Pusey Baccalaureate Speech Berates Youth

About 200 members of the Harvard and Radcliffe graduating classes, participating in the first joint Harvard and Radcliffe Baccalaureate ceremony, heard President Pusey indirectly excoriate their generation yesterday for "talk[ing] about love while behaving in a thoroughly unlovely manner."

The group-one-seventh of the class, a substantial increase over last year's Baccalaureate attendance-also heard Radcliffe President Mary I. Bunting praise Pusey and the "youth wave" of recent years.

Pusey told the seniors gathered in Memorial Church for the service that the ceremony was "in a sense a Baccalaureate for me."

'Going Out Together'

"Since we are going out together, I shall try to speak a word of mingled thanksgiving and entreaty both to and with you," he said.

Pusey denounced what he called a tendency of "all too many of us" to "heap abuse on those whose understanding of this world seems to us inadequate or misguided...."

"In the midst of bitter name-calling, love or even charitable regard for others... would seem rapidly to be vanishing from the earth," he added.

Pusey cited as "specific examples" the fact that "some express rhapsodic concern for the environment, and spread pollution wherever they go. Some march and chant, smash windows, steal and misrepresent, burn automobiles and buildings, tack posters on trees, spray-paint walls and public monuments, break down bushes, trample grass by the roadside."

"Some others sound pollute the atmosphere with blaring music from open windows, amplify their rhetoric in public parks, shriek their calls to action over bull horns and sound trucks within the groves of academe, repetitively spreading private-and usually very mane-doctrines," he said.

'Daily, Hourly'

"Some do this daily, almost hourly, and yet talk about beauty in life and profess concern for justice and loveliness and peace!" he added.

Pusey then denounced the "so-called revolutionaries," whom he called "grievously, even malignantly, deluded."

"If they are to be believed," he said, "the world-unready as yet to be set right by them-is totally cor-rupt, governed, controlled, and manipulated by schemers of whom, I suppose-at least in a minor way-I must be considered one."

He said that he could not see "any significant correspondence between the world which I have experienced and have come to respect and the would they describe."

Pusey told the seniors that "in the midst of widespread hostility, anger and uncertainty, how could we fail to have doubts about the alms and values of what we had assumed we were called to do...?"

But he cautioned them against seeking to blame the troubles of the world on scapegoats. Citing a Biblical passage prophesying that God will separate the sheep from the goats on the day of Judgment, he said, "We sheep; you goats. How quick we are to make the distinction! And how comforting it is! Or is it?"

"How easy it is to rid ourselves of the world's and our own shortcomings by blaming our troubles on someone else!" he said.

"Despite the manifold difficulties of our times and the current widespread prevalence of the practice, scapegoating will not do," he warned.

He finished by voicing a wish that members of the graduating class would find "the sense and perception of God."

"The Lord can help if only we will let Him." he said. "May the peace and the strength of God go with you, and me, in our new endeavors."

Bunting began her address by praising "the fine working relationship which has existed between Radcliffe and Harvard and between President Pusey and myself through the last 11 years,"

Speaking of the non-merger scheduled to go into effect next year between Radcliffe and Harvard, she said, "I am the last person to play down the significance of a signed contract, but it is not past or future formal agreements that this joint service symbolizes for me so much as an unusually fine day-by-day working relationship."

She then told the seniors that their generation possessed an "unusually strong horizontal cohesiveness," and that the "youth wave" of recent years "has brought profound changes through-out the nation and those changes that are surviving in this University seem, for the most part, to be good ones."

Bunting then addressed the subject of women's liberation. "Perhaps the cohesiveness of today's youth and its interest in stripping away the artificialities of race and sex and class are opposite sides of the same coin," she said.

"A great deal has been said recently about Harvard's discrimination against women. I have said some of it myself and some of it is true, as the absurdly small number of women with Faculty tenure makes evident," she said. "but this community is further ahead than is generally realized in its basic attitudes toward sex."

She cited the success of the co-ed living program of the last two years as evidence that "the new Harvard-Radcliffe relationship should prosper."

"Women's liberation." she said, "has brought increased self-confidence to college women but the danger today is that it may replace one set of stereo-types with another set that is just as confining."

"Career opportunities and supporting roles should be open to both men and women but not on any rigid formula," she said.