University of Cincinnati - Cincinnatian Yearbook (Cincinnati, OH)

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‘undecided’ ... the idea of a 'calling' that you feel you must have is an old fashioned idea of a Victorian life, when one chose one thing to do for the rest of his life. you've been called the futureless generation — no past, no future, just an immediate present, but in order to have a future you've got to have a past, this is what various minority groups have discovered — they've got to discover their roots, not only for group identity, but for living. i believe that there is a unity of life and a unity of experience and a unity within man that must be connected up. but i think we must somehow connect up skills with ethics, and morality with intelligence, unless we do. we have dr. strangeloves — we have trained idiots, we must connect the feelings and the mind, the heart and the head inauguration address, great expectations november 1971 i hope that you will continue to see. with a clarity and sense of outrage that sometimes unnerves us who are not as young, those areas of the educational experience in need of reform ... and it is the young who constantly remind us that bad education is more than another cause for concern, more than a reason to form expert task forces and compile reports, for the young, bad education is a crime, and they know because they are the victims. i hope that you will scrutinize your own ideas and actions with as much vigor and candor as you have shown for your analysis of american insitutions and society as a whole, the imagination that gave us. for want of another term, an excit- ing counter-culture, was a young imagination, fresh and orig- inal. but good ideas have a way of attracting less imagina- tive imitators, innovation becomes fashion, the counter- culture is as susceptible as any to this phenomenon, one has constantly to be on guard against faddism ... i hope that the youth culture or counter-culture will continue to change, continue to find fresh areas to explore and will not settle simply for a different set of conventions, a new set of false gods. there is no reason students must come in only four sizes. 18.19.20 and 21. there is good reason to believe that many might be better students if they spent two years doing some- thing else. city hall is where the action is. and the city itself is the focus of all major problems that concern the young — crime, con- gestion. racism, alienation, drugs . . . properly, the univer- sity should be. along with city hall, the command post of all the operations to reclaim, renew, rebuild, revitalize the city, more of our student lawyers should be getting their day-to- day experience as helpers in legal aid and for consumer groups, our student architects working as interns on urban renewal, our learning sociologists accompanying case workers to the homes, there are day care centers that need starting and staffing, illiterates that need to be taught, addicts that need encounter therapy, neglected children who need a friendly voice and hand, the city around us is itself a university without walls. we have a great city; it needs us. we need it. there is much that is good about it, there is much in it that needs critical attention, our students — and we are all students, really — should be considering what might be done about the things that are not right and should be learning from the things that are right, i believe we would be wrong to consider these grounds and these buildings only as our university, i suspect this is a time for tearing through walls, not building them, and i speak as much of walls of the mind as I do of walls of stone and ivy. i think this is a time for moving out of the rooms and fluorescent lights for the more penetrating light outside, and when that is impossible, for bringing that outside light in here for the illumination it can offer us. i think this is a time for preserving what we have that is good and for finding out what we need to make ourselves better.

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