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To Joe Brennan: This is the way I'm mailing it. -- God knows outcome. Jim

A few weeks ago I abruptly resigned from my post as a
college president and walked off the campus feeling good
about my decision. The sequence of events had been very straightforward.
I had found conditions which I believed to be deterimental to
students and unfair to faculty, conditions with which I did not
wish to be identified. When it became clear to me that prompt
reform was impossible, that my governing board's resistance to
change would swallow me up and saddle me with a period of com-
plicity, I checked out. End of problem.

The specifics are really not very interesting. They involve
the control of hazing, the selection of students, the rigor of the
curriculum, and such less important issues as organizational
streamlining and so on. The interesting part has been the split
in the reactions to my resignation among those generally on my side.
The split cuts right down the age line. With a few notable
exceptions, my elders say, "Regrettable. Too bad you couldn't
work out a consensus, a compromise with your governing board."
My younger adult friends sing a different tune: "Way to go! !";
"Stick it in their ear!!"

This is not the first time I've come across this new attitude,
this new spirit in our educated men and women in their 20' and 30's.
I don't write it off as a fallout of the '60's, or as irresponsible
exuberance of youth, or as a manifestation of inexperience. I
think it is born of a new, responsible, awakening of moral
sensitivity. I like it. My first brush with it came
when I was President of the Naval War College. There I
taught a course in moral philosophy and periodically required
each of my students to submit a paper on the resolution of moral