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Although I have seen trustees I'm going to be an aversive and the advisory board of all the employers are thousands I'm happy to meet you on this fiftieth anniversary of the surprise and. We shall not have the. Time of use formality. Nor have over many normal speech on this it is in a sense a family party. A rotten large family and it is true that one of them appeared to defend himself from our challenges and here org. Our guests tomorrow are the winners of the home of surprises of the past our century and what with us tonight and particularly the two or three time winner is seated at this table may I ask first of all for the surprise winners rise and be great. If. Through me. The other members of the six separate without whom the cause of presence could not exist fifty years on the trustees of the university who are there may I ask the trustees to Rodd's. Through. Through. The advisory board of Missouri presidents who recommend me eyes that arise. Thank. You. Let me also welcome here tonight there was an art nevertheless necessary that all the best in this prize or the publishers of the woods are present in the books the producers of the plays the many others inside and outside of Columbia whose advice and counsel for the vice counsel we are made. We welcome the members of the jurors whose expert guidance we seek. Jurors who often suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune whether they are the rule not by some burial wisdom but by Spirit sorry. I thought wow. We are sure a matter of awesome series. That. Our Consulting Group Prize winners has made the happy suggestion that we continue long after the briefing program journey into the terrace room where we can have the pleasure of looking up old friends and meeting new ones. Is now over to witness the presentation of the one thousand and sixty six awards the winners will see it on the stage. The war as well as you know or announced on May second the conditional first Monday of many. Asked Mr Morris to move the chairman of the trustees from the universe to war in the process with the assistance Dean and rude of you from his Graduate School of Journalism. If. You tell me. The right. Thing or the other side well. Yeah you're right here. The only thing the deal with the more I think the one you're right the. Thirty fifth and. The one day left right. Yes very little left that. The right of that here with no one three one three three. Really. Good i think. You have your belief that one three things are in the. Right of. The little. Guy. The way we're leaving. Here. They are well they're really little on the other the woman on her lip that. For her. Oh boy. Thought they were here. For him were investigated were really all there for which. The oil for food and. That. Was one was. Here I have the word here. For which. They're. All for her which. While you're in you're. Already or a. Lot for which. You only. Know what. The right. Hour for which. Yes water for which. There. Was. A war. For which. For which. You. Were very. Well. Liked your home for which. Wore. A thin if. You. Will. That. If. We have as. My own. We have asked five eminent points of prize winners. To speak briefly tonight on friends and their respective feelings when I say brief I mean five minutes a statement far more difficult to compose and to deliver than many a professional lecture. We are reminded when this five minute limitation is fixed of the classic statement of what Bill Wilson but he needed a week to prepare a five minute speech but he can deliver an hour's address without notice. First as our income and Pulitzer Prize winner in music in one thousand forty five a distinguished American composer I want to has brought about greater recognition for American concert music and whose music has brought joy to audiences the world over has to cope. With. Ladies and gentleman. I've been asked to sort out friends in my field in three hundred seconds flat. The first thing that strikes one about music nowadays is the extent to which it's become involved with the building trades. At the moment the whole country is suffering from what some Westerners called the edifice complex. The buildings are brand new. But unfortunately no one has done anything about the audiences no new trends. On the contrary nothing is more staunchly conservative than the music loving public they have but one notion let the art of music alone it's lovely as it is. For them I am the bearer of brutal tidings The plain fact is that we're living in the midst of an unprecedented musical revolution the ossified practice is in the process of being dismantled broken down into its component parts and put together again in ways we never dreamed of a brand new factor is now to be taken into account the injection of science and scientific calculation it while musical thinking a tone is no longer merely a tone to be accepted as a fact of nature it can be taken apart like a mechanism and measured in frequencies and decibel as in duration and in the kinds of attack. It can be reassembled by electronic means recorded on magnetic tape and tampered with so as to produce every possible sound combination from the most shattering noise to the most delicate tonal mixtures the resulting composition can then be sent through the males played over the radio and heard everywhere but what I've been describing is already at least ten years all more recently I am has gotten into the act. Of Computer seven zero nine zero zero in fed the necessary information can write out its own music and transform it. Is the astonishing how quickly all of us even if we don't like to have become accustomed to the idea that we are to have a new kind of music music without instruments without performers and even without composers in such circumstances it's too much to expect in so-called normal as it will remain just as it was in the past as usual it's the younger generation the spearheads the new musical movement the compositions they write are often problematical and very difficult to execute their composing less and less for large orchestral groups and more and more for small ensembles of dedicated musicians I have nothing but admiration for this new species of young performers who grapples with these complexities rhythmic instrumental and I might add notation all of the newer composers After all God works are easy to identify They just don't sound like the music we're accustomed to here generally they fall into one of two opposed categories of music of Titus control where every element is worked out as the result of a pre compositional plan. Or a music that is wayward and unpredictable relax a day exploring the charm of chance operations the curious thing is that when you listen to an avid and odd piece you can't always tell which category it belongs to in either case don't look for any tunes any continuity any graspable form or any proposals of rhythms this isn't a criticism it's merely a description of what isn't there what I'm trying to say is that in facing up to the new music you're on you're wrong. This is no different from being on your own before the new paintings the new movies the New Theatre cetera it's just that people are quicker to get with it in relation to the visual and verbal arts and slower much slower to swim upstream with the aural art whatever else may be said there's definitely a sense of adventure in the new music as a charter member myself of the adventurous generation of the twenty's I can sense a similar excitement in the air nowadays good luck to them thank you. Second off the M.C.I. Center the junior winner of the nine hundred forty six point surprise and history of the age of Jackson and winner of that I did sixty six more the surprising biography as you've just heard for his promise of the Kennedy years a thousand days as a story I'm a biographer is unusually qualified to speak of these two special feelings of interest as the substance of. The first half century of Fielitz or prizes. As seen in the field of history something of a revolution in the kind of history written in the United States and in the place of history in the balance of the American mind and I am ashamed to say that historians have not yet been taken over in the sense of vividly and wistfully described by Mr Copeland by the electronic computer. That will combine one nine hundred eighty four. And these prizes began fifty years ago the historical enterprise in America had withdrawn somewhat from the great national audience this was a relatively new development through most of the nineteenth century history had been a dominant the other a form in the United States speaking powerful A to the central concerns of the nation Bandar Parchman Prescott plays spark serving were in every serious private library historians were notable figures and the art of the end of the century history began to lose the reading public of Henry Adams as history of the United States during the administrations of Jefferson and Madison coming out in one thousand nine hundred ninety one and the classics from its first appearance sold a mere three thousand sats in the first decade after publication the decline of popular interest in history was due partly to changes in national taste a country in the tumult of growing rapidly turning into an industrial society and the world. Was caught up by the excitement of the president had little time for a relic of excursions into the past. You know as do all the changes within the historical guild itself the typical historian was no longer as he had been in the nineteenth century the time and scholar he was dial the college teacher and only a few as in our own days I milked Elliott more awesome that had been happening faculty of combining the humane cultivation of the one and the technical proficiency of the other. Thank the professionalization of scholarship with the establishment of graduate training and the enthronement of the Ph D. program had a new and now writing emphasis on minute and very and mother graphic publication The result was a very of the classical historians of the nineteenth century had written for statesmen than editors for journalists and divines for the serious public in general the professional historians of the early twentieth century with a few distinguished exceptions like Frederick Jackson Turner wrote primarily for their colleagues and students Moreover many seem to regard this with entire satisfaction as their best and find the audience Theodore Roosevelt a surviving historian of the older school complained bitterly about these as he put it of conscientious industrious painstaking the pedants who would have been useful in a rather small way if they had a history of their own limitations but had become because of their conceit distinctly noxious they solidly believe that if there were only enough of them and that if they only collected enough flags of all kinds and sorts there would cease to be any need here after for great writers great thinkers. Roosevelt's outburst did inadequate justice to the absolute importance of the establishment of hypothetical standards the meticulous recovery of documents and verification of facts carried forward in these years lady indispensable foundation for bolder flights in the future that Roosevelt did just plain call attention to an incipient complacency and appropriately ism within the historical guilt a willingness to settle hard and narrow corner of the nation's intellectual life and the runs evasion of larger vision and into the lives of vast amounts of First World War brought with it a resurgence of popular interest in history the phenomenal success of well as outlined of history one and a half million copies sold in the United States and a dozen years show that has a star in this had a great potential public even if members of the American Historical Association were not inclined to satisfy perhaps history it was too important to be left to the historians in any case a group of gifted outsiders turned to history in their twenty's and thirty's and began to restore the relationship to the nation which the professionals had largely permitted to lapse. Men and women like Alan Evans Carl Sandburg Bernard devoted the South Hall Freeman and repairing gold and Mike Brooks Marcus James Margaret Leach and so many others at the same time Charles a beard having left academic life and become in a sense an outsider himself and Vernon L. Parrington a professor of English showed the power if in terms later generations found somewhat naive and mechanical of sweeping ideological interpretations of the national past. The onset of the Second World War and celebrated the revival of the historical consciousness in times of change and danger as John just passed another outsider wrote come in the part of a book significantly entitled the ground we stand on in times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men's reasoning a sense of continuity with generations gone before and stretched like a life by a cross that's the scary present the profession regard of these developments of mixed emotions not all historians it should be set at accepted a narrowing of the historical mission and one nine hundred twelve James Harvey Robinson to challenge the guilt of the spirit of man the best of the new history and in subsequent years a number of historians beard Karabakh or my father among them. Had sought to revitalize the writing of history by and large in scope diversifying its method and increasing its relevance this is led between the warriors who are not useful but rather artificial controversy within the professional about the nature of history was it science or art and about the limits of historical knowledge objectivity versus relativism other parties that have become evident that such questions did not permit a clear cut answers that the objectivity was an unattainable ideal but an essential discipline and the history that elements of bold art and science liberated from these debates a new generation of historians many of whom had been thrust for a season by the Second World War and the world of action and passion brought I think a new energy to the study of the American. The new energy was and farmed by a mark sophisticated conception of the historical enterprise nothing I believe has counted more in this connection and the rise of the intellectual history and I'm commanded go it's a committee for recognizing this by warning the history prize this year is the most distinguished of our intellectual historians the labor All right Miller. Thanks the rise of intellectual history has been important not only in pursuing its own purposes the origin and impact of ideas but in restoring fertility to apparently exhausted fields of conventional history seen through the prospective of ideas political economic diplomatic and institutional history have acquired a new force and vitality and allegedly history has broadened the framework of interpretation facilitate facilitating the application of insights from economic psychology anthropology and sociology as route as encouraging comparative study of developments in other continents and other epochs result has been a notable revival in historical studies in America I must confess myself. Myself in the past. Not to say intimidated by the quality of the work turned out today by our younger scholars it's liveliness imagination range technical skill and literary Grace I believe that the next generation of historians in the United States may well reclaim for history a central place it occupied in the American mind in the days of Bancroft's in Parchman. This revolution has also affected the contiguous areas of biography and Autobiography of the changes here of been less dramatic and you know Linear A far biography a more personal and idiosyncratic art as to a considerable degree escaped the corporate factionalism which has so often inhibited the writing of history that's half a century ago biography had not call an individualist state which characterized too much of technical history when the pillars of prizes were found in the years since it has at its best surmounted the various temptations of hagiography public relations debunking too fast for idealism and so on to carry far this solid condition in American letters the contemporary revival of history is I believe important for other reasons and simply the vanity of historians for history should be much more than simply a technical exercise our literary flourish I do not mean to suggest that history offer insurance or use to conundrums of public policy or infallible insights into the future but I believe that history is a moral necessity in a society marked by power. It is man's best antidote to his illusions of omnipotence and omniscience it shows for ever remind us of the limitations of our passing perspective it should strengthen us to resist the pressure to convert or momentary interests in tomorrow absolutes IT leaders do a bit of time and humbling sense of our frailty as human beings to a recognition of the fact so often and so sadly demonstrated that the future will outwit all our started to notice and the possibilities of history our current certain margaritas and the human intellect is likely to conceive a nation in farms and maybe ever understanding of the ironies of history is I believe best equipped to live with the Temptations and tragedy of power are and since we are condemned as a nation to the role of our that a growing sense of history and temper and symbolized its deepest thanks. Third speaker is James B. Reston associate editor of The New York Times when are of the nine hundred forty five and I'm fifty seven tours of rises in national sporting and for many years the chief of The Times Washington bureau often called First a reporter of the day Scott or president needs to know for their credentials. Mr Chairman Ladies and gentlemen I suppose I am here. Because it is the reporter's business from time to time. To muscle into places where he is not expected to be. I think I should say to you quite frankly that Dean Barrett had a really tough time and trying to get somebody to fill this spot and front of this audience after all it is not study with poets and historians but with newspaper men and I'm supposed to talk for them. And explaining this I should say to you that Mr Walter Lippmann is in California. And Joss finally gave up on the president and has decided to bomb Hanoi on his own. Was. I ask you to think about the sweep of chains of these fifty years in politics from Woodrow Wilson to Lyndon Johnson which I suggest to you is quite a distance. In world affairs from Lenin to cuss Seaghan. In journalism from Lippman Kroc and David Lawrence. To Lippmann Crocker and Dana. Through. To thirty. Anyway this is a wonderful occasion. Full of the modesty of journalism. For here again are we newspaper man who cannot agree upon any standards for ourselves celebrating the presumption to set standards for fifty years for everybody else. This I suggest to you is quite typical of our craft I didn't know Mr Pulitzer but I assume he had a sense of humor. He must also have had a sense of pity for he established in this institution. Not only a reward for all the chief months but an alibi for our shortcomings and he succeeded so well with the help of this great university that even when we loiter and failed. People say well me anyway or so I'm sore couldn't always have been that. He wanted just one of the full moon. With. I've been trying to say that for many years on. About this business of cram us. Simon has to sit down and four minutes and I've been sitting here I was just slicing has been talking penciling and wonderful remarks. Are I thought the time. Anyway we have I think we can I think identify some friends some cran of the past twenty years anyway the main problem in our business in the last generation. Has been to reconcile the tradition of newspapering with our new duties to keep our attitudes and our methods up to date with the new responsibilities of our country in the world this is not an easy. Our tradition is to be skeptical of power to publish whatever is done by our government except in time of absolute war this was all established when we were an isolated country before we lived in this halfway between war and peace before we had a secret service operating all over the world. I believe we have made some progress but the world has changed faster than we can change ourselves we have a new role in a new world and we in the newspaper business have not yet caught up. We grumble of course about all this and we stick in our fur or like an obsolete wheel. But the new age is good for us it is forcing us I believe to think and to use that mind instead of our delay it is making others think about the causes of violence rebellion and war rather than merely reporting the struggle in the streets and this is giving us an opportunity to attract a much more intelligent sensitive company of reporters than we have ever had before. This new generation of reporters now in their thirty's and early forty's is quite different from the old combative types many of whom one Pulitzer Prizes for some thumping disclosure they are specialists on everything from labor of the relations and science and the psychology of Lyndon Johnson and they range much more widely in the world at large and are much better equipped to move from straight newspaper reporting to analysis to periodical journalism and the history these past fifty years have also given us the cost. I don't know whether you would regard this as a trend or merely as a misfortune. It has enabled the papers to buy ideas instead of having them. And it has created a new goal for the modern reporters they all want to be columnists and throw around continents and analyze the new generation on the campuses there are of course obvious advantages and some disadvantages these young men are much better educated than our generation but qual they are brainy or they are not more muscular they know what to say when they get through the door but I have a feeling that they don't knock down doors the way we should we use to. This I think is not necessarily progress the balance of political power in this country is not running with the press or the Congress but with the president. He now has more power to make war to tolerate or create the conditions that lead to war than ever before the point could be proved if we had time but in any event we are going to have see I have to use some blunt instruments and have some of the tough old characters around and sometimes I wonder about this especially when I hear the elegant language used around the State Department in fairness I must say some of the old newspaper traditions still will still remain. Our self-worth righteousness I can assure you is undiminished. Our capacity to criticize everybody and our imperviousness to criticism ourselves are still live believing unmatched by a novelist support us or anybody else. Will. I trust you will not must misunderstand what I am saying I believe profoundly in my profession for all its troubles it never had a better chance for public service or a greater opportunity for young man than it does today. Just as the nineteenth century was the century of the novelist so I believe this postwar phase of the twentieth century may be the era of the journalist. This is a point I think that is. Very little understood and we. We have. Pretended I think in the twenty's and in the thirty's to try to be novelists on the side. But actually sticking to our last is really the main point now if I can find my place of pride ignore. It. Somewhere I suggest there is a line. Between the old skeptical combative publish and be damned traditional of the past in our papers. And the new line of the new generation this new restless generation I wish I knew where to find it for I think it could help the newspapers and the nation in their present plight and it could and I also believe help us to believe again which in this age of tricks and techniques may be our greatest need. Fortunately we are not left without some guidelines the best one I know of for the present time. Came from the opening statement of principles. Which. Was presented by the spectator in London at the beginning of the eighteenth century then it was said. And I suggest this may be useful to us and. That the purpose of the press after reporting the moos was to correct the vices ridicule the follies and dissipate the ignorance which too generally prevailed at that time and this is the main point and to do so by in livening more reality with wit it. And tempering with with morality the newspapers I believe are no yearning toward that point. And after fifteen more years of the Pulitzer committee perhaps we shall achieve thank you very much for one for the or. For our. Our former speaker is Robert Penn Warren. Professor of English at Yale University winner of the nineteen forty seven pounds a prize of fiction or is not moral or king is mad and that I can fifty eight points at present power through from his book promises to the world of the novelists and the world of the poet often in some kind of military a writing. Takes on a different meaning for us all. From I present Professor moral that I'm not as a fictional proverbs nor as a non fiction novelist but as a poetic novelist is to war. For them or. Thank you. Mr Chairman Ladies and gentlemen. Ask Mr Reston fiction seems to have a poor place. Though our. Best. Copeland's there's a good word for noir is. Mr Such going to the past Mr Ruskin a good word for newspapers and fiction I suppose has a small word to be said for it is just about people not about the past or the future of fiction I'm talking about is not the fiction of the future and not even the trends. They cause the only trend how the advertising now is a trend toward the death of the now. When I was dying we are told. Have been told that for a long time in one hundred twenty years just before the start of the theory and finding its way to. Listen to what he reported to be dying. So he understands and that many true. Evil deeds launched wrote. It becomes harder and harder to read the whole of any modern novel. Always a bit and knows the rest or else one doesn't want to know any more. He himself was he said bored. And I like most of us I suppose bored by a good man in our lives. I've even bored of myself and stand high on the bestseller list and I put it to the steam. This makes me feel out of step with civilization and to chat. But there are other novels. Some are also very high on bestseller list. They don't bore me and I hope don't bore you that in fact fascinate me and compel me. But trends Now here's my trouble. I find it very hard to put these fascinating novels into a trend in a single package market trend the trouble is that a good now is very apt to stand on its hind legs and say leave me alone. Are not at random if you can we are trying to grasp it you are. Easy to look back or do a textbook and see trendiest in say one hundred twenty years the one nine hundred thirty years yes that period I remember a big book of it was in forty one by our then critic. Who divided all right owners of twenty years into these categories naturalists that he wants to do this for the young ones not just the one subheading for modern cynicism. But that didn't include of course TS and it who had quoting exulted and in the big influence on the American character this one year before Pearl Harbor for burial is just if I look back to my school day years the nineteen twenty years I don't remember naturist or decadence I don't know books. After the books exist we make the clan and the categories for a nice convenience and while real need for transient categories but. We must always remember but the books never sours in that cranky arrogant individual integrity. Now at the point via a manual. The powerful obscurity of genius we could use the trends and the labels but if we are why as we don't forget the moment of the finest fuel each morning before we gave names of the animals. There was a rap with our name arthritic that will be. Now the kid now was around me I don't feel ready to give names I see some groupings and the constellations but I don't see any overall overarching trend to this by and they say. What I now see is rich pluralism. Some inspired improvisations a groping towards. A notional flight may be the age behind this they invoke appearances or are. This question must be asked is this true or is a merely at its deepest the mark for the exams really. Marked not by two individuals some but by four strivings after originality. You said striving itself the trend. Manifesting itself in mere inversion of the conventional. Such an inversion might be a form as a recently published novel in loose leaf. Through the reader might reshuffle the novel every night for you experiences new suggestions a glorified new messiah. Or it might be any variation of valuers in the contact residence or a trans valuation of taboo. Is mandatory if what used to be called quantum phenomena fair will resolve the emphasis on shock after shock leads us to recurring effort to over reach the last shot by you give it your dick or our or programmatic pathology the paradox of this new part cannot refer to is that we the readers are converted that is the participants of the value. We get a fiction sometimes because they wield the fact that imagination they cannot make us read or write or it to an afternoon. Use of lights words Cleopatra's sad often backed but into focus papa a little in the famous coin car. Always a trend toward extinction. In saying so or some people mean the engine our society history journalism or psychological case study. Though most of which indeed it lies very close to. The novel will change and discovers new materials and new insights but this is I want to say that it will be renewed I think to New England of light. That never meant even to the printed page if the age of good and Berg is really over but it could still be an hour the earth that hears the medium remained the image of reliance rather than language. In language. Because of the beast reality of the novel this story is a study. By the in the play where twenty in the ordinary verbal language of now racial income and and what some psychologists call the primary language of imagery. Then is back to the life years we have been told not worth living. And work novelist one way of which we can inspect light this image this discovery images. Can be made by. And only made by. The act of artistic imagination which is radical and subtle and be distinguished from historical imagination with no itself to be the off. There is no substitute for it or as long as it can in proper humility be cultivated the Navajo. Will like even get very very sick. Just take our place of names out of. The few novels in our novelist now quite young like John or Peter Madison or Updike or star one and others because. As these large banks some forty years ago. Us asked trouble is not with an hour for the novelist It isn't that enough you can always catch but Henry James called the very note and trick the straight regular rhythm of life but they don't make of that will be known only. He's always been known after the fact. Then we can discuss Trent thanks thanks. To. Our story is one of the few who three time Pulitzer Prize winners Mr MacLeish is a moralist came in one thousand nine hundred three and one thousand and fifty three Parker and one hundred fifty nine for his power writing problem J.B.. He speaks to us tonight as a distinguished dramatist and his timidity. Thank you. Thank you. Is not often on a rich fabulous and strong occasion such as this that one and these the host but on this occasion I do for our hostess Columbia University and the rule of Columbia University in these proceedings is unlike our own restful unambiguous and unembarrassed. Columbia has decided after fifty years of distributing Pulitzer Prizes do except Gates's advice draw a raindrop brass cast a cold eye on life and death and take stock of the consequences. Whereas we ladies and gentlemen we who address you and a large proportion of your whom we address are the consequences. We are Mr Pulitzer's dream made flesh. We are the men and women who were chosen. And what of the chosen to do on the great day on the solemn appraisal the ultimate aside was what to put it crudely can they conceivably say. Barbara Tuchman has a story in her proud tower of which a lumen aides are predicament it seems that the father of Richard Strauss a famous for to also of his day was asked how he would prove his right to be considered the foremost living performer on the horn. I don't he said I don't prove it I admit it. Conceivably we might follow this procedure sample but somehow we don't seem to. The trouble is that our emotions are engaged in a way in which the emotions of the egregious horn player apparently were not we can't admit the charge against us because we make it ourselves we're proud of it as our presence here this evening proves. And it is there of course that the ambiguity of which I speak appears the the embarrassment of what precisely are we proud. Of ourselves of ours certification by a great university a superior performers on our various instruments. Possibly poets I will confine myself to poets leaving the novelist journalists playwrights composers historians and biographers to speak for themselves poets are at least as human as anyone else not to say more so. Possibly it is only ourselves who are proud of me but I don't care for poets though may they may know only too well how to value themselves know how to value something else even more they know how to value poets. Poetry is. Present and to come and their real pride consists not in being preferred to their contemporaries. They know how often these performances are reversed by time and how frequently the forgotten poet of one age is the remembered of another but in feeling themselves a part however small a part of the common consciousness which contains in any particular time of the present of poetry what these awards have done for many in this indifferent world of ours this particularly indifferent American world is somehow to include them. We do not all of us have the courage as we certainly do not have the reasons which made it possible for Keats to say that the loneliest moment of his life and that he knew he would be among the English poets of his death we need most of us a sign of recognition not recognition of our ultimate worth as poets only poetry itself can give that but recognition that we exist that we are there among those who live between those who went before and those who will come after to pick up a new or forty third on answered year the copy of the Paris Herald which says you have a Pulitzer Prize is not to be proud of yourself it is to think of Edwin Arlington Robinson whom you will read in your revere and Robert Frost and you will learn to and the others in your own generation when you have heard of and never seen and all the rest ill younger Still to come. No one believes least of all the perceptive president of Columbia University that the Pulitzer Prize is will change the art of letters in America art is not impressed by our awards but there are men and women in this room among them the most intelligent of this time who will testify that these prizes have warmed and humanize the world in which the art of letters must be practiced. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU the concluding remarks for this fiftieth anniversary will be made by grace and Kirk president of Columbia University where my grandfather and trust in the prizes that bear his name president characters are responsible for their ministration he serves our advisory role right now to educate all that authority on international relations presenting Dr. RUTH. As a charm on what is and gentleman. Obviously it's a very great prose or unprivileged tonight to be able to speak on behalf of the University. And to extend our congratulations to the distinguished winners both past and present. Of what. We regarded as one of this country's most coveted prizes in journalism Arts and Letters the last fifty years. The Pulitzer Prizes have recognised upstanding achievements in these fields I like to think that they have also served as an encouragement to excellence for the various scholars journalists and authors and composers this works might be reviewed by the juries and in all this time I can assure you that those who have had responsibility for the administration the prizes. Have tried to be mindful of the charge which Joseph Pulitzer in his will laid upon the university that those prizes be and I'm quoting for the encouragement of public service public morals American literature and the advancement of education. I've heard I've heard somewhere or other of the curious rumor that the selection of these prizes may not be entirely in fall. And. I read somewhere various and sundry places that there are critics who with all the virtues of hindsight believe that there are juries in our advisory board in our trustees all two hundred more ought to have had more foresight. Well we all believe in human fallibility I'm sure. But as I look over this splendid audience tonight I'm confident confident that at least two hundred and perhaps more than two hundred of our guests. And plus all the boys and husbands and know that it at least one instance the judges exercised impeccable and forced. They move their marriage green with what someone once said that even though they just even though they dislike to admit it that they also serve who only sit and berate. And I while any system of horrors is open to improvement and I'm sure the award of the Pulitzer Prizes and Noble is no exception. I note ladies and gentlemen that there is no reluctance on part of authors or publishers to submit their products to our jurors. The selection process becomes your early more difficult because of the ever growing number of submissions. As many as seven hundred and fifty different newspaper and periods many of them weighing pounds and pounds are now received than a single season and without any solicitation on our part. We are now receiving more than four hundred books each year in these six book categories. And this number increases every year despite our pleas to the publishers to please send us only the things that are really proud. And there are times I'm sure one. That's our Hornberger the secretary of the Advisory Board begins to feel a little more like a Sorcerer's Apprentice an investor in journalism. But our intention ladies and gentlemen our intention now as throughout all the past half century is to do the very best we can to carry out the mandate of Mr Pulitzer's will. Allow for all the difficulties of human fallibility. To try to select those recipients the persons whom serious and competent men have selected as being in their judgment the most worthy in the nation. As I say I wouldn't for a moment and sussed out every aspect of this selection mechanism is sure perfection without and should not ever be changed but mind you. If our trustees her bound to follow every judgment of the advisory board and if the advisory board were bound to follow or bring judgement of the of the of our jurors. I think we would have a bound and in effect a system of checks and balances that provides us with a maximum assurance of the quality of the final result. And greatly as we are indebted to the jurors for their careful and conscientious work and to the work of the Graduate School of Journalism for its share of the administration the prizes I do think tonight I would like to take the opportunity to say just a word about the very heavy responsibility is what's the Advisory Board members have carried over the years at a very considerable cost of time and effort was no compensation of an econ even for personal expenses. The editors and publishers only advisory board it carried out their responsibilities carefully and pains to claim year after year they very seldom given been given more of the very grudging credit for the rewards which they recommended to the trustees of the university most of those awards being based on the judgment of expert jurors but you may be sure that when ever they want anything goes wrong the board members the ones who take the blame they may be criticized for many things ladies and gentlemen but never for a lack of diligent or effort or courage to do what they thought was right. On behalf of the trustees of the university who once did reverse them and could do so again I want to thank them for their work. The art of these prizes seems to me a perfectly appropriate function for a university. Such as ours. Because the principal goal we have in every facet and phase of our activity is the encouragement of excellence. If we were not to do that we would have no raise on debt. The university must encourage excellent teaching excellence and research excellent in the performance of its public service responsibilities and we're very grateful for the fact that the first bill is a Pulitzer made it possible for this university in its way to recognize excellence in these fields which he singled out in his will and I heard and I think we're grateful too for the fact that he also chose Columbia as a place to the school of journalism it is still after all these years the only strictly Graduate School of Journalism in the United States there isn't a single great journalistic enterprise in this country that doesn't have some of our graduates on its management or stuff some of them have thirty or forty eighty or more of our graduates helping them and this too is excellence and the existence of these prizes the national prestige which they have achieved and which they will continue to hold. As one Moritur demonstration of the fact that man does not live by technology alone because no matter how great our devotion may be to the machines that are freed us from all these many old tasks of past generations. We know that in the xor of all judgment of time this nation. Will be remembered not by its technical artifacts and via its cultural achievements and of recognition is not in these fields extended to those worthy of it how fell those achievements be known. Ladies and gentlemen many hundreds of men that worked over this past fifty years to make these awards possible and to guarantee they do the level of excellence which they are universally recognized to have had these people have worked with us in most cases no remuneration of the Northwest minimal remuneration their requests to assist in the administration of this because they are believed in the importance of the process and these men deserve our grateful produce just as the winners present and past here tonight deserve our congratulations. Maybe after all the first fifty years are the hardest. With. Us being all of us and saying thank you to these gentlemen to have a sedative all counter this. Is the end of our formal her and it isn't our own little thank you very very much for being with us as. If.