Commencement?

By the time of Commencement, so many seniors had gone into training that many doubted if there would be a Commencement at all. "This year's Class Day sounds as sad as a dance record at ten in the morning," declared one editorial. "The class of 1917, more than any class which preceded it for half a century, will be scattered to the four winds in the fulfillment of that work which it stands ready to do." Ironically, that class which had felt the effects of President Lowell's attempts to weld undergraduates into a communal body was all over the world at the time when they were to have been completely together.

But the aim of Lowell's program had been to educate students into ideals of public service. Thus their sparce, grave Commencement was oddly logical. For the students who had favored duty to country and universal conscription were far from "gentlemen scholars." William H. Meeker, who had been the President of the CRIMSON during that year, died the following September, 1917, at Pau, France. Like many who were absent at graduation, the Class Poet William Wilcox '17, mailed in his poem from the Newport News aviation camp. There was no Ivy Oration; the Orator, Henry Wentworth, was away in training camp.

Ninety per cent of the Class of 1917 were eventually directly involved in the war, 87 per cent in the armed services. Twenty-nine per cent of these suffered war casualties.

Lead the Fight

President Lowell exhorted the graduates in his Baccalaureate address that year to go out and lead the fight. "Never let your own standards be shaken by the experiences around you," he urged. "Let no man despise thy youth, but be in character older than your men."

The Phi Beta Kappa Society that year was addressed by the President of Amherst, Alexander Meiklejohn. "I am going to put the liberal arts college on trial," he began, and he proceeded to call up each body of a college. The young students, he said, were innocent; they are guilty of anything you accuse them of, but they are not responsible. The teachers are the ones who are responsible--for what he did not say. "It seems clear, terribly clear to me, that teachers are not commanding and dominating the spirits of their boys because they have no purpose which is a proper claim to domination." Meiklejohn's was the voice of the older generation, which blamed itself for the catastrophic state the world appeared to be in. Youth was innocent; to both Lowell and Meiklejohn it was youth's responsibility to function in the wake of the disaster.

Alumni Expected

Among the alumni expected to return for the reunion are:

* Douglas Campbell, the air ace of the First World War. The September following graduation he began to fly in France, and for a year and a half, in the 94th Aero Squadron's 1st Patrol Pursuit Group, he won an outstanding reputation, as well as the Croix de Guerre and admission to the Legion d'Honneur. After 12 years' retirement in Peru as a sugar planter and producer, Campbell worked in military and civilian aviation. Harvard, he writes in the 50-year Class Report, "is a place where men are expected to do things with their lives."

* Brooks Atkinson, now retired from the New York Times.

* James P. Warburg, the well known writer on economic and political affairs, and former Assistant Secretary of Defense.

* Henry B. Cabot, President of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

* Archibald B. Roosevelt, son of Theodore Roosevelt.

* R. Buckminster Fuller, the whiz engineer and architect who plans to change the world. His geodesic dome is the U.S. pavillion at Expo 67. Fuller was one of those seniors who had enlisted before Commencement in the Navy, where he served until 1919. One classmate described Fuller's mind as an "intellectual carnival." Fuller's own account of his life is less pedantic; "Born crosseyed. Abnormally farsighted. Corrected at four. Until then saw only large patterrns. Emphasis persisted after correction. Started young documenting against world developments, formalized as Chronofile 1917. Chronofile disclosed Newton's era world at rest supersded by Einstein's world constant change..." His four-thousand-word life history, written for the fiftieth reunion report, concluded, "Good luck for me I was born crosseyed."