Tuesday, June 14, 1966 Summer Session Kansan
Page 9
KU Chancellor W. Clarke Wescoe drew on the Surveyor I moon landing for metaphors and on "My Fair Lady" for a musical wrap-up in his brief commencement talk.
'66 Commencement is history Surveyor 1, Henry Higgins KU growth Varieties of love analyzed are pegs for chancellor keynoted in baccalaureate address
He addressed more than 15,000 persons in Memorial Stadium in KU's 94th annual commencement exercises.
Announcing that he intended to give the seniors "a farewell never attempted before and probably never to be repeated," the chancellor intoned these words as the KU Concert Band struck up "I Could Have Danced All Night":
I could have talked all night,
I could have talked all night
Een even worse a bore;
I could have spread my wings
And said a thousand things
I'd never said before;
"I'll never know
What made me so
Retiring,
Why all at once
I sensed your plight;
I only know when he
Began to present me
I could have talked, talked,
talked all night."
MOMENTS EARLIER Wescoe had taken a poke at commencement oratory:
"In all of our Centennial celebration we neglected to point up perhaps the noblest tradition of this university—a century-long prohibition of invited commencement speakers.
"By that thoughtful prohibition we have resisted the movement toward obligated oratory and have protected an army of alumni in their finest hour from being plastered with pious platitudes. We intend to maintain this prohibition."
Wescoe explained that he has no "stop week" in which to prepare his speech and prefers to wait until the last minute. "I prefer to have these comments be timely. For the second consecutive year, NASA has cooperated to the point of providing me with a suitable launch for my remarks. In this, KU's Centennial year, that administration has crammed into our final week two breathtaking accomplishments, a double space spectacular. . ."
"THOSE SUCCESSFUL achievements symbolize for us again the power of educated man, the triumph of the disciplined intellect. They characterize, also, the urgency and the vitality of the days in which we are privileged to live.
"You have seen students move from what appeared to be a relatively passive acceptance of what was presented to an active striving to determine, in greater measure, their own destinies."
Wescoe said the students also have seen higher education move from the wings to center stage. "If once the university was a contemplative retreat for scholars, it never again will be." He cited government and industry's dependence on higher education.
"Your years in the University have been almost entirely years of ferment," Wescoe told the graduates. "In your time you have seen your own generation change from the silent, even apathetic, one to the one now generally called the generation of dissent.
GOV. WILLIAM H. Avery and Arthur H. Cromb of Mission Hills, chairman of the Board of Regents, briefly greeted the graduating class. The 12-month total of graduates provided 2,990 names for the Commencement program, 1,843 of whom finished their course work this month.
Five alumni received citations for distinguished service; Dr. Forrest C. (Phog) Allen, former KU basketball coach; Merrill W. Haas, Houston, vice president of Humble Oil & Refining Co.; Charles H. Haines II, New York City architect; Dr. Elmer Staats, Washington, D.C., comptroller general of the U.S., and Dr. Clyde W. Tombaugh, Las Cruces, N.M., astrogeophysicist who discovered the planet Pluto.
Chair named in honor of Learned
Establishment of the Edmund P. Learned professorship in business at the University of Kansas has been announced.
The professorship brings to 13 the number of endowed chairs for KU faculty. It results from a $100,000 gift by Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Learned of Bartlesville, Okla., and it honors his brother, the Charles E. Wilson professor of business policy in the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration.
The Learned professor will receive the income from the $100,000 endowment in addition to the regular state salary for a teacher of his distinction.
A few years ago Mr. and Mrs.
Learned gave $100,000 to endow the Albert P. Learned professorship in engineering, honoring another brother who has had a distinguished career as a consulting engineer in Kansas City, Mo.
The three Learned brothers, natives of Lawrence, are the only family in which three members have received the University-Alumni Association citation for distinguished service to mankind.
While promoting wheat marketing programs in South America with headquarters at Lima, Peru, Parkinson became famous in Peru and Chile for his work in establishing school lunch programs for poverty-stricken areas and for his resettling 30 families from the slums of Lima to a model community 400 miles away.
A scholarship fund memorializing the late Harlan S. Parkinson has been created with the Kansas University Endowment Association by his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Parkinson of Scott City. The endowment will assist students of music in the School of Fine Arts.
Fundcreated in memory of Parkinson
KU growth keynoted in Wescoe talk
A 1955 graduate, Harlan Parkinson was South American director of the Great Plains Wheat Association when he died in Peru in 1964, at the age of 30.
He was decorated in 1962 by the Peruvian government with the Knight of Corrian Order, highest award that nation confers upon a foreigner. The following year the Chilean government awarded him the Bernado O'Higgina Grand Order of Merit
Chancellor W. Clarke Wescoe saw growth all about him as he assessed the "state of the university" for more than 1,500 alumni, graduating seniors and friends in the Kansas Union ballroom.
Growth in recognition. Quoting from stories about KU in newspapers from New York to Los Angeles and in Time and Newsweek magazines, he said "few people in the nation have not had the opportunity to learn that the university is 100 years old and that it has been celebrating its Centennial."
In his Centennial Commencement message, the chancellor cited:
Growth in endowed professorships. —Wescoe announced for the first time a $100,000 gift for the creation of the Edmund P. Learned Professorship of Business. (See related story elsewhere.)
GROWTH IN PRIVATE support.—Wesco noted that the $18.6-million goal established this year for KU's three-year Program for Progress has reached the $3.1-million mark, including the largest single gift ever made to KU, the $2 million Spencer Research Library. Wesco also announced for the first time an anonymous unrestricted gift of $500,000 to the drive.
Growth in research and graduate training...Grants totalling more than $10.2 million in this category have been received the past year. Wescoe said.
Growth in physical facilities.—Wescoe said $5.4 million in halls and buildings have been completed the past year, another $7.5-million worth are under construction and $10.2-million worth are soon to be begun.
GROWTH IN STUDENT achievement.—Wescoe noted that 18 seniors the past year won Woodrow Wilson fellowships, bringing to 106 the number of KU Woodrow Wilson Fellows in the past six years, and that Stephen Munzer of Salina became KU's sixth Rhodes Scholar in eight years.
The chancellor emphasized that hundreds of students participated in the Centennial Concert and Lecture Series in Kansas, and said it is hoped that such tours will become an annual event.
Growth in student aids.—Last year, 3,750 students received 4,713 loans totaling $2.1 million, Wescoe said, and a record 1,300 students received scholarships or grant-in-aid assistance totaling $565,000.
GROWTH IN FACULTY achievement. — The chancellor awarded the $1,000 annual H. Bernerd Fink Award for outstanding classroom teaching to Dennis Quinn, associate professor of English. Wescoe reported that the university had its greatest harvest of Guggenheim fellows the past year (Klaus Berger, art history; John Greene, history of science; Charles Micheener, Watkins professor of entomology).
"We have more to work with, our position in society is more central, and our services are more essential. High school seniors look to us in larger numbers than we ever have been able to accommodate in the past. "The state and its citizens look to us not only to educate their children but to bring to Kansas the benefits of the age of research."
Love for oneself, for one's fellow man, for a Platonic Idea and for God was the philosophy offered by Dr. Clifford P. Osborne in KU baccalaureate services.
Speaking on love as a moral value, Dr. Osborne became the first KU faculty member to deliver the baccalaureate address. He will retire this year after 28 years in the philosophy department.
"Love for oneself is not necessarily morally reprehensible or smacking of egoism in the vulgar sense," Dr. Osborne said. "Self love depends of the kind of self that is loved, which in turn depends of the kind of objects that the self seeks."
THIS TAKES PLANNING, and a good rule here is that "a present lesser good is not to be preferred to a future greater good," the speaker said.
Benevolence, which characterizes love for one's fellow man, is blind if impulsive, just as indiscriminate charity has attendant evils, he continued, adding that
rational benevolence is the maximum general good.
"Perhaps the rule in this case should be I ought not to prefer my own lesser good to the greater good of another," Dr. Osborne said.
Plato's idea of love as a desire to realize the idea is moral progress—reaching out for a goal which is on a higher moral level than the immediate environment, he said.
"But love has a more adequate object than Plato's highest metaphysical abstraction, and that object is love," Dr. Osborne said.
"LOVE FOR GOD and love for neighbors is the inner motive of the heart that leads to righteousness," he said. "Moral conduct seen as a duty toward a personal God, whom one loves, has a superior force over the highest metaphysical abstraction of Plato.
"This is the great advantage that religious ethics have over philosophical ethics." Dr. Osborne observed.