Paul Schroeder’s Convocation Address, March 1968
Why?
(Editor’s Note: This is the text of the spech delivered at the Centennial Convocation Monday by Paul C. Schroeder. Schroeder was a representative of the Educational Reform Committee.)
By PAUL SCHROEDER
Why?
Why did those students walk out, so quietly, from this place? You must be able to see that there is something wrong.
Why are we students forced to walk out on our University, on the society that produced us? Our University is simply not listening to the critical questions of our age. Our educators were schooled before Hiroshima, before Watts and Detroit, before automation and anonymity, before university education was provided for all facets of society, except the Blacks.
Governor Kerner sits with us today. His commission only repeated the obvious: our society is diseased. I and thousands of students question the priorities of a nation that devotes to a senseless war resources badly needed to cure the disease at home.
Students chose me to come today to talk with you. They did not pick me because I follow a party line, or because I am a radical, or because I know the answers. I am simply a student who spent four disappointing years at the University of Illinois.
The University has not fulfilled its responsibility. It never taught me how to ask a question. I was told; I was lectured to. I was asked to accept the answers to
yesterday‘s questions. In some rare instances teachers have looked at me, expecting something new to come out of my head. I failed them , and myself.By the most important standard , the development of critical minds, this University has failed us. It has led many students to really believe the recent industrial recruiting ad which said : “College is a waste of time unless you find a job that turns you on.”
But I am not looking so much for a job as for some guidance in solving for myself the critical questions of my duty to my society and to myself. This is a people ‘s university, and it must fill the needs of Illinois and the nation. Are the technicians produced here really the men with vision who are needed to lead our country?
Formal classroom structures are out of phase with reality, and we students are painfully aware of this. You teachers feel that the questions of your era are important today. It isn‘t so. We students want to be heard, we cry out to you in our need, and we see no one is listening.
The duty to teach the future generation how to question has been neglected for a long time. What has been the result?
The United States suffers from a crisis in criticism. Society is full of people conditioned only to the acceptance of authority. Thoreau told us of the existence of unjust laws, and asked why the government “does not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults?”
This principle was affirmed when American self-righteousness led to the condemnation at Nuremberg of Germans who unquestioningly obeyed the orders of their government.
What is the status of these principles today?
It is clear: The man who questions is a dissenter, a “Nervous Nellie;” the man who obeys is a patriot.
Secondly, we are in a crisis of direction. Technologically we accomplish the possible, regardless of its rationality. We use more and more sense to do the more and more senseless. Who is directing ourprogress?
Someone today must accept personal responsibility to build a more sensible society.
One hero of students today is Regis Debray, a man who lives his ideals. He says: “To judge an intellectual it is not enough to examine his ideas; it is the relation between his ideas and his acts which counts.”
Students must begin to act. We are members of the University, and are capable of analysis of its flaws. We must begin revolutionizing the educational process.
Without our participation the faculty, the administration, and the government will continue to be unable to provide for our needs.
Following this Convocation I invite all students to meet outside the Assembly Hall to walk together to the Union. There we will join with others in trying to decide how to build education for a new century. We want to humanize the University, to introduce critical thought, to restructure the University into units which are vital and personal. We want to learn with our teachers, and not merely from them. The pleasure of creative scholarship must be found.
Students must join together. We can not bring about changes by asking the administration or the faculty to do the job for us. We must build for ourselves. We can create in our own lives the relationships and critical attitudes the University is not providing. Only then have we accepted our responsibility.
Faculty and administrators, join with us, and listen to us. We have needs, and we will begin to satisfy them. The urgency of the moment is the result of past frustrations. We can not wait. The drift from the sterile academy has begun. The gowns of dead tradition are being shed. Let us all work together not so much to liberalize the present order, as to gain our liberation from it.
