Buehler In Eulogy Of Babbit As Man Who Searched For Ideas Behind Style

Three orations of a more serious nature than yesterday's Ivy Oration are being delivered at the Commencement Exercises this morning. They are the English Commencement Part by Reginald G. Buchler, a graduate of Yale in 1919, and the traditional Latin Part by Paul L. MacKendrick '34, and another English part by Malcolm A. Hoffman '34.

Mr. Buchler's address, is a tribute to Irying Babbitt, for many years one of the College's most distinguished English professors. After asserting that Mr. Babbitt showed that there was something more to literature than an escape from reality and a vicarious romance, lie goes on to say that "Because this method of studying literature demanded a concentration on the ideas contained therein, he had little use for scholars who concern themselves primarily with sources and textual criticism." This may have caused him to miss the value of some literature, but this belief made him "restore to literary criticism some of the verve and vigor that it had long ceased to possess." His austerity came through his belief that his position could not be otherwise in a world of emotion and sentimentality.

Not only the first year of his administration but his scientific achievement have given President Conant a place in Mr. MacKendrick's Latin address. Tributes follow to the Fellows and Overseers, the Deans, and Baby Deans, the faculty, the Governor, the honorary degree recipients, the alumni, the parents, the girls, and finally to his classmates.

That education should take for its purpose the development of a critical faculty in the student through the use of books is the dominating theme of Mr. Hoffman's speech. "It is the function of education to make the mind more capable of penetrating judgment. If actuality is avoided and so not understood by the academic erudite, the very sphere in which he lives loses significance; his world becomes impotable and unsubstantial."