Loyola College - Review Yearbook (Montreal, Quebec Canada)

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ee 8 Dear Graduate: June 1, 1974 You as anew graduate are almost a new being with so much talent actuated and confirmed in some meaningful search or direction. We can say that James Bay, the Olympic village, women’s liberation, peace in the Middle East, Concordia University are at this moment little more than words, visions of pertinacious dreamers, promises for a better tomorrow. Similarly, we can say that you as a new graduate are a potential engine of achievement, a plant about to blossom and bear fruit, a pledge that the future will honour the past and improve the present. But, you, unlike projects and causes that rise and fall as they render service, are a human person with immanent enhancement that must transcend usefulness for external objectives, however noble. Your essential meaning lies within your dynamism and destiny. True, the human person will, for good or evil, influence things, processes, events, even other persons. But its measure of ex- cellence is itself and its degree of self-fulfillment.

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| sense that a criterion of worth within self can translate as selfishness, self-centred aggression or timidity, and can degenerate into self-applauding vanity. Indeed, | suspect that all of us turn at times the process and treasure of learning into self-seeking meanness, muddle-headedness or mischief. Examples abound. Dachau, Watergate, Gulag Ar- chipelago, Hiroshima tower as shameful monuments raised by intelligent educated men who led themselves astray. And on a less cosmic scale closer to home, our own experience bears painful witness. Indeed, against man’s dismal record some may scorn all education as vain and deceptive. | am not of their number as you must have guessed from my congratulations to you at convocation. For me, more temperate thoughts about education seem worth consideration. And | do not hesitate to invite you to share them and build on them as you con- tinue your education, | hope more richly, all your life long beyond college classrooms. First then, education is essentially a work by the mind on the mind. Schools in our society house all sorts of services catering to individual and social wants, but they exist to attend upon the mind, to share and expand human knowledge. Doing, willing, being of fit body, displaying social grace, communicating, leading are all desirable human achievements but, as objectives of colleges, they are subordinate to the care and feeding of the mind. | do not deny these and other talents and accomplishments; | simply propose to you that they walk in treacherous ways unless guided by reason, in- formed, inquiring, disciplined, developed reason. Some misuses of knowledge come from good-intentioned persons who charge the heart to speak for the mind to such disastrous effect for the mind and the heart. | think that | speak to your experience. You have come across people, perhaps teachers, wounded by the alienating cruelty of contemporary society. Book learning does nothing to relieve this relentless, inner anguish. Something has to reach their loneliness, their pain, their emptiness; feeling must be resuscitated from stifled contempt. You must understand a little if they close their books and minds to pursue peace in their emotions. But they pay too dear a price for too fleeting a truce. Education, | hold, is by the mind for the mind. That is a simple definition that, unfortunately, issues in a simplistic un- derstanding of education as one brain plugged into another. But, education is a personal attribute; it is better un- derstood as a dialogue among persons who tell, listen, ask. And the mind, for its part, discharges its high essential of- fice not as autarch but as servus servorum in the commonwealth of a person’s skills, talents, emotions and poten- tialities. As alienating society goads human feelings and affections into rebellion against thought, it can also dupe the mind into a practical repudiation of our feelings, emotions and hence the very fullness of ourselves. Somewhere earlier, | spoke of self-fulfillment as an objective, and just now | have seemed to concentrate on setting just and peaceful equilibrium within the person. | may have given the impression that the educated person has merely to come to terms within self. Let me say that | am profoundly moved by Martin Buber’s insight that there is no “Il” unless there be “Thou”. The I-Thou equation is not only a high sounding saying, a cry of the heart, a dosage against alienation. It is an essential part of the formula for respecting the mind, unifying the self, and fulfilling the person -- in a word, for starting to build upon our education. We are up against those words of St. Augustine that | like: ‘The truth is neither mine or another’s; but belongs to all of us whom Thou callest to partake of it, warning us terribly not to account it private to ourselves lest we be deprived of it”. God bless you! Yours sincerely, Lip were T Patrick G. Malone, S.J. President