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Pusey Baccalaureate Speech Berates Youth

About 200 members of the Harvard and Radcliffe graduating classes, participating in the first joint Harvard and Radcliffe Baccalaureate ceremony, heard President Pusey indirectly excoriate their generation yesterday for "talk[ing] about love while behaving in a thoroughly unlovely manner."

The group-one-seventh of the class, a substantial increase over last year's Baccalaureate attendance-also heard Radcliffe President Mary I. Bunting praise Pusey and the "youth wave" of recent years.

Pusey told the seniors gathered in Memorial Church for the service that the ceremony was "in a sense a Baccalaureate for me."

'Going Out Together'

"Since we are going out together, I shall try to speak a word of mingled thanksgiving and entreaty both to and with you," he said.

Pusey denounced what he called a tendency of "all too many of us" to "heap abuse on those whose understanding of this world seems to us inadequate or misguided...."

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"In the midst of bitter name-calling, love or even charitable regard for others... would seem rapidly to be vanishing from the earth," he added.

Pusey cited as "specific examples" the fact that "some express rhapsodic concern for the environment, and spread pollution wherever they go. Some march and chant, smash windows, steal and misrepresent, burn automobiles and buildings, tack posters on trees, spray-paint walls and public monuments, break down bushes, trample grass by the roadside."

"Some others sound pollute the atmosphere with blaring music from open windows, amplify their rhetoric in public parks, shriek their calls to action over bull horns and sound trucks within the groves of academe, repetitively spreading private-and usually very mane-doctrines," he said.

'Daily, Hourly'

"Some do this daily, almost hourly, and yet talk about beauty in life and profess concern for justice and loveliness and peace!" he added.

Pusey then denounced the "so-called revolutionaries," whom he called "grievously, even malignantly, deluded."

"If they are to be believed," he said, "the world-unready as yet to be set right by them-is totally cor-rupt, governed, controlled, and manipulated by schemers of whom, I suppose-at least in a minor way-I must be considered one."

He said that he could not see "any significant correspondence between the world which I have experienced and have come to respect and the would they describe."

Pusey told the seniors that "in the midst of widespread hostility, anger and uncertainty, how could we fail to have doubts about the alms and values of what we had assumed we were called to do...?"

But he cautioned them against seeking to blame the troubles of the world on scapegoats. Citing a Biblical passage prophesying that God will separate the sheep from the goats on the day of Judgment, he said, "We sheep; you goats. How quick we are to make the distinction! And how comforting it is! Or is it?"

"How easy it is to rid ourselves of the world's and our own shortcomings by blaming our troubles on someone else!" he said.

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