PAGE EIGHTEEN I'M MICHIGAN DAILY THURSDAY, SEPTEMM , 1"S PAGE EIGHTEEN TIlE MIChIGAN DAILY - THURSDAY. SEPTEdBER 20. 1936 Harold Taylor, President of Sarah Lawrence '-5 (Editor's Note: The following speech was g-ven by Harold Tay- lor, president of Sarah Lawrence College, as the keynote address of the Ninth Annual National Stu- dent Association Congress. It was delivered to an audience of more than a thousand students at the University of Chicago, Aug. 21. With the exception of introduc- tory remarks and comments about NSA, the speech is reprinted in its entirety.) By HAROLD TAYLOR What kind of private instrue tion can teach young men and women to be free, to be indepen- dent, to want to think and act fo themselves? In a way, it is a question of teaching people to find them- selves, to establish their own iden- tity, an identity which is their's and no one else's; it is a question of teaching people to know what they believe, about themselves and their world, about other people, to know who they are to know what there is in life, what they want from life and what they want to give to it. All this is involved in the struggle for per- sonal independence. I would like to suggest that this is what colleges and universities are for, to enable the young to find a personal identity, to help them to achieve a personal inde- pendence. I would like to suggest that this is what students are in college to do, and that if they ar not doing that, they are failing to achieve a true education. We hear a lot about the stu- dent's responsibility. You hav probably heard that most colleges are bent on teaching you to be responsible citizens - and ar counting on you to help things along in future generations. Responsibility . BUT WHAT does it mean to be a student? Who is he respon- sible to, and for what? To be a student is an honorable and highly respected position to occupy. In Burma, in Indonesia, in Ceylon, in Africa, to be a stu- dent is to accept the responsibility for being a leader of your coun- try, of being educated to bring your gifts to the country's service - at a time when education has not been able to catch up with the incredible demands for educated r men and women who can build new countries. iBut is the student in America f a very different situation? Is there not a shortage of educated andinformed leadership in our s country? Some would say yes, 1 such a shortageexists, particu- tlarly in the political party which s is not the onea person is in. Is , the American student not respon- sible, quite as much as the Bur- t mese student, for putting his edu- t cation at the service of his coun- s try, and not merely putting it at - the service of a commercial career? s Have we so many teachers that s we do not need an infusion of a new, enthusiastic educational P leaders recruited from among - yourselves, ready to undertake the t excitement of reforming American 1 education? e It needs reform as you may a have noticed. And education is only reformed and invigorated by - students and teachers who are e vigorous, active, lively and inter- s ested. We cannot promise our e American youth that after a uni- e versity education they will go s straight into a post with the Cab- inet or a United Nations delega- tion. But we can promise them that their presence as informed and interested citizens, aware of political and social issues, is wanted in the government, in ed- ucation, in politics, in the law, in business and everywhere else. In most other countries the stu- dent does not go to a universtiy merely to increase his chances of a higher income in later years. He goes to develop those talents which in the view of the Univer- sity are needed for the continua- tion of his country's culture. In this country, at this point in its material success and prosperity, we hear constantly of the values of college.in raising your income. It works out, I believe, to around $100,000 more for a B.A. degree than without one. But any of you people who have it on your mind should remember not to go on to the Ph.D. or any higher degree. The income falls sharply after the B.A. Emphasis on the personal ad- vantages of a college education has distracted many people from thinking of the true values of higher learning and the true mis- sion of the student. A student is not a professional athlete, although many Univer- sities, and a large segment of the watching public act as if he were. He is not a little politician or junior senator looking for angles, getting a good record, getting con- tacts, and starting his business career in his sophomore year. He is not an amateur promoter, a glad-hander, embryo Rotarian, cafe society leader, quiz kid, or man-about-town. He may be some of these or all of these for a little while before he grows up, but none of it defines him as a student. A student is a person who is learning to fulfill his powers and to find ways of using them in the service of mankind. The student at his best has a purity of motive which is the mark of his true function. He wants to know the truth, to know what is good, not merely for his own or for other peoples' advantage, but in order to achieve his maturity as a stu- dent. He is granted the priceless advantage of looking openly at the world to discover its secrets. He is given the rare privilege of withholding his assent to the claims the world makes for its own particular brand of truth, and he can decide what he thinks on the basis of the evidence, not on the basis of pressure, because this is in fact what it means to be a student, and what the world asks the student to be. For a little time before he be- gins a life which will gradually involve him in more and more commitment to tasks and duties which are not central to the con- cern with truth and ideals, the student lives in a world of dis- covery and of possibility where nothing is yet completely settled, where everything, including the achievement of greatness, is still actively possible. * * * Excitement, Hope . . I URGE you to make the most of this time, for it may never come again. If your life as a stu- dent does not possess the excite- ment, the innocence and the hope of the true enquirer, you may never again experience a time for thoughtful and sensitive attention to the big issues of human life. If you do possess that quality in your life as a student, you can be- sure it will remain wtih you as a way of thinking and acting for the rest of your days. But your difficulty is that not everyone thinks of your student- hood in these terms. More often the student in America is con- sidered as manpower to be trained to carry out society's wishes, as "youth" to be educated according to a set pattern of ideas. One of the more annoying ways in .which this is often stated is to compare the number of graduates in tech- nical fields now being produced in the Soviet Union with the num- ber being produced in the United States. The assumption is that higher education in the United States has the same ideals and values as that of the Soviet Union and that if only we turn out another 30,000 technical ex- perts a year to keep up with the U.S.S.R., our country's future will be secure. Will it make us more secure or less secure if we accept the Soviet view of education as a combina- tion of propaganda and tech- nique? Will it make us more or less secure to give all our high sal- aries and material rewards to technical experts, with no one left either to teach them or to discover new forms .of knowledge, new values, new works of art or the new ideas, which alone make a civilization worth preserving? I don't think that security lies in this direction, and I think it is not only a foolish mistake but an un-American activity to think of students this way. Anonymous Units . . NOR DO I think that educators themselves are paying enough at- tention to students. This is odd, I admit, since. students are the reason for having colleges and universities. In all the plans made for the reform of American high- er education in the post-war, period, the discussion has been about subjects to be required,, tests to be administered, rules to be applied; buildings to be raised, money to be found, numbers of qualified experts to be produced. Certainly these things must be discussed. But it is a dreadful mis- take to think of students as anonymous units of mental stuff, to be put into classes, lectured.at, examined, and graded as if they were products in a manufacturing plant, to be turned out in.thous- ands for the maintenance of Am- erican prosperity and military supremacy. No. wonder people are arguing for using television in higher edu- cation. If higher education mere- ly consists in feeding information to students and grading them on how they manage to hand it back, it would be much better to save the money now being spent to build campuses and just pipe in the information to every happy student listener in his own living room or bar. Among other things, it would certainly help with the parking problem, and it would make obso- lete the work of the campus po- liceman. You would then see the logical outcome of the present system. The faculty, unhampered by the presence of students,,would then be able to do their research, sign government contracts, .or if they preferred it, fill the profes- sional journals with more and more technical articles; or even publish fat books on higher edu- cation. As General Grant once said about Venice , it would be a great town if they would just drain it. This is what comes of not think- ing about students. I asked, a while ago, who is the student re- sponsible to, and what is he re- sponsible for? I am ready to try some answers. * . * Buildings, ,Books ... THE STUDENT is responsible for his own education. Unless he takes that responsibility, he will not become educated. A college can provide the buildings, the teachers, the books and the equipment, but these are the environment of higher learning, not the learning itself. The student must bring to his teachers an interest in learn- ing, note the learning itself. The student must bring to his teachers an interest in learning, a respect for what the teacher can give him, a readiness to learn and a will to become educated. Without that, the teacher does all the work and the student learns merely to accomodate himself to the system by whatever means he can devise. The student Is also responsible for other students and, for the quality of the life they lead to- gether. The student is in fact a young adult, should be treated like one. If he is given the respon- sibility for planning and organiz- ing the life of the campus, if he is made responsible to the Uni- versity for the government of stu- dent affairs and for the develop- ment of educational and social policy, he responds. Collen- students are in fact adults, many of them are married, some have children, some have held or are holding jobs, some have written stories, poems, nov- els, newspaper articles, others have travelled throughout the world. They belong to ail inter- national community of youthful adults, a community whose com- mon characteristic is the fact that all its members are involved in the process of learning to find their place in the world in which they live. The student is of course respon- sible to his University. But beyond his University, he is also respon- sible for carrying out his obliga- tions to the world of scholarship and human learning. Therefore he is responsible for educatnal planning. When I said a moment ago that the educators are not paying enough attention to the students, I meant that they are not paying the right kind of at- tention. I believe that students should have a central role in the devel- opment of educational policy. They are the ones who know at first hand the qualities and val- ues in the education they are re- ceiving, and they have at their disposal a gold-mine of informa- tion to be used for theImprove- ment of American higher educa- tion. But too often in the struc- ture of the University community, there is no place where their in- formed judgments about educa- tional questions can be put to work in a creative way. For the most part they are ex- cluded from curriculum planning, and excluded from the formation of social and educational policy, when we have in our hands the evidence of the National Student See DISCUSSES, Page 19 1 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN 1956-57 LECTURE COURSE 'w ... I 1 in!h REQU E5 Now in it's Second Century of Bringing the World's Greatest Speakers to Ann Arbor DR. RALPH J. BUNCHE CLEMENT AT Under Secretary of the United Naions i BE Prime Minister of Great Briai Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize TEBOr Leader of British Labor Party HAT IS HAPPENING IN THE MIDDLE EASTT"r . "THE WORLD Theatrical presentation with scenes from OCTOBER 10 "The Wayward Bus," "Of Mice and Men," etc. JANUARY: And a complete production of "BURNING BRIGHT" OCTOBER 24 Starring Four Brilliant Stars _ _ _ ENTERTAINMENT DRAMA le uiaCmd Rt e Editor LISS GRENFEL iT HE PLEASURE" INFORMATIVE AND .LITERATURE FT ETMERT ICET NOE B ER 1ieN FEil aser usicl-e Unied Revue a} rerEdCto rSYITER"TUR TML TOISCONSTANCE SENNETT ROBERT STRAUSS- ..I << rBAER PRIEST a__ GEN A usurer of the United States ~>~Frmer Coin W/oman on the Washington Scene ^________________ ________________ Author JR MONETARY FRANK McHUGH TOD ANDREWS "LET'S SYSTEM"/ LO( 7 TLEE n, 1945-51 , 1935-55 w r MBARA WARD ant journalist and Speaker, of England's "Economist" UNITY OF THE :REE WORLD"' EBRUARY 19 SCENE" A ;I J} S IV T re Prominent' "O . WEDEMEYER (Rel.) manding General, China Theatre of Famous Report on Korea TAKE ANOTHER 4K AT CHINA" I , I 0 0