The Great Allergy

In the flowery world of commencement orators ("Commencement is not an end, but a beginning"), there are always dragons to be slain. Last week was no exception. The orators slew Senator McCarthy dozens of times; they jabbed at the Atom, slashed at the Soviet, spoke well of freedom--academic and otherwise. But at Pennsylvania State College, one man took on a dragon that seemed to him more dangerous than all the rest. Said Clarence Manion, lawyer and former dean of Notre Dame's College of Law:

"My criticism of modern education is that outside of the physical and mathematical sciences, it tends to become more and more cowardly in its finding of facts and less and less courageous in the exploitation of such facts as it finds. Whereas the physical scientist boldly builds his breathtaking, ever-broadening structures upon precisely exact measurements extending far within the ten-thousandth of an inch, our social and political scientists tend constantly to broaden their basic concepts out of all semblance to necessary foundational depth ... In its progressively and ever more involved search for truth, socalled, the mind of our typical social scientist is now so wide open that it is utterly incapable of holding and containing anything for sure or certain."

Change Without Notice. "This allergy to absolutes has recently spread from the campus to the courts. It scars the modern mind with but one conviction, namely, that every and any conviction is always subject to change without notice. As pure intellectual exercise, this hypothetical school of political science is entirely defensible. For the sake of pure political hypothesis, it makes little difference whether man is a creature of God or the hind end of a happenstance. But for the sake of American freedom in its life or death struggle with Communism, it makes all the difference in the world. For it so happens that the foundational, supporting concepts of the structure of American freedom are very deeply and dogmatically laid . . .

"The United States is not a mere matter of population and geography. It is the incarnation of political convictions. It is the one political structure in the world's history that was built consciously and deliberately from precise, mathematically calculated specifications on a vacant lot cleared for that purpose in 1776. The mathematical certainties are described in the specifications as 'self-evident truths.' They describe the certainty of an Almighty God, the certainty of human equality before God and therefore before the law of the land, the certainty of the divine origin of human rights and duties, and last but not least, the certainty that civil government is merely man's appointed agent for the protection of God's gifts. These are not mere matters of faith; on the contrary, they are stated as matters of fact."

Servant of Men. "These specifications raise no question about the nature of man or the purpose of government ... The specifications settle these questions firmly ... It is the fact of God and God-given rights that debases American government into a servant rather than a master of men. It is the fact about the true equality of men that clashes critically with the 'equalitarianism' of the challenging Marxists ... The equality of men is before God and the law. Beyond that point each man is personally, naturally, and eternally distinguished from every other . . .

"These are the supporting facts of American life which are threatened by the agnosticism of prevailing political sciences. These convictions are vital to the success of our defense program . . . The cruel contest between freedom and slavery thus moves from the battlefield into the classroom. The call is not merely for the revival of faith, but for the resurrection of fact."

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