Duke University - Chanticleer Yearbook (Durham, NC)

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available to him. The degree of freedom with which he can combine quantities of these raw materials, in any pattern, is unparalleled in other phases of life. And in each combination lies always some- thing to be discovered, an idea, another person, or just a nameless realization which can enable one to come to terms with himself. Reynolds Price, novelist, professor, and Duke alumnus, views his own education as the discovery of work—not just as some preparation for graduate study but as the slow development of his own gifts. 7

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The sad aspect of college education is that so many people submit themselves to it. They get the idea that education is entirely preparation, and that life, real living, does not begin until one has an A.B. or a B.S.; a college diploma is con- sidered a birth certificate. In truth, if one is ever to experience genuine life”, he must keep himself alive and growing even before he obtains the hallowed de- gree. The great and important questions of life are therefore valid concerns of the college student. Not only has he rights to such questions, but he has duties to these questions. The cloisters of the university do not shield him from ele- mental problems of humanity. The college years ought to be a time for introspection, experiments, discoveries, and maturation. One is suddenly sep- arated from family ties which, although intensely meaningful, can also prove stifling; one is suddenly presented with certain raw materials otherwise not 6

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FINDING WORK by Reynolds Price Mottoes, like heroes, are out of fashion. Perhaps wars have come too closely on us lately and we have not had time to forget the savage poverty of wartime mottoes, the brief and lethal imperatives —Remember the Alamo! Remember the Maine! Lafayette, we are coming! Re- member Pearl Harbor! Oddly, the Korean War and now the Vietnamese seem to lack battlecries. Perhaps their purposes and possibilities have been and are too complex and appalling to submit even to the simpletons who manufactured our earlier shouts. (That might be our hope —that now we at least know the density of war—were the hope itself not such a black end.) But when I was a child in North Car- olina in the Second World War, private mottoes still had almost magical power for me and my elders. Several of my 8