[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 58 (Thursday, May 12, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: May 12, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                       IN TRIBUTE TO ROLAND DILLE

  Mr. DURENBERGER. Mr. President, on June 30, 1994 the longest serving 
president in the history of Moorhead State University, Roland Dille, 
will retire after 26 years of unprecedented guidance and leadership to 
the academic community. His loss will not only be felt by those 
students who currently attend MSU, but by all of us who value his 
commitment to education.
  Mr. President, to fully appreciate the challenges Roland Dille has 
faced during his presidency, we must first remember the tenor of the 
Nation when he assumed leadership at MSU. No American who lived through 
it can forget the year 1968, which brought a divided nation the 
assassinations of both Senator Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, 
Jr., the Tet Offensive, and mounting tensions on college campuses 
across the country, including Moorhead State.
  As the symbol of authority, President Dille was not immune to rising 
hostility. Professors were advising students on draft dodging; William 
Kunstler spoke and urged the students to burn the campus down; the 
student newspaper bitterly opposed the Vietnam war; a student fired a 
gun on campus, intensifying racial tensions.
  Dille, meanwhile, received death threats on the lives of his children 
and black paint was splattered on his car. He had to shut down the 
student newspaper. During a moratorium on campus following the Kent 
State shooting, he told State police--poised to stop an expected 
demonstration--to stay off campus. Mr. President, the first few years 
of his tenure probably would have been enough to drive the best of us 
into early retirement.
  But from this tumultuous beginning, Roland Dille has been, and 
remains, a friend of the student. He is what I would term ``a 
visionary'' when assessing the overall educational needs of the 
university and the community. During his tenure, Moorhead State's 
enrollment has more than doubled, five new buildings have been added, 
the Livingston Lord Library has been expanded and improved, and land 
has been acquired for future expansion. Most importantly, opportunities 
for the mind have been nurtured and enhanced. When asked what he'd like 
to be remembered for, Dille said: ``Getting students to accept and 
seriously support the liberal arts as an essential background for 
working, voting, living people. We're entering a period when the Nation 
is looking at our education system for answers. It wants a more 
rigorous education where students are made to challenge their 
potential. The understanding is that if we're going through life as 
half people, it's probably because we're half educated.''
  It is no secret that Roland Dille grew up in Dassel, MN, an 
experience that he has used in many of his speeches and writings. Dille 
has said that in Dassel, one can find a microcosm of the history of 
civilization. Indeed, the friends and relatives and neighbors he grew 
up with have provided a wealth of portraits used by this man of 
humanities.
  Roland's work in behalf of the humanities have taken him across the 
country and around the globe. He completed a 6-year term on the 
National Council for the Humanities. He is past chairman of the 
American Association of State Colleges and Universities. In 1989, he 
was named 1 of 100 of the most effective college presidents in the 
United States. Because of who he is, and his dedication to the 
humanities, the Minnesota Humanities Commission established the Roland 
Dille Aware for Distinguished Service. And in his honor, Moorhead State 
University has named the Roland Dille Center for the Arts.
  Mr. President, Roland Dille may be retiring next month, but his 
influence and the innumerable lives he has touched will continue to be 
felt.
  I hope my colleagues will join me in wishing Roland Dille all the 
best by saying thank you for all he has given over the past 26 years to 
Moorhead State University, to Dassel, MN, and to all who value the 
illumination of the human spirit through education.
  For the Record, Mr. President, I would like to insert a speech Roland 
Dille delivered to a joint meeting of the Minnesota House and Senate 
Committees on Education.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  There being no objection, the remarks were ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                 To Minnesota Education Committee, 1994

       What this farewell will have to do is to call to mind the 
     long years of a fruitful alliance between the legislature and 
     education.
       It is worth recalling that fruitfulness in a time that is, 
     more than most, conducive to skepticism about the capacity 
     and will of education to serve the public weal.
       To that, let me say in a career that began in 1949 when I 
     went from the University of Minnesota to teach at Dassel High 
     School, that I have worked more or less closely with a 
     thousand teachers and that I would be hard-pressed to name a 
     dozen who were not totally committed to furthering the 
     learning of their students.
       If it is important not to lose faith in teachers, it is 
     even more important not to lose faith in young people. And 
     that means accepting the endless complexities of human 
     beings.
       It is not surprising that in a time of real economic stress 
     we turn to our universities to ask what they are doing to 
     send people out into an economy that badly needs skills and 
     intelligence.
       But, unless with the collapse of Communism, America is to 
     be the chief advocate for meanly defining human beings as 
     counters in an economic system, we must ask of our colleges 
     that they provide not just advanced training but education, 
     an education that addresses the fullness of possibilities, 
     that does not deny to its students intellectual, spiritual, 
     and imaginative challenges and growth.
       And let us not forget that there are very practical reasons 
     for such emphasis. While reasoning skills are developed in 
     courses in accounting, marketing and business administration, 
     creative thinking, the stricter demands of logic, the habit 
     of decision making, and the gathering and analysis of 
     information are more likely to develop in several of the 
     disciplines traditionally associated with the liberal arts. 
     As will, indeed, the ability of communicate precisely and 
     clearly, to understand a diverse society, to deal with the 
     complexities of international transactions.
       In short, even a college narrowly conceived as an 
     instrument of economic development will fail in its purposes 
     if it provides an education narrowly conceived. We may 
     survive in the hands of technicians; we will not flourish.
       However much we depend upon colleges to ensure our national 
     prosperity, their further purpose is to ensure our national 
     health. We are, I do not need to remind you, a democracy, and 
     it is never out of place to refer to Thomas Jefferson, who 
     saw, better than anyone else, what a democracy could be and 
     who placed his hopes for the future in the existence of an 
     educated citizenry. It is not too harsh to say that as a 
     citizenry we seem to lack the capacity and clearly lack the 
     will to confront our major problems. No one in Washington 
     believes, I hope, that if we do not talk about our problems 
     they will go away, but most of our leaders seem to believe 
     that if we do not talk about them they will not affect the 
     next election. Such talk as there is consists of the 
     reiteration of tired formulas and ancient myths. And where is 
     the citizenry, unangered and unconcerned, the half, or fewer, 
     who are willing to participate in an election, ready to make 
     their fateful decisions on the basis of slogans and 
     soundbites?
       Can education provide a countervailing force to the 
     thoughtlessness and self indulgence of mass culture? Well, a 
     college is, or should be, committed to a counter-culture, a 
     minority culture, if you will, in opposition to mass culture, 
     a mass culture not developed out of human experience and 
     human hopes, as folk culture once developed, but artificially 
     created to titillate, it sometimes seems, our meanest 
     desires, and to assure the triumph, for it is sponsored, 
     after all, by people selling things, of an over-riding 
     materialism.
       The culture of our colleges, in its history books, in its 
     novels taught, in its political science classes, traces, 
     indeed celebrates, the struggle to find order in chaos, the 
     affirmation of human dignity, the sacrifices of heroes, the 
     creation and change of institutions devoted to the public 
     good. It celebrates the great ideas that have moved us, 
     however slowly, forward, and the great works that have 
     inspired us, moved us, given us serenity. It testifies to the 
     good that follows the choice of reason over impulse, of the 
     long view to the short view. It makes us skeptics and gives 
     us faith. It helps us to recognize our common humanity even 
     as it teaches us to take joy in our diversity. Perhaps it 
     makes us, finally, by awakening in us a sense of 
     possibilities, good citizens.
       This is what a college can do. It is what teachers have 
     done.
       Education is to be valued because it redeems the young. 
     Those who pass our laws, who establish our institutions and 
     support and direct them, have a special responsibility to the 
     young. That responsibility goes back beyond memory, beyond 
     records. Not to accept that responsibility is to condemn the 
     young to early death, to wasted lives, to bleak existence. No 
     matter how hard we try, we can never assure that all young 
     people can be all that they can be. But we can try.
       Let me read a poem. It is by W. H. Auden, an English poet 
     who lived long in America. It is entitled ``The Unknown 
     Citizen'' (to JB/07/M/378 This Marble Monument Is Erected by 
     the State).Unknown, because unnoticed. The Average Joe, if 
     you will. The JB/07/M/378 suggest impersonality. He is only a 
     number. Think of him as a productive contributor to economic 
     development.

     He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
     One against whom there was no official complaint,
     And all the reports on his conduct agree
     That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a 
           saint,
     For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
     Except for the War till the day he retired
     He worked in a factory and never got fired
     But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors, Inc.
     Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
     For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
     (our report on his Union shows it was sound)
     And our Social Psychology workers found
     That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink
     The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
     And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every 
           way.
     Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully 
           insured,
     And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it 
           cured.
     Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
     He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment 
           plan
     And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
     A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
     Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
     That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
     When there was peace, he was for peace, when there was war, 
           he went.
     He was married and added five children to the population.
     Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of 
           his generation.
     And our teachers report that he never interfered with their 
           education.
     Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
     Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

       Is the question absurd? Perhaps in the context of our 
     society. Nothing seems to be wrong because this is a man who 
     had neither expectations nor definitions of real freedom or 
     true happiness. He lives a half life.
       A college would be foolish to promise happiness, but it can 
     teach a student to seek fulfillment. As for freedom, that is 
     what a college is all about. To be free of unexamined and 
     second-hand ideas, to have the capacity to make decisions, to 
     be delivered from the tyranny of impulse, to have some power 
     over one's future, to be able to shape a thought and to put 
     it into words, to know who you are--in all of this reside 
     freedom.
       And how about fulfillment, so much more worthy a goal than 
     success? To have a mind well-furnished with knowledge, and to 
     have the discipline to reflect on that knowledge and the will 
     to act on your conclusions; to know the pleasures of the 
     imagination and the joys of the spirit--these are not the 
     fruits of mass culture, with its mindless engagement with 
     sex, its snickering embrace of violence, its enthronement of 
     triviality. They are the fruits of study of broad reading, of 
     the serious conversation of the classroom.
       Poetry and glittering generalities, you will say. But every 
     worthwhile generality glitters a bit. I would, however, 
     insist that somewhere in all of this, truth lies. For human 
     beings are creatures of infinite capacity, That capacity 
     shrinks under the impact of a mass culture, and a society 
     uncertain of its values and natural inclinations. That is 
     surely unarguable. There are those who regard that shrunken 
     capacity as no great loss. Those who care, who are troubled 
     by the prospect of the young being lost in a twilight world 
     of ignorance, have nothing to offer except education.
       This legislature has always believed in education. I have 
     deeply valued my opportunities to discuss education with you, 
     in all those sessions, going back to 1967.
       I leave you now, tearful, as you can see, with gratitude, 
     and filled with hope.
       And, of course, with a few more lines of poetry, the last 
     lines of a poem by Tennyson, an old man's poem, and thus 
     appropriate.

     Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though
     We are not now that strength which in old days
     Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
     One equal temper of heroic hearts,
     Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
     To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

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