Public Speaking Failure and Morals

Direction for questions 46 to 50: Read the passage, and answer the questions following it.

One of the greatest public speaking failures of my career took place last summer at Valparaiso University, Indiana where I addressed a convention of editors of college newspapers. I said many screamingly funny things but the applause was dismal at the end. During the evening, I asked one of my hosts in what way I had offended the audience. He replied that they had hoped I would moralize. They had hired me as a moralist. So now when I speak to students, I do moralize. I tell them not to take more than they need, not to be greedy. I tell them not to kill, even in self-defence. I tell them not to pollute water or the atmosphere. I tell them not to raid the public treasury. I tell them not to commit war crimes or to help others to commit war crimes. These morals go over very well. They are of course echoes of what the young say to themselves. I had a friend from Schenectady visited me recently, and he asked me this, "Why are fewer and fewer young Americans going into science each year?" I hold him that the young were impressed by the war crimes trials at Nuremberg. They were afraid that careers in science could all too easily lead to the commission of war crimes. They don't want to work on the development of new weapons. They don't want to make discoveries which will lead to improved weapons. They don't want to work for corporations that pollute water or atmosphere or raid the public treasury. So they go into other fields. They become physicists who are so virtuous that they don't go into physics at all. At the University of Michigan, at Ann Arbor, the students have been raising hell about the university doing secret government work. I go to talk with some of the students about the protests that had been made against the recruiters of Dow Chemicals, manufacturers of napalm among other things. I offered the opinion that an attack on a Dow recruiter was about as significant as an attack on the doorman or theatre usher. I didn't think the recruiter stood for anything. I called attention to the fact that during the Dow protest at Harvard a couple of years back, the actual inventor of napalm was able to circulate through the crowd of protestors unmolested. I didn't find the fact that he was unmolested reprehensible. I saw it as a moral curiosity. Though I did not mean to suggest to the students at Ann Arbor that the inventor of napalm should have been given one hell of a time.

In this address at Valparaiso University, the author

Moralists are

The author's perception is that young people

The author regarded the inventor of napalm as

It is implied from the author's comments that the present-day students