Caps Harvard Ceremony : Prince Charles Urges Humanistic Education

Harvard University celebrated its 350th anniversary Thursday amid scholarship and symbolism, with its principal speaker, the Prince of Wales, calling for a renewed emphasis on balanced education.

Prince Charles addressed the 18,000 guests at an impressive convocation under the great elms of Harvard Yard. Speaking both as a future British monarch and as a concerned parent of young children, he called for a stronger Anglo-American alliance and a return to the humanistic tradition in education.

“Perhaps, . . . as parents you may be wondering, as I do on frequent occasions, whether the educational system you are confronted with is the right one to produce the kind of balanced, tolerant, civilized citizens we all hope our children will become,” the heir to the British throne suggested.

Seeking ‘A Good Man’

” . . . We may have forgotten that when all is said and done, a good man, as the Greeks would say, is a nobler work than a good technologist. We should never lose sight of the fact that to avert disaster we have not only to teach men to make things, but also to produce people who have complete moral control over the things they make.”

The celebration at the nation’s oldest university mixed scholarly symposiums with historic pageantry.

Paul Gray, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, summed up what Harvard, his neighbor on the Charles River, has meant for generations of scholars. “We pay homage to one of the world’s great treasures,” he told the audience of alumni, students, guests and faculty seated in the yard under a misty, uncertain sky. “ . . . In a larger sense we celebrate academe, a life of the mind.”

A Parade of Presidents

Benno C. Schmidt Jr., the new president of Yale, joined a parade of university presidents, including David Gardner, president of the University of California, in paying tribute to Harvard, founded 16 years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.

“Harvard teaches the lesson that for a university to be great, it has to be skeptical, challenging,” Schmidt said. “Today you stand against the shortsighted zealots who would make the university a servant to an agenda. The triumph of academic freedom here is the signal achievement we honor.”

“Happy birthday, Harvard,” Gardner wished his colleagues in higher education. “Our nation is deeply in Harvard’s debt.”

Harvard’s convocation--the first of three celebrating its birthday--began with an academic procession and the joyous pealing of church bells. There were prayers, choral selections, orations in Greek, Latin and Hebrew. But it was Prince Charles and the Harvard mystique that were the stars of the celebration. In the Harvard Yard--an architectural museum of historic structures--the names of such students as Cotton Mather, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were evoked.

The Meaning of Harvard

In the young faces of students and the lined faces of alumni, the words of Archibald MacLeish, writing a decade ago in Harvard Magazine, found fresh meaning:

“Not until a man’s own generation comes to its last few survivors, not until the generations of the dead include his own contemporaries, does he see what Harvard is--that long succession of the famous dead who bear the living on their shoulders and conceive the always changing future.”

Harvard President Derek C. Bok touched briefly on the theme of continuity in thanking the other university presidents for their praise.

“For most of us 2036 will come too late,” Bok said, referring to Harvard’s 400th birthday. “We must make good opportunity of the occasion we have.”

Gets Standing Ovation

And make good opportunity the university did. Prince Charles received a standing ovation when he entered the yard and assumed his seat on the stage with its crimson backdrop set against Memorial Church.

The prince, 37, is a graduate of Cambridge University, where many of Harvard’s earliest benefactors, including John Harvard, were educated.

Throughout the long convocation, Charles sat quietly, waiting his turn to speak, a study in patience. Finally, after almost two hours, he addressed those gathered in the yard.

“The suspense of this mammoth occasion has been killing me,” Charles said, smiling, and obviously glad to get started. “You have devised an exquisite torture for the uninitiated. I realize all my character-building education I have endured in the past has prepared me for this great occasion.”

‘Ties That Bind’

“Occasions such as this do help to reemphasize the ties that bind us; the trials and tribulations we have been through together; the arguments and recriminations that from time to time have served to separate us,” he said.

“Well-worn cliches, I know, are inclined to abound when talking about the Anglo-American relationship--special or otherwise--but when all is said and done, the mortar that holds all the bricks together is so often made up from warm personal relationships between individual human beings.

“Such friendships help to withstand the destructive nature of the appallingly simple generalizations by which nations tend to judge each other and through which so much harm can come to the fragile relationships between so many countries.”

Prince Charles said there would be inevitable tensions in the transatlantic alliance because of increasingly different perceptions that Americans and Europeans seem to have about each other’s attitudes and interests.

Sees Important Role

“I am sure many people consider that the United Kingdom is in an ideal geographical and historical position to act as an interpreter and mediator between the United States and Europe, and I can foresee that having, as it were, a foot in both camps, the United Kingdom will have an increasingly important role to play in this area,” he said.

” . . . Above all else,” he warned, “we must beware lest unscrupulous people exploit these areas of misunderstanding and divert our attention from the really important task, which is our common defense of the kind of freedoms we hold so dear: the freedoms for which this noble university so proudly stands and for which many of its sons gave their lives in foreign fields.”

He then spoke as a concerned parent, calling for greater stress on both the study of religion and psychology in colleges.

Necessity for Standards

“Surely it is important that in the headlong rush of mankind to conquer space, to compete with nature, to harness the fragile environment, we do not let our children slip away into a world dominated entirely by sophisticated technology,” he warned, “but rather teach them that to live on this world is no easy matter without standards to live by.”

After the convocation, many of Harvard’s alumni and guests attended a broad range of symposiums. One of the best attended was a seminar headed by Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, Saudi Arabia’s oil minister, who stressed the need for long-term stability between OPEC and non-OPEC nations in the world oil market.

The birthday celebration was marred Thursday evening when chanting anti-apartheid demonstrators forced the cancellation of a black-tie dinner for prestigious alumni. About 150 protesters blocked all four entrances to Memorial Hall, where the dinner had been planned. There were no arrests and Harvard officials had no official comment.