Washington College - Pegasus Yearbook (Chestertown, MD)

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LANDON C. BURNS, Ph.D., DEAN OF THE COLLEGE 22

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Dear Class of ' 68: As the time draws near for your graduation, you doubtless face the future with mixed feelings. For many of you the B.A. is but a stepping stone to further academic work; for others it probably will be a terminal degree. But you will all share one thing — this world we live in. And I need hardly tell you that it is not perfect, and that mankind himself bears the chief responsibility for its imperfec- tions. As Matthew Arnold said, We are here on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. The world — your world — desperately needs your light. You are better prepared than most to assume your share of responsibility for pro- viding it. Good luck and Godspeed. Sincerely, AimSj . 6

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As my first year, and your fourth, at Washington College comes to an end, I suspect that there are still many things that you could teach me about the campus and about my job. I have learned a great deal this year — in many ways from you, individually and collectively — so that I feel a special identification with you in the class of 1968. In The Eighth Day, Thornton Wilder speaks of a figure in the arras (he doesn ' t mean Polonius), and of the way in which various kinds of people react to the probability of there being a grand design in our lives and perhaps in the universe. May you who go, and we who remain at Washing- ton College, fall neither into the complacency of being so sure we know what that design is that we stop searching, nor into the nihilism of denying the possibility of our apprehending it. To put the matter another way, when you return in ten, twenty, or fifty years, I hope you will have continued to grow intellectually and spiritually and that you will find that the College has done the same. C UcJ S £ iA vo 23