[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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