Clark Kerr, AVOID TOTAL INVOLVEMENT

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Clark Kerr, Chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, from a speech made in the mid-1950s:

The danger is not that loyalties are divided today but that they may be undivided tomorrow. . . . I would urge each individual to avoid total involvement in any organization; to seek to whatever extent lies within his power to limit each group to the minimum control necessary for performance of essential functions; to struggle against the effort to absorb; to lend his energies to many organizations and give himself completely to none; to teach children, in the home and in the school, "to be laws unto themselves and to depend on themselves," as Walt Whitman urged us many years ago--for that is the well source of the independent spirit.