Tufts University - Jumbo Yearbook (Medford, MA)

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An Israeli Soldier guards a Jordanian Bridge (UPI)

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DEDICATION IT S A MAD MAD MAD MAD WORLD If education is seeking to give a sense of order to history and experience, it is possibly the only remaining hope for a world that is becoming more and more fragmented. Instead of dialogue between opposing factions in this country, there is name calling by the “doves” and stances of right¬ eous indignation by the “hawks”. During the period in which the U. N. has been calling for peace, there have been several major wars and a handful of skirmishes. Vio¬ lence appears to be a watchword, rather than something to be avoided—a fact of life to be accepted and ignored rather than confronted and alleviated. A summer of riots only presages a greater conflict between classes and races. Congress is caught up in a world of bureaucracy and either can not or will not conceive of the reality of rats and pov¬ erty. The rat control bill was almost laughed into oblivion because the problem was not a reality to Congress. The Arab-Israeli conflict continues as a result of a total lack of communication and is an example in miniature of the com¬ munication problem that divides the entire world. Being an Israeli or an Egyptian, a Greek or a Turkish Cypriote, an Ibo or an Hausa, has completely vanquished the ideal of brotherhood. An individual has lost the option of being simply a man, he now must be a member of some partic¬ ular and specific category; color, culture, country, class, ad nauseum. Man’s search for peace and progress can only be viewed as ironic. The irony of his search is revealed in the very language of the 20th Century: a language which demon¬ strates a competition in a futile atmospiiere. It is a “space race,” a “war on poverty,” a “population explosion” and “peace corps”. Such slogans reflect the existence of prob¬ lems and the nature of the methods used to combat these problems: violent action. The problems, along with the catch phrases become meaningless after they are classified and result in inertia. Here is an example of how we have created formulae from abstract, meaningless and there¬ + Jr Sj, . 6 fore useless overstructures. These slogans are useful because they offer a glimpse of what mass society means. Alienation, a favorite concept of today from the Beatles to Ginzburg, results from values embodied in such slogans. Everyone believes the slogans, but no one knows how to put them into action because they are not slogans which contain the means to an end, they are taken as an 6

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A youth burns his draftcard at the Pentagon (UPI) end in themselves. When someone tries to achieve the goals implied in the above catchphrases he discovers that these linguistic exercises do not contain the means to achieve the goals and hence he is alienated from the society which produces such meaningless terminology as a substitute for direct action. Our system is slow, and productive of waste and a new futility arising directly from a sense of alienation. Four astronauts died in the process of another human quest. Man must get off this earth soon or there won’t be any room. Of course, he is liable to blow himself off the earth and this is the con¬ cern that we, “tomorrow’s leaders,” must reach some con¬ clusions about. Tomorrow starts in June, 1968, right now. Peace, that elusive concept, doesn’t seem to be a viable reality. It should be our concern to alter, to revitalize by organization, the fragmented reality that is peace. The question is, How? Are we to allow mass society and its penchant for violence to swallow us up? Is the history of the past four years, our peak learning years, going to make us totally cynical and oblivious, or shall we try to use our education to make sense and order from the chaos of present history? If we can do this, then, perhaps we can deal with the world constructively. Education gives us the tools for thinking. Thought, if it T$ to benefit man must look out¬ wards. It must search for patterns of order, patterns which are based on a concern for man and men. We must search