Antidote for Cynicism

In greeting hordes of freshmen this fall, most college presidents have dusted off the standard speech on the rights of dissenters v. the rights of the community. No. such platitudes for Yale President Kingman Brewster Jr. In his welcoming address to Yale's 1,250 freshmen last week, the Ivy League's least beleaguered president faced up to the root causes of student unrest with candor and conviction.

As Brewster sees it, the key threat on campus today is cynicism--and understandably so. "It is hard not to be cynical when so much of politics seems dominated by string-pulling interest groups. The rare alignment of the lobbyist with the public interest seems more the exceptional coincidence than the rule. It is not easy to keep faith in Adam Smith's 'unseen hand' in an economy so largely dominated by conglomerate giants. With mass communications concentrated in a few hands, the ancient faith in the competition of ideas in the free marketplace seems like a hollow echo of a much simpler day.

"It is not easy to sustain the American ideal that success is primarily related to effort, when so many in the cities are excluded from effective political and economic power.

"Even for the privileged, the feeling of social claustrophobia is tightened by a system of conscription which makes the campus a draft haven and which distorts career choices in an effort to avoid service in a war nobody wants to fight. The deep misgivings about the war, compounded by the immorality of using an inequitable draft to fight it, generate a bitter skepticism of the values which motivate all established authority."

Brewster dramatized the point with an anecdote about "a student rebel friend" who, just before unleashing a torrent of rhetorical castigation, leaned over and whispered; "What I'm about to say isn't directed against you personally, Mr. Brewster; we know that you have to do and say the things you do because of your position." Recalled Brewster: "The sweetness of the charity did not offset the bitterness of the insult."

By contrast, the Yale president praised two idealists--New York Mayor John Lindsay and Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin--as alumni who have been "quite unabashed, wholly unashamed of their high purpose." He urged his audience to affirm five propositions that give the lie to the cynic: "We know that happiness is more than material wellbeing, that conscience is more than simple fear, that love is more than sex, that moral authority is more than political power, and that community is more than organization." As for himself, Brewster added, he will continue to draw on what is perhaps the most important capacity a college president can have: an abundant reservoir of wishful thinking.

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