John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

The play on his nickname drew applause from the audience.

"I have enough faith in the Founder," he went on, always smiling, "to believe He'll give me an A for effort even if my notion of Him is all wrong. So I'll tell you frankly that my ideas about Commencement are pretty much the same as old Entelechus's. Graduation, I take it, consists in fulfilling one's Assignment on this campus. Since studentdom by definition is composed of rational animals, it's the Assignment of every one of us to have the best mind in the best body he can manage; and the Graduate must be a splendid animal, excellently rational. An All-College halfback, say, with a Ph.D.!"

I gathered from the audience's amusement that the remark was meant wittily.

"Actually, I see the typical Graduate as a man about forty years old — young enough to be vigorous, but old enough to be prudent; he's physically, intellectually, and materially at the head of his class, excellently brought up and educated. I see him as neither cowardly nor foolhardy, but firmly courageous; neither meek nor arrogant, but justly proud; an enjoyer of all the good things on campus in proper measure: food, drink, love, sport, friendship, art — even learning itself. In the same way I see him as generous, witty, tolerant, philanthropic, gentle, cheerful, energetic, fair-minded, public-spirited, sagacious, self-controlled, articulate, and responsible — and neither too much nor too little of any of those things! In his youth he served in some branch of the ROTC; in his middle years he helps administer his college or department; his later life he'll devote to research and publication…" Everyone was chuckling by this time at the obvious correspondence of the image to the Chancellor himself. Rexford flashed his grin. "I haven't decided yet whether it's absolutely necessary for him to have a riot-wound, a political-science diploma, and a pretty wife. Probably not, if he comes from the right quad and has good connections."

More seriously, he said, while it seemed clear to him that men were quite variously endowed with character as well as goods and intelligence, he firmly believed in equality of opportunity. To be Commencèd, then, was in his view a thing somewhat analogous to being talented or comely: each involved an arbitrary native endowment and the good fortune to have that endowment developed, or at least not spoiled, in one's early youth; but each was also capable of being disciplined and cultivated by its possessor or let go to waste, and became thus a matter of responsibility. Surely it was no student's fault that he matriculated into this campus crippled or ugly; yet it was the winner of the race we applauded, the lovely face we turned to admire, and though we might praise a runner despite his limp, or love a woman despite her uncomeliness, at least we never normally valued them because of these defects. Never mind whether things should be thus; thus they were. And if it seemed to any of us that he did wrong not to question further these first principles — on which he had constructed his life as well as his administration — he called to our attention those characters in animated Telerama-cartoons who unwittingly walked off cliffs and strode upon the empty air assured and successful — until they looked down, saw what they stood upon, and fell.

Though I was ignorant of the art-form he alluded to, I saw the point of the image and applauded with the others. In truth I'd felt the limitations of his premises, thanks to Max's tutelage: to one like myself — a goat, a gimp, Chance's ward and creature — it was by no means self-evident that my Assignment was to be an athletic intellectual with a handsome face and a charming disposition; or that if it was, Graduation consisted in fulfilling it; or that if it did, fulfillment lay on the middle path between extremes; or that if it so lay, anyone could mark with authority the middle path. But Lucius Rexford was his own best argument, so immediately engaging that my merely logical objections seemed beside the point. If such as he were not Graduates, I reflected, then to be a Graduate was a less happy fate than to be in his fraternity.

"Now I'll leave the Philosophy Department and get to my own," he said, plainly pleased to have been up to the excursion and equally to have it behind him. "Since WESCAC's AIM will be so much in the news this term, I want to talk about my conception of New Tammany's aims, as I see them — especially in the Quiet Riot, which my critics think we're losing." Here his face turned serious: "I believe in light and order, my friends, and in moderation, discipline, harmony, and compromise. Extremism and disorder I conceive to be the enemies of enlightenment, and I despise them — moderately, of course. Now I happen to think it's West Campus's Assignment, and New Tammany's in particular, to make the University such a place that every student in every one of its quads is free to fulfill his own Assignment to the best of his abilities. In fact all men are brothers (perhaps I should say roommates; I've never had a brother, but I've had plenty of roommates) — fraternity-brothers, let's say — and they should compete like brothers, in light and order, in spirited but friendly rivalry. NTC will become a Graduate School the day we make that possible."

The same analogy, he maintained when we had done applauding, pertained to the several colleges: the competition of East and West Campus for leadership of the University should be like a championship chess-match between brotherly rivals. Indeed it was such a match; what made it fearful, he believed, was not so much the stakes of the game or the awful fact that each side had the weaponry to EAT the other, but the intemperate personality, if he might so put it, of our Student-Unionist brother — the fact that his Answer was not a kind of excellent normalcy and healthy rationality, but something extreme, and counter to student nature: a subordination of means to ends, and of individual Graduations to the Commencement of the Student Body — which was to say, the Student Union. Competing with East Campus was like playing chess with a violent-tempered brother who might shoot you dead to capture your pieces.

To those well-intentioned liberals in the College who advocated "unilateral fasting" (as Max had), Chancellor Rexford objected that it was necessary for a dangerous brother like East Campus to believe that he'd lose in an EATing-match but win in a Quiet Riot, so that he wouldn't be tempted to EAT in desperation, campus suicide, or revenge. "A terrible question, that last one," he remarked, looking up from his prepared text. "Here we are with all this frightful EATing-capacity whose only purpose is to deter Student-Unionist aggression — there's no really workable ANTEATer yet, you know. Now suppose they really should press their EAT-button one day — Founder forbid! In five minutes we'd all be destroyed, whatever we do. So tell me, do we press our button then? Do we EAT them out of sheer revenge? The answer, unhappily, is yes — WESCAC's already AIMed to do it, as you know; otherwise there's no deterrent. But how dreadful it is to have to commit oneself to a policy of revenge, in order not to have to commit the deed!"

Assuming the deterrent to be effective, the Chancellor saw two grounds for optimism about the outcome of the Quiet Riot: if East Campus should grow more prosperous, it might grow more conservative and moderate; rapprochement might become feasible, and real rapprochement and exchange of students could gradually wither the objectionable aspects of Student-Unionism itself. Something of the sort could be seen occurring in Nikolay College even presently. On the other hand, if the economic situation in East Campus should grow continually more desperate over the semesters, and EATing-riot could be deterred, then their whole academic complex must crumble. The strategy, in that extremely dangerous situation, would be to encourage them up to the very last minute to believe that there still remained hope of their winning; but of these two possibilities, the Chancellor frankly preferred the former, as the less immoderate and perilous.