Fresh Phrases

Student protest was far from the only topic on commencement speakers' minds, and for every dose of Nytol administered by a dull orator, someone else delivered No Doz in the form of a fresh phrase or a sprightly idea. Some of the best:

sb ON THE ECONOMY: "Affluent, hell! The average American family just about scrapes by, and every average American here knows it."--Cartoonist Al Capp at Framingham State College.

sb ON COLLEGE TEACHING: "Once a visitor is able to penetrate the rather forbidding facade created by our dignified gowns and colorful hoods, he will find himself surrounded by frightening pockets of indifference, instability, and outright incompetence."--University of Cincinnati Law School Dean Claude R. Sowle at Kendall College.

sb ON COMMUNISM: "There is no need to fight Communism as an economic system--it is failing in Russia; it is failing in China. Marx has been and is a terrible handicap to these nations."--retired Ford Motor Co. Vice President Theodore Yntema at Caltech.

sb ON NEW YORK & OTHER CITIES: "For miles and miles in all directions, ugliness, ugliness, ugliness. I can't go on making little buildings and plopping them about in their ugly surroundings. Please, please, you young generation, change our cities, make beautiful our country."--Architect Philip Johnson at Mount Holyoke College.

sb ON WORLD LAW & POWER: "Law not served by power is an illusion; but power not ruled by law is a menace which our nuclear age cannot afford."--U.N. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg at the Catholic University of America.

sb ON POVERTY: "There are among us the gloomy ones who say that the world will always have its poor. This is much like those who a hundred years ago were sure that there were some who were born to be slaves. Is our vision such that we can look beyond the stars but dare not gaze upon the face of the earth?"--James Nabrit Jr., deputy U.S. representative to the U.N., at St. Lawrence University.

sb ON THE TEACHING OF SCIENCE: "The really big thing that has happened in the past 300 years--and if you don't know this, you are an ignoramus--is that in that time men have learned how to go about understanding the physical world. This is the overpowering fact of modern times--the most important development in 100,000 years of human existence. And the higher-education program that doesn't recognize this is as inadequate as the elementary schools that fail to teach the three Rs."--Caltech President Lee DuBridge at Cornell College, Iowa.

sb ON THE MULTIVERSITY: "When the great questions are asked and society turns to its learned men, there is something lacking in the answer, 'Well it depends upon which one of us you want to ask.' "--Claremont Graduate School President Louis T. Benezet at the University of Colorado.

sb ON INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION: "We may soon know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the problems of five-sixths of the peoples of our planet who are not Americans."--Indiana Congressman John Brademas at Brooklyn College.

sb ON AGGRESSION: "When aggression stalks either a community or the world, resistance to it is both necessary and noble, lest it become all-pervasive. And it is well that it should be checked in its early days before it can acquire the cumulative momentum of success."--Senator Paul Douglas at Amherst.

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