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While Mahmoud's wife and one-month-old son took his diploma for him in NYC, I was attending my grandson's graduation from University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. The commencement closing address was a quote and a charge from a former U of C President who held that post in the 1930's. George Norlin wrote essays and gave speeches which were critical of the Scopes "monkey" trial. He rebuffed the blandishments of the Ku Klux Klan governor of Colorado, who offered him legislative support in return for firing Jewish and Catholic faculty. After a year in Germany as lecturer on American Civilization at Berlin University in 1933, Norlin spoke and wrote articles warning of the dangers of Nazism and anti-Semitism. Hitler, he told a journalist, was not someone with whom you could go fishing. Unfortunately, few listened to Norlin's warnings. Like Churchill, he had the dubious fate of living just long enough to see his warnings come true.**
If one is to compare and contrast two University Presidents under pressure from the Government nearly a century apart, it could not be clearer that one caved while the other stood tall. When I heard "the charge" which has been read each and every Commencement since Norlin's tenure, I was struck by how relevant that message is today for my grandchildrens' generation. How similar the actions of a state legislature in the hands of the KKK spewing unthinkably, awful demands to expel and fire Jews and Catholics from an American University. How close we are coming to failing the biggest test of our lifetime. Reminders are everywhere in the photos of students on US campuses being abducted without warning. These students, foreigners and citizens alike, might have met a different fate in the 1930's when President George Norlin spoke on behalf of the University:
The Norlin Charge:
"You are now certified to the world at large as alumni of the university. She is your kindly mother and you her cherished sons and daughters.
This exercise denotes not your severance from her, but your union with her. Commencement does not mean, as many wrongly think, the breaking of ties and the beginning of life apart. Rather, it marks your initiation in the fullest sense into the fellowship of the university, as bearers of her torch, as centers of her influence, as promoters of her spirit.
The university is not the campus, not the buildings on the campus, not the faculties, not the students of any one time — not one of these or all of them. The university consists of all who come into and go forth from her halls, who are touched by her influence and who carry on her spirit. Wherever you go, the university goes with you. Wherever you are at work, there is the university at work.
What the university purposes to be, what it must always strive to be, is represented on its seal, which is stamped on your diplomas — a lamp in the hands of youth. If its light shines not in you and from you, how great is its darkness! But if it shines in you today, and in the thousands before you, who can measure its power?
With hope and faith, I welcome you into the fellowship. I bid you farewell only in the sense that I pray you may fare well. You go forth but not from us. We remain but not severed from you. God go with you and be with you and us".
*New York Times May 22, 2025
