University of Arkansas Commencement Address, 1968

As old as the doubts we harbor and as young as the ideals we sustain. Yet those of you who are young bring a special authority and influence to our counsels. It is your adamant insistence on real answers ---your disdain and defiance of history's instruction when it seems incorrect. There will be peace -- and the certainty of it is clearer and closer today -- partly because of the unequivocating insistence by American youth that poverty and prejudice, which contribute to civil disorder; are wrong and can be eliminated. It is already evident, too, that in the struggle of the individual to regain his appointed place in the society, youth will be, again, the protagonist of the higher value -- insisting that only the individual matters -- that the unfair dominance of any institution over the individual is wrong -- that nothing to the contrary is to be accepted as a reality just because history let it first become a habit. It is indeed this deeper conflict which seems to me to underlie a great deal of the restlessness of the campuses -- and in this country -- today. For this comes at a time when peace is closer -- poverty and prejudice lesser -- material progress greater -- than ever before. But the companion fact is that the individual today feels himself a smaller and smaller part of all that is going on. Sitting in larger and larger classes in ever bigger universities -- he feels a loss of personal identity as a student. His work -- when he leaves school -- seems limited to a smaller and smaller part of an increasingly specialized or automated operation. -2