University of Delaware - Blue Hen Yearbook (Newark, DE)

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A well-trained mind is made, so to speak, of all the minds of past ages: only a single mind has been educated during all that time. — Bernard de Fontenelle

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013 GolLfe

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Yo ou, as University students, possess an enviable and challenging oppor- tunity for attainment of the kind of knowledge which can be gained through formalized education. Few of our citizens ever will have such an opportunity, and to the majority of your fellow-citizens who lack that opportunity, you have a deep obligation to make the best possible use of your acquired knowledge. That leads us inevitably to the question: Knowledge for what? Education can ' t provide all the answers to the perplexing questions of our times except insofar as it can provide the method for arriving at them, the courage to find them, and the courage to defend them when found. 1 challenge you — and so does the world challenge you — to not only find the answers, but to defend your findings, and your right to arrive at them. Defend them against those who would distort them for the purpose of furthering sordid ends. To do so will require merely the calm courage to combat fear and despair, to meet problems as they arise, and to have the character to reshape our thinking accordingly. Freedom of inquiry, perhaps the greatest of our modern freedoms, is being threatened from many sides, and therefore must be defended. Only the unrestricted right of inquiry into man ' s current problem can unfetter the human drive for survival through growth which heralds a new age of quest for the world. It is my greatest hope that you as students, and later as graduates, will take your stand against the organized heresy-hunting which would shamelessly inhibit free inquiry were we to permit it to do so. By taking your stand, you will release new human energies so tremendous that they Will put the atomic bomb in its proper place in modern life, not as a destructive force, but as a symbol of the forces of good that can be tapped in all human society. The world ' s position today is akin to that in the early days of the Renais- sance, when medievalism ' s dogmatic bonds were broken and free inquiry swelled as a result. The same human drive for survival through growth is not only called for today, but it is again beginning to show itself. Today we live in the beginning of a new Renaissance. We live in a new age of quest in which, as once before, much of yesterday ' s knowledge becomes today ' s error to shape tomorrow ' s truth. It is up to you to continue that quest in all its numerous shapes and to guide it into a new Renaissance. 12