I have been an intermittent teacher all my life and when, as this year, I return to a university community. I find myself continually drawing comparisons, not comparisons between institutions but comparisons between something far more striking and instructive, comparisons between attitudes, tacit assumptions, the thought-world of students that I have known throughout the decades of my teachings: attitudes that we held in 1917, 1918, 1919 and 1930, attitudes that my students in the University of Chicago held in the '30s, and the attitudes which I see in the students around me this year. What a difference! What a difference!

Now the students today have been told sufficiently that they are living in an age which has variously been called...the Age of Upheaval and the Age of Anxiety...Current graduates have spent their lives then in our view in stormy or in threatening weather. They never knew, as we who were born about the turn of the century, that evenly-running world to which one of our Presidents gave the name of Normalcy.

Adapt to Conditions

When I go about my occupation of drawing comparisons, I become aware that those who live in troubled weather build or discover resources that we in 1920 felt no need to call upon. Like species among the order of the animal kingdom, they developed adaptations. These resources, of course, are not of their manufacture but they find what they need from the currents of thought and literature that are about us all, and it is how they assimilate it that is interesting to me.

I am talking about tacit assumption, basic attitudes of so deep a level that they themselves are often not aware. But what they are aware of is that many of the concepts to which we older persons clung are to them irrelevant, irrelevant and irritating.

The 20th century is shifting its foundations and it is altering its emphases with striking rapidity. The scientists and the poets and the writers have described this new mentality which is moving into place...

Attentive to Modern Men

I teach literature. I teach the consecrated classics but I am attentive also to the masters of modern literature and if I were not so my students would have waked me up to them. About five years ago a professor who was a friend of mine in a university far from here once said to me, "You know, when a student in my classes has written a brilliant paper on the 'Scarlet Letter' or on 'Tom Jones,' I invite him into my office to compliment him and to make his acquaintance, and we talk for a while.

Often, too often, the young man or woman on leaving my office turns and says to me, 'Well, Professor X, of course, we like these books we read for you, but what we are really interested in is T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound.'"

And the professor said to me, 'Now, what's the matter? I spent my life studying great literature. These books are purportedly in the English language, yet I cannot read five pages of them with any pleasure, to say nothing of intelligibly. I have no choice but to think that my most gifted students are either hypocrites, imitative snobs, or else just incult barbarians who don't know beauty and clarity when they see it."

Gulf Between Generations

Well, that is the gulf between the generations and it is up to us to be very attentive to it. Now, freshmen and sophomores stop me on the street and visit me in my rooms to ask me about these very writers. And that shows us that these writers are fulfilling a profound need for those who live in stormy weather. And I find three tacit assumptions within their work that are reflected in the best young 20th century minds, assumptions that he could not have grasped in 1920.

First, the young person today in the light of science sees himself not as one of many hundred thousands, not as one of many millions, but as one of billions. Secondly, a whole new tacit assumption in relation to responsibility. And, thirdly, a realization that the things that separate men from one another are less important than the things that they have in common.

Now, the multiplicity of the human creation. Kierkegaarde, the great Dane, the greatest of the Danes, wrote in his journal in 1844 that he had an anthropologist tell him that $4 billion men and women were living or had lived and died, men and women above the level of the aborigine. He put it in his journal and his reflection follows: "I carried that to an anthropologist friend of mine and he said. 'How childish! How childish! Three and four times that many fully responsible human beings have lived and died.'"

Learned to Count