Henderson Daily Dispatch

Intellectual Freedom Is Inseparable From Advance Of Civilization, Dr. Angell

Durham, June 6.—"We shall gain a firmer hold on a saner and more rational kind of liberty exactly in proportion to our ability to exercise trained intelligence in its determination, and our willingness to fight fearlessly for its maintenance," Dr. James Rowland Angell, former president of Yale university, declared this morning in delivering the Duke university commencement address.

Dr. Angell said the enslavement of the university by the collectivist States is extremely portentous and it contains a lesson for us in the United States. "In the last analysis," he said, "it is freedom of thought which gives all the other freedoms their real meaning and worth, and thought is the very essence of the university."

The former Yale president, who is now educational counselor to the National Broadcasting company, devoted his entire address to a discussion of the place of the university in the struggle for freedom. The address was a highlight of the concluding day of Duke's commencement which will come to a close at 5:30 o'clock this afternoon with the awarding of approximately 800 degrees.

Dr. Angell reviewed the revolutionary changes that have come about in the world during the past quarter century. "The changes," he stated, "involve the complete abandonment of many principles which we have considered fundamental and substitution for them of ideals and policies which, should they spread widely, would inevitably menace our mode of life as a nation. And one of the first institutions to suffer emasculation would be the university."

"However blind we may have been to the underlying causes of the present upheaval in Europe, let us not fail to measure frankly, and with such precision as we can command, the conditions which we face in our own country."

"There is an element of the tragic in the situation in that much of the chaos in the contemporary world is a consequence of that free exercise of thought in the universities and elsewhere which we are now so concerned to conserve. The great achievements of physical science are the results of the unfettered exploitation of the experimental method, operating under the direction of untrammeled thought. And the result is our modern technology, which has given us a control over physical nature that has in a generation revolutionized our manner of life and utterly outstripped our ability to match it with social and ethical and economic readjustments. One has only to mention the telephone, the radio, the movie, the automobile, the airplane, to bring to mind the endless list of devices which have transformed the whole pattern of living."

"Much of the technical advance has been benign in the highest degree. We have gained control over many diseases which formerly decimated life and occasioned suffering and sorrow. We have ameliorated innumerable conditions of living and have thus brought happiness to thousands. But in the same moment we have often wrought ill, temporarily when not permanently. Labor saving devices have impoverished hundreds of thousands who have been thrown out of employment. The machinery of warfare has been made so terrible that another great war might quite literally destroy civilization. The methods pursued whereby women and children and innocent non-combatants are brutally slaughtered quite as a matter of course represent a reversion to sheer barbarism. It is unnecessary to elaborate the tale, but it should never be forgotten that the invitation to such malign acts has arisen from the applied fruits of scientific thought imposed upon a world that has not yet achieved the moral and spiritual controls to protect itself from the misery of their misuse."

"We have had a one-sided development of successful creative thinking directed to physical problems because these were easiest to solve. In any case, we need and need desperately, a corresponding development of spiritual and ethical insight and control. Of this circumstance the university must take cognizance, for should we through a complete economic collapse have to face the same conditions of despair which certain of the collectivist states have passed through, we too might find ourselves turning as a last resort to essentially dictatorial control—and with that would go liberty of thought and speech, the university and all the finest values for which it stands, as certainly as night follows day. You cannot effectively control the agricultural, industrial and commercial procedure of a nation without control of all the other aspects of its life. From a practical point of view the absolutist States are quite right in suppressing intellectual liberty in the universities as they have done, for there can be no sabotage of the policies of the State if a totalitarian regime is to work at all, and free-moving thought is always a potential disturber of the peace."

"In the celebrated Bill of Rights of our Federal Constitution (which my own State of Connecticut and your neighbor, Georgia, after one hundred and fifty years of profound deliberation, have recently summoned courage to ratify) there are provisions guaranteeing freedom of speech, of worship, of the press and of peaceful assembly. In Russia, in Germany, in Italy and possibly in Spain, these liberties, with the exception in some of the countries of a measure of religious freedom, either do not exist at all or exist under such restrictions as to render them practically void."

"At times religion has been subjected to ruthless repression, at times it has been pretty well let alone. And why should we worry about all that? Simply for the reason that most powerful nations sponsoring these repressive doctrines are possessed of a proselyting missionary zeal which leads them to abuse and threaten, in season and out, all other types of government and especially democracy. They attempt to bore from within the boundaries of these other governments by planting agents and promoting propaganda to convince the proletariat, and especially the indigent and under-privileged, that their lot would be far more favorable under Nazi or Fascist or Communistic regimes, whichever the advocate happens to favor."

"This enslavement of the university by the collectivist States is extremely portentous and it contains a lesson for us in the United States."

"Behind and beneath the great tangible liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights—liberty of speech, liberty of the press and the rest—lies freedom of thought. This systematic, continuing, creative thought is the sacred province of the university. Much important thinking obviously goes on outside its walls and always must and should. But the university is the institutionalized embodiment of this function of free creative thinking and, as long as it is rigorously protected, no lasting damage to the more practical freedoms we cherish is likely to occur."

"In the last analysis, it is freedom of thought which gives all the other freedoms their real meaning and worth, and thought is the very essence of the university. Other educational institutions are primarily concerned to convey knowledge and to offer technical training of various types—both being extremely necessary and valuable functions which involve intellectual activity of a high order—but the university, when it is true to its obligations, is concerned with the larger universe of thought, with the highest intellectual excellence, with the creation and transmission of dynamic ideas in every field."

"This is a function which is inseparable from any advancing civilization. Indeed, it is a function broadly identical with intellectual integrity, and any impairment of it, whether by external force or internal corrosion, must result in intellectual futility and moral confusion."

"In conclusion, let me say that in our well justified concern at the fate which has overtaken intellectual and political freedom in the totalitarian states abroad, with its ill-concealed threat to our own social order, it is expedient that we weigh thoughtfully the limitations which surround liberty everywhere, and not least among our own people. And this is a function which the university cannot forego. Absolute, irresponsible individual freedom is incompatible with civilization. Some restraint of passion, impulse and desire is a pre-condition of any stable social order and has always been so recognized. Every society imposes the restraints of its own culture upon its members. Puritan New England, established by a people who had crossed stormy seas to face the perils of a rude and unknown continent, exercised the most stringent and unrelenting control over the morally or religiously heterodox. In many American communities today there are acts and words and views which, if indulged, will lead to social ostracism, if nothing worse. All of which is simply to say that we should not be unduly self-complacent about our own type of liberty, as though it suffered from no restrictions, though we cannot be too solicitous to preserve against the encroachment of brute force those liberties we have won. To succeed in such a course means a constant and active struggle for these liberties are always under fire—from prejudice and selfish interest when from nothing worse—and in much of the world abroad from a paranoiac nationalism.

We shall gain a firmer hold on a saner and more rational kind of liberty exactly in proportion to our ability to exercise trained intelligence in its determination, and our willingness to fight fearlessly for its maintenance. In this struggle no institution has a more critical part to play than the university."