Colleges: Far More than Grades

Brainy college freshmen under the impression that their next four years would be spent as assembly-line workers in ivy-covered fact factories got a sharp jolt last week. "You demand facts, facts, facts," Guest Speaker A. L. Sachar, president of Brandeis, told the entering class at the University of Illinois. What they need just as much, he insisted, is values to serve "in a world where the harsh voice of unreason cries down the generous passions," and "the elasticity of your minds will be a shield." On campuses across the U.S., college presidents were playing up the value of values.

Yale President Kingman Brewster Jr. said that although freshmen were picked for their intellectual ability, their "moral capacity" had also been taken into account. Success at Kenyon, said Dean Bruce Haywood, ultimately depends on a student's "individual taste and moral judgment." "The collection of knowledge is only the starting point," echoed Curtis Tarr, president of Lawrence University at Appleton, Wis. At Pomona College, one of the six associated Claremont Colleges of California, President E. Wilson Lyons also greeted freshmen with a call to use knowledge for moral ends.

The most fervent plea for a "moral quest" came from Princeton's Robert F. Cohen. He told bright Tiger cubs that if they expected "only to accumulate knowledge, I would advise you to begin negotiations with another institution where you can attach yourself to a pipeline of inanimate learning and become full, like a storage tank, sealed by a diploma and otherwise useless."