Poem for Commencement Issue of Grinnell Scarlett & Black

 

Can we trust the values we adopted in college?

Jack Doppelt

May 1974

[This talk was given in the lead up to graduation from Grinnell College in May 1974]

Especially as I leave Grinnell College, it becomes important that I evaluate the values and ideals of my immediate contemporaries. 

It becomes important to me because I refuse to permit the impersonality of history to inform me for the first time of the phenomenon I have experienced for the last four years. 

It is important to me because I pledge to prevent my directionless nature from pulling me into a world eventually controlled by the values of my contemporaries without first trying to gauge those values. 

It is important to me because I am not confident that my values, no matter how dedicated I am to them, will endure uncompromised in a world in which my values are less accepted. 

A value system is a difficult concept to grasp. The system ranges from the seemingly trivial idiosyncracies of an individual, such as preferring to read a novel to a historical account to the almost unchallenged tenets of a generation, such as the non-ending quest for material gain.

Many of my contemporaries feel comfortable about the future because they presume that their present values are 1) wiser than those of the previous generation and 2) overbearing enough to win the survival of the fittest values. Ironically, I say comfortable about the future at a time when most of our personal futures are so nebulous that the alumni office has stopped asking where we plan to be a half-year from now because so few of us seem to know. 

And yet, I am not comfortable about the future. 

At first, I was able to explain away my anxiety by rationalizing that I am content with my own sets of values, and even satisfied with the prevailing values of my immediate contemporaries here at Grinnell, but that somewhere outside of Grinnell lie the majority and controlling values of my generation. 

That realization was disillusioning enough, but that I could adapt to a world in which my values were supported by a minority conmunity whose values were equally resolute and passionate. 

However, after a little thought and critical observation, I even have· to question whether my immediate contemporaries, my fellow students, are really dedicated to the values upon which we pride ourselves. My initial assumption was that by virtue of the time and place in which we have been lodged here at Grinnell for the past four years, we have conscientiously cultivated a value system which will transcend Grinnell and remain with us; that we have· systematically confronted the value systems of the previous and present generation, culled out the worthwhile values and rejected the hypocritical ones. 

I have to question whether we have really been truthful to ourselves. It may be, that what we have, in fact, done is to come to Grinnell and assumed the values of an isolated, informal college community merely as a defense mechanism to endure here. Might it not be possible that we have not really examined and sharpened our value systems, but only adapted them to the value system endemic to a college environment.

A college community is no more tolerant of unorthodox values than whatever setting we are about to enter. We have spent the last four years adapting to the values of blue jeans, premarital sex, anti-war, anti­-television, liberal politics and respect for the position of women, but I don't see us leaving Grinnell as intent on preserving worthwhile values as I see us willing to adapt to the preordained values enveloping us.

Let me briefly introduce some superficial evidence which has led me to register my doubts about our dedication to our own value system. Over the past four years, students have compromised a host of their professed values when they return home for a vacation and when parents visit campus. Students have cut their hair, stored their blue jeans, switched off the stereo, turned on the television, hidden the marijuana, subjugated their political beliefs, forgotten to mention the companionship of their unregistered roommate, and even guarded their religious convictions from parents and friends. I realize that there is quite a difference between protecting our values while home for a few months and totally abandoning them once we leave Grinnell. Yet I fear that society is a lot less tolerant of aberrant values than parents and friend are. 

It is painful to see that the vegetarians in college have, since leaving, conformed to the practicalities of societal interaction and turn to eating meat.

I had assumed that the females, wearing lipstick and eyeshadow after graduation wear the same ones who wouldn't think of wearing it in college, not just because no one else did but because they decided that it was unnecessary and representative of misguided societal values.

As for the ever-churning drive toward material wealth, it seemed that we had successfully stepped off the treadmill. We would no longer except the title "businessman" or "lawyer" unless there were something creditable supporting the position. Yet, how can I justify the law school and med school dash? I look back and instead of perceiving students re-evaluating the values of American society, I see students adjusting to a college setting in which money plays a reduced role and in which Societal status is equalized I also see students postponing purely material pursuits, not rejecting them.

It is very painful for me to think that many of the values upon which my entire college experience has been predicated were merely the childish tantrums of a phase we were all given the opportunity to go through and get over.

Although it bothers me to realize that but for the past four years we have not really been judging the values of society, but simply adapting, almost biologically to whatever values we have to face, it deeply troubles me that we were about to retain whichever values seem convenient and abandon those that just don't fit into the mold.

It would also mean that all those patronizing statements about how "when I was your age, I had those same kind of naïve ideals" might have more than a grain of fatalistic truth in them. That would especially hurt because it would mean that everyone knew we would succumb, except us.

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