LAST SPEECH BY GORDON BJORK AS LINFIELD COLLEGE PRESIDENT AT
UNIVERSITY OF OREGON (UO) IN EUGENE ON MARCH 8, 1974
Address related to
Dr. Bjork being a finalist for presidency of the UO
(Originally posted at Wildcatville July 21, 2015)
Gordon Bjork’s last speech as
Linfield president was delivered on the University of Oregon (UO) campus in Eugene,
Ore., Friday March 8, 1974, during the UO Winter Graduation Convocation. The
speech was titled “1974-1984: the Challenge of Change”
While serving as
Linfield College president Bjork tried to land a president’s job at another
college or university, Vince Jacobs said in December 2016.
(Jacobs joined the
Linfield history faculty in 1967. He retired from full time teaching at the
college in 2002 and taught online courses for the college until 2014. During
his tenure at Linfield he served as chair of the Faculty Executive Council.)
According to Jacobs,
Bjork’s speech at the UO was related to Bjork being a finalist for the UO
presidency. It was a “bizarre coincidence,” said Jacobs, that the speech came
the day after the Linfield “no confidence” vote. Because of that vote Bjork
withdrew as a UO presidential candidate, Jacobs said.
Thanks to University
of Oregon Libraries Special Collections & University Archives, below is
text of speech notes Bjork prepared and used and text of a news release about
the speech issued by the University of Oregon News Bureau. While these are
Bjork’s speech notes, they do not necessarily reflect
exactly what Bjork said in his address.
===Speech notes used by Gordon C. Bjork, President, Linfield
College in his University of Oregon Winter Graduation Convocation address on
March 8, 1974===
1984 is a decade away. When George Orwell wrote his horrific
predictions of social change forty years ago, his readers did not have to
regard his prophesies with any sense of imminence. The observations I will
share with you today about 1984 are not Orwellian in their scope, but their
imminence comes from an explanation and extrapolation of current economic and
demographic trends. We do not need to acquiesce in Orwell’s predictions for our
society in 1984. We can choose otherwise. I want to suggest to you, however,
that there are certain basic forces operative in our world which will make 1984
much different from 1974. We need to understand the nature of those forces and
their implications on our future.
It is becoming commonplace among educated people to remark that we
live in a world of accelerating change – not just change, but accelerating
change. I want to suggest that we are living during one of those periods of
discontinuity that historians use to mark the passage of one age of
civilization to another. The changes do not have their source in the
interaction of man with his environment.
There are two very powerful factors presently at work in American
(and to lesser degrees in other parts of the industrially developed world)
which will make 1984 very different from today. Those forces are economic and
demographic change. The first factor which will effect a powerful change on the
world as we know it is the end of rapid economic growth – the end of a
century’s long process of increase in the standard of living. We have
experienced a long and spectacular increase in the standard of living in our
society, basically by the application of technology to the exploitation of natural
resources. We have mined the earth’s crust to produce food and energy and
consumed the capital provided us by nature. There is accumulating evidence that
this process cannot be sustained at anything like the present rate, let alone
increased rates, without the rapid exhaustion of resources. To the old saw,
“You never had it so good,” I would add that we are never going to have it so
good again, if “goodness” is measured by the conspicuous consumption of
material goods.
We are presently facing an energy crisis and a food shortage. Some
people regard these as temporary phenomena, and they might be classified as
temporary
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insofar as they are caused by temporary differential shifts in
supply and demand. In a larger sense, however, they are not temporary
situations capable of easy long range solution.
The snow pack in the Cascades and the Rockies may be heavier this
winter and increase the capacity of the Bonneville power system. The Alaska
pipeline may be built, and new refineries may be put “on-line.” We may have
bumper harvests. But there are limits to our capacity to exploit the earth’s
resources and the application of technology to extend those limits will be
increasingly costly in terms of the capital and labor which must be expended to
produce an equivalent quantity of thermal units, kilowatts, and calories. The
limits I am speaking of will not be broached by turning out the lights, driving
VWs, or eating organic vegetables.
Some alterations in consumption patterns are fairly obvious. In
1984 we are not likely to be consuming as much beef or bacon, because the
process of converting plant protein to animal protein will have become too
expensive. We will have forsaken our gas-glugging automotive juggernauts for
mass transportation and personal transportation systems less consumptive in
their construction and operation of fossil fuels. We will be well along in the
process of abandoning our half-acre, split level ranch houses in suburbia for
vertical construction of house room more economical in its use of land,
materials, and energy. We may warm ourselves with warmer clothes rather than by
heating the spaces we inhabit.
The other implications for our economy caus3ed by shortages of
energy are not so obvious. You might be interested to reflect on the economic
and technological consequences of a shortage of wood fuel in 18th Century
England. As the price of wood for space heaving and iron smelting rose, it
became profitable to mine coal. But coal mining necessitated heavy capital
investments in the mines and the development of pumps to drain the mines and
steam engines to power the pumps and railroad and canal systems to transport
the coal, and so forth. The technological consequences of the shortage of wood
for fuel were a process later called by economic historians “the Industrial
Revolution.” An important element of the Industrial Revolution was the
harnessing of fossil fuels to the production of human needs. The exhaustion of
a traditional fuel source triggered enormous economic and social consequences.
We are going to have to develop alternative sources of power to
replace fossil fuels. We are going to have to develop and implement alternative
technologies to produce and use energy. I have no doubts about our scientific
and technology capacity to develop alternatives. We will have an energy
revolution. We should all be aware, however, that the alternative technologies,
at least in the short run, are going to be capital intensive. The most
important economic consequence of the energy shortage and the decreasing use of
fossil fuels is the demand for capital investment which will result. In
economists’ parlance, the ratio of capital to output and capital to labor will
have to increase. For the capital output ratio to increase, the ratio of saving
to income must increase. For the savings ratio to increase, the consumption ratio
must decrease.
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In 1974 we are already into a different sort of economic situation
than we have known for many years. We face both unemployment and inflation
because of difficulties in producing adequate quantities of some raw materials
and finished goods. Some of these problems are traceable to natural scarcity,
and some of them are due to an inadequate level of capital formation over the
last several decades.
One of the reasons we have “never had it so good” has been that we
have been consuming capital … natural capital in the form of oil, coal, soil
fertility, and forests. When that capital is gone, we must return to
consumption levels equal to natural production rates within a stable ecosystem.
A second reason we have “had it so good” is that in the last two
decades we have consumed too much and invested too little in productive
capital. In part, that is attributable to a set of social and political
priorities which has spent large portions of our national treasure on foreign
wars, expensive weaponry, domestic boondoggling and other expenditures which
have interfered with out long-run ability to provide adequate food, housing,
education, medical care, and culture to our population.
There has been much criticism of corporate profits in recent
months. May I say, as an economist, that if corporate profits after taxes are
the primary source of investment funds for the building of capital in our
society, they have been inadequate to maintain, much less increase, the capital
output ratio. I am not suggesting necessarily that corporate profits must
increase. I am suggesting that some social means of generating an adequate
level of real capital formation will be to be instituted to avoided serious
declines in production by 1984.
My comments about saving and investment may sound “old fashioned,”
but they are going to become new fashioned in the years ahead if we choose to
maintain our material well being in the longer run. I predict that most
Americans will consume fewer kilowatts and calories and natural resources in
1984 than in 1974.
What are the social and political implications of our changing
economic situation? They are cloudy and complex, but let me make some
predictions. The decrease in the rate of economic growth and the increase in
the saving rate necessary to create alternative energy technologies are going
to decrease consumption for some nations and groups within our nation.
The available historical and comparative evidence on the
distribution of personal income indicates that economic growth has been
accomplished by equalization of personal incomes. Indeed, it has been the
promise of growth which has been used both to justify and explain economic
inequality. The promise of improvement has helped the poor to accept less in
the short run in expectation of more in the long run. What happens in a steady
state economy? I believe we will see greater equality. But we should all
realize that greater inequality in the future will not be achieved by raising
the rate of growth in income of the poor while allowing the
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consumption by the well-to-do to increase more slowly. It will
come about as some people become absolutely less wealthy to increase the income
of the poor. That threatens social confrontation in our society. The rapid
inflation we are experiencing is the first chapter in the story of increased
social tension which will result from the pressure of rising expectations on
natural limits to economic growth. Its political consequences in England at
present are an example of what we may expect in our society in the next ten
years.
Private property in land and natural resources has been on
enormous importance in America for several centuries. It has been a spur to
economic development. It has also been a primary determinant of income
inequality. I predict that we will see substantial changes in the private
control of land and natural resources.
I predict that we will soon see, in Oregon, legislation which
prevents the conversion of privately owned agricultural land to purposes other
than agricultural production and tax policies which encourage and enforce its
productive use. I don’t predict that the nationalization of land and natural
resources is a near-term possibility, but I do believe that tax, zone and use
regulations will substantially lessen the present perquisites of private
ownership before 1984.
The corporation and the labor union are both socially created and
sanctioned entities appropriate to an economic system where capital formation
and size are social objectives. I believe we have reached a situation in which
the power of a small number of individuals to privately control production and
distribution in accordance with their great market power is nearing an end.
While the unbridled power of corporations and labor unions may
have been a necessary counterpart of rapid economic growth, they are not a
necessary part of the difficult adjustments which will be necessary in the
no-growth or slow-growth economy of the future. We are becoming increasingly
reluctant about allowing social objectives in production in income distribution
to be determined by General Motors, Standard Oil, the Teamsters Union, or the
American Medical Association. And there will be fewer economic reasons to allow
them their present powers in the future. The decline in economic growth and the
increasing needs for capital are going to lead to some substantial changes in
our major economic institutions – corporations and labor unions.
A second fundamental force of equally far-reaching social
consequences of the character of our society in 1984 is demographic change.
Those of you graduating today have witnessed more rapid demographic change than
perhaps any members of any society have ever experienced. You were part of an
expansion in the birthrate, and you have contributed to a decline in the birthrate
which is unparalleled in the history of western man for its rapidity. I want to
explore two of the many far-reaching social consequences of demographic change.
The first is in social roles for women. The roles of women and the
structure of the family in the United States over the past two centuries have
been primarily determined by rapid population growth. As long as the population
of a sparsely settled land presented unlimited opportunities for expansion, the
role of women and the role of the family developers of an increased labor force
shaped a whole set of cultural attitudes. Women had primary responsibility for
the production and
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rearing of “human capital” and it was an all-important and
all-encompassing social role. The pre-1945 decline in the birthrate can be
explained as a national response to changes in the economic costs and benefits
to the family of having children. The bulge in the birthrate after World War II
was accompanied by a temporary return to earlier social attitudes and values
appropriate to the role of women in society. It was the complex sociological
and economic characteristics of this role which affected the social and
economic opportunities open to women in the 1950’s and earlier ‘60’s. The
“Women’s Liberation Movement” has been a rational and predictable response to
the rapid decline in the birthrate in the 1960’s. Its intensity can be
explained in terms of the rapidity with which the birthrate had declined. Low
birth rates in the 1970’s will lead to complete social and economic equality
for women before 1984.
While I dislike the concept of unisex – “vive la difference” – let us hope that this rejection
of unisex is neither male nor female chauvinism, but part of a positive
affirmation of pluralism and respect for all those aspects of individual
identity which give a civilized society its strength and creativity.
I can think of no institution in our society which has been
changed more substantially by rapid demographic change over the last two
decades than the university. The “baby boom” which followed World War II
created a tremendous demand for primary teachers, then secondary school teachers,
then university professors. But the demand for elementary and secondary school
teachers also created a demand for professors to educate those teachers.
And the demand for university professors created a demand for
university teachers to educate the increase in university teachers.
Universities had two other forces of similar magnitude hit them concurrently.
There was a rapid increase in the percentage of the population enrolling in
universities, and after 1958 there was a crash program on the part of the
Federal Government to produce more scientists and engineers for
government-supported programs in basic research and the space program. The
growth of universities caused them to divert much of their attention to
educating more professors. There is an equivalent phenomenon in the theory of
economic growth called the “acceleration principle” – growth generates growth.
(I should add that we are now experiencing a related phenomenon – deceleration
leads to decline.)
Rapid growth in the 1960’s did other things to universities than
increase their size. I wish to dwell only on the effect of the demand for
professors on their values and objectives. Behind all of the rhetoric of the
past two decades about higher education, there was one rationale for
universities which the public, and consequently, their legislators really
“bought.” And that was that higher education was necessary because it provided
“trained manpower” for the needs of a rapidly growing society. I believe that
is one important function of higher education, but it is only one part of the
reason why universities are so important in our society. One of the effects of
the demand for professors and the public rhetoric about training manpower is
that the general education functions of universities – particularly for
undergraduates – were ignored.
Oh, yes, students were still required to meet distribution
requirements, and there was public rhetoric about the importance of breath and
exposure to the “liberal
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arts.” But in many of the academic disciplines traditionally
involved in cultivating the liberal arts, the emphasis has shifted to “manpower
training.” I speak from experience when I say that in the economics department
we tried to teach undergraduates the modes of analysis and the workings of the
economic system. But we also fashioned our course requirements about what was
needed for graduate school. And our priorities and values were such that we
really measured our success in how many of our graduates got jobs at other
universities – particularly other universities which were also known for their
research and graduate education.
These values and priorities are pervasive in most of the best
“senior” institutions in our country, and they are even perversely adopted by
many faculty in community colleges who absorbed them from their teachers and
try to fashion their students and their institutions in the same mold. It
happens in every discipline. In my own college, I continually hear academic
requirements and academic programs discussed in terms of “what the students
need to get into graduate school.” Demographic change and the rhetoric of
manpower training have conspired to distort our educational objectives.
Universities don’t just train people for jobs, they educated people for living.
I would like to make a distinction between “educating persons” and
“training manpower.” The term “educate” comes from a Latin verb “educo” meaning
“to lead out.” Education is the process of leading a person out of his
ignorance into an understanding of self and the world. Many members of
universities pay lip service to the liberal arts, but when they speak of them,
they often are referring to a vaguely defined set of subjects in the arts and
humanities. Another way of considering the liberal arts and their place in our
society and our educational institutions is to consider them to be a set of
skills and attitudes which reflect civility and maturity in our society. I am
referring to the habits of disciplined analysis of material and reasoned
exposition of ideas, a life style which has form, pattern, and patterns of
behavior from the student of art, literature, music, and history. I believe
they can also be acquired from the student of accounting, economics, physics,
or forestry. What is important to the acquisition of the liberal arts by the
leader is not what academic disciplines are studied, but how they are studied.
The measure of a person’s acquisition of the liberal arts is his ability to
live creatively and responsibly in a world whose spatial and temporal
dimensions are wide and complex. Those of you receiving degrees today have
acquired, hopefully, some skill in the “liberal arts” as well as professional
competence in particular disciplines.
One of the results of the rapid expansion of all levels of
education, but particularly universities, over the past two decades has been an
overemphasis on “training manpower” to the exclusion of educating persons.
To a large degree the demand for university teachers in recent
years has led university professors, particularly, alas, in the humanities and
social sciences
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to see their role as the reproduction of another generation of
university teachers. The university has trained manpower for the university
rather than educating persons to live liberated and artful lives in a complex
world. The distortion in objectives has partially been a consequence of the
effects of demographic change in the labor market requirements of our society.
I profoundly hope that one of the beneficial consequences of the depression in
university employment will be a reemphasis on the part of universities of their
role in educating persons as well as training manpower. One does not study
history, music, or physics only to become an historian, musician, or physicist.
These, or any other discipline, should contribute to an understanding and
enjoyment of living in an age of discontinuity.
What consequence do economic and demographic change have for
universities between 1974 and 1984? Their role as reproducers of another
generation of academics will continue to decrease in importance. Hopefully, they
will help us solve the problems of our age. The development of alternative
energy sources and techniques will provide plenty of challenge for our
scientists and engineers. The strains on the social fabric created by rapid
economic and demographic change pose enormous challenges for our social
scientists. I personally see in the necessity for ending the materialistic life
styles of the Sixties, the possibilities for a renaissance in arts and
humanities in the 1970’s. Let us amuse ourselves with music, art, and drama,
rather than jet vacations, gas guzzling automobiles and Saturday strolls in the
asphalt deserts and plastic islands of our great suburban shopping centers.
The percentage of 18 to 22-year-olds enrolled in universities is
declining and the number of 18 to 22-year-olds will decrease before 1984. I
believe that one of the most important thrusts of institutions of higher
education in the coming years will be the continuing education of mature
adults. I believe that education will increasingly come to the regarded as a
lifelong process not to be confined to and concentrated on 18 to 22-years-olds.
There is great anxiety, frustration and conflict in our society.
Part of this, I am sure, is an unavoidable consequence of rapid change. But I
am sure a great deal of it could be avoided if the American people had a
greater understanding of the scope and nature of our problems and the
development and functioning of our institutions. Anxiety arises from fear of
the unknown. Frustration comes from inability to secure desired responses from
the framework in which one lives. And conflict arises from a lack of consensus
about means and ends.
Reference is often made to the “generation gap” as a unique
phenomenon of our time. I believe it is a unique phenomenon arising from the
perception of youth that the problems and solutions of the past are not those
of tomorrow and from a failure on the part of the older generation to see that
they did not inherit their institutions as eternal verities engraved in stone.
Our institutions of higher education should be furnishing the
cohesion which prevents the fabric of our society from being rent by a
generation gap. In the past, universities have supposedly functioned in the
difficult and ambiguous role of both conservative upholders of continuity in
social institutions and liberal critics of the
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status quo. It is my personal observation that our universities
have not fulfilled that ambiguous role very well in recent years, and I would
assign to education as a whole, and particularly higher education, considerable
responsibility for the generally inadequate level of understanding of our
problems. The avoidance of an Orwellian 1984 will depend on the success of our
universities in giving leadership in the next decade.
There is a long tradition in literature of men finding meaning and
purpose and relief from the absurdities of civilization in the wilderness. Locke
and Rousseau both speculated on political arrangements in the absence of
civilization.
Jefferson saw a simple agrarian society as a bulwark of democracy.
Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, Kerouac and Kesey have all celebrated in different
ways that revelations and relevance of the wilderness to the human condition.
You may remember that in 1984 Orwell’s protagonist finally escapes the
unbearable regimentation and circumscription of his society by escaping to the
wilderness.
Last September I went with a group of faculty and students from my
college for a six-day sojourn in the Sisters’ Wilderness area in Central
Oregon. During one day when my friends were out pitting themselves against the
mountain, I stayed behind in the silence of a beautiful alpine meadow. It was
my first experience of walking solitude in many years. I listened to the
burbling of a brook and felt the brush of an alpine wind cooled by the Collier
glacier, warmed by a thin September sun and scented by the noble firs of the
mountainside. I remembered Thoreau’s phrase, “In wilderness, the preservation
of the world.”
The meaning of that experience for our preservation in the midst
of the changes which will take place between 1974 and 1984 came to me in that
solitude. It was a realization of the continuity of the natural world and the
discontinuities of the human condition. I came down from the mountain with a
different perspective. In the discontinuities of the next decade, let us work
within the constraints of our natural world to change that which we can and
accept that which we can’t. If we keep our perspective, Orwell’s prophesies
never need be fulfilled. And if you have found the ramblings of a
philosophizing economist hard to take, remember the word of one sage critic of
our dismal science: “In economics the problems never change, only the answers.”
END OF PAGE EIGHT/END OF SPEECH NOTES
CITATION:
Gordon C. Bjork,
“1974-1984: The Challenge of Change,” March 8, 1974, in “Commencement
Speeches,” University Archives alphabetical subject files, UA Ref 1, Box 5,
Special Collections & University Archives, University of Oregon Libraries,
Eugene, Oregon.
==News Release from University of Oregon News Bureau
Eugene Oregon
March 8, 1974 sh
Commencement address
“The avoidance of an Orwellian 1984 will depend on the success of
our universities in giving leadership in the next decade,” said Linfield
College President Gordon C. Bjork in a commencement address to a standing
room-only audience at the University of Oregon Friday (March 8).
A total of 777 candidates were presented for degrees at the UO’s
winter term commencement exercises. Some 1200 persons attended the event.
Bjork predicted that as a result of economic and demographic
change, the role of universities “as reproducers of another generation of
academics” will continue to decrease in importance. “Hopefully, they will help
us solve the problems of our age,” he said.
“I believe that one of the most important thrusts of institutions
of higher education in the coming years will be the continuing education of
mature adults,” stated the Linfield president.
The thesis of Bjork’s remarks was “we are living during one of
those periods of discontinuity that historians use the mark the passage from
one age of civilization to another.”
He predicted a decline in economic growth and increasing needs for
capital, which he said would lead to “substantial changes in our major economic
institutions – corporations and labor unions.”
Bjork commented on “a decline in the birthrate which is
unparalleled in the history of western men for its rapidity” and predicted that
low birth rates in the 1970’s will lead to “complete social and economic
equality of women before 1984.”
News Bureau, 170 Susan Campbell Hall, University of Oregon 97403 (503)
686-3134
CITATION:
“News Release:
Commencement address”, March 8, 1974, in “Commencement Speeches,” University
Archives alphabetical subject files, UA Ref 1, Box 5, Special Collections &
University Archives, University of Oregon Libraries, Eugene, Oregon.
::::
=Fri., Jan. 4, 1974 –
Story in Oregonian. Committee named to search for a new UO president because
current UO President Robert Clark reaches mandatory retirement age June 1975.
Oregonian.
=Fri., Jan. 4, 1974 –
Story in Oregonian. Committee named to search for a new UO president. “Panel
seeks UO leader” first paragraph: EUGENE – A search committee has been named to
select a new president for the University of Oregon. Dr. Robert Clark will
retire from the post in June, 1975, when he reaches mandatory retirement age.
Oregonian.
=Wed., March 6, 1974
– Story on page 7B in Eugene Register-Guard. Linfield President Gordon C. Bjork
will deliver University of Oregon Winter Graduation Convocation address Fri.,
March 8, 1974, on UO campus in Eugene. “777 to receive degrees.” The University
of Oregon’s Winter Graduation Convocation will be held Friday for a class that
includes 777 candidates for baccalaureate and advanced degrees. Giving the
address will be Gordon C. Bjork, president of Linfield College. Title of his
address will be “1975-1984: The Challenge of Change.” University President
Robert Clark will confer degrees on the class, which is comprised out 539
candidates for baccalaureate degrees, 174 candidates for masters degrees, and
64 candidates for doctoral degrees. Candidates who complete all requirements
for their degrees by the close of winter term on March 15 will receive the
official degrees at a later date. The March 8 services will be at 3 p.m.
NEWSPAPER STORY ‘CLIPPINGS’ FOR YOUR INFO:
--Anecdotes
from Prof. Emeritus Vince Jacobs about Linfield (July 21, 2015)
http://wildcatville.blogspot.com/2015/07/anecdotes-from-prof-emeritus-vince.html
--Gordon
Bjork’s Linfield presidency ended May 31, 1974 (posted July 21, 2015)
http://wildcatville.blogspot.com/2015/07/gordon-bjorks-linfield-presidency-ended.html
--Rest
in peace, Vince Jacobs, Linfield prof of history emeritus, died 1/8/2018 in
McMinnville
http://wildcatville.blogspot.com/2018/01/rest-in-peace-vince-jacobs-linfield.html
--Vince
Jacobs' obit appeared in 1/19/2019 McMinnville N-R
http://wildcatville.blogspot.com/2018/01/obit-vince-jacobs-appeared-in-1192019.html
--Vincil
D. 'Vince' Jacobs, Linfield history prof, dies at age 81 in January 2018 (N-R)
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/17663360/4874984684145202139
:::::
Below regards Gordon Bjork,
Linfield College president, 1968-1974.
Source: March 7 1974, Oregon Daily Emerald, Eugene Ore.
