nation ' s culture tends to be left more and more in their hands as potential or actual wives and mothers, but in the con- 20