Stanford University - Quad Yearbook (Palo Alto, CA)

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Wray Huestis As a scientist whose intellectual life has been influenced profoundly by an undergraduate “liberal arts education. I am an enthusiastic advocate of diverse humanist education for students regardless of their careergoals. When distribution requirements were dismantled in the academic upheavals of the last decade, students lost an important motive for attempting new and difficult fields of learning. I hold the reactionary view that a university has an obligation to define its educational values and to guide its students accordingly. Your generation of students has been criticized for approaching Stanford as a preprofessional training institute rather than a university. I think that our reluctance to visit our values on you has contributed to this atmosphere, for of course you were not really freed from structure and pressure. Instead, the demands made on you came to be shaped by external and sometimes alien social institutions. This distorted your use of our resources. I hope that in spite of these demands, your years here have brought you enough maturity to sec beyond the bottom line to the more subtle rewards of scholarship. 24

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o I don't have any inspiring things to say to a graduating class. 1 merely want to say that I enjoy teaching physics at the elementary-intermediate levels, an 1 appreciate the interactions I have with undergraduates. I like their responses to the demonstration experiments I do in the lectures. 23

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 A great American thinker, Justice Holmes, once wrote “The chief end of man is to frame general propositions. He meant by this that life can be made meaningful and tolerable only by the kind of thinking that can generalize from experience and provide, by means of these generalizations, a basis for judgement about individuals and about social and national perplexities. But Holmes did not stop there. “My fundamental formula, he wrote, “is that the chief end of man is to frame general propositions and that no general proposition is worth a damn.” This is merely an extreme way of saying that we must always have decent doubt about the products of our ratiocination and a willingness to modify them when new facts or altered circumstances make this necessary. Hegel had made the same point earlier, by arguing that the March of Thought is dependent upon the successive overcoming of useful generalizations by their modifications and that the March of Thought is merely another name for freedom and progress. If the class of 1979 bears this in mind, it will save itself a lot of trouble and serve the nation well. Robert Horn 25