Writing to Regent William K. Coblentz, who was then board chairman, a year later, Bateson said he was "deeply impressed by two things during the year that I have been a regent.
"First, by my own incompetence and ignorance. I am simply unable to decide or even to have an opinion on most of the matters which come before the board.
"Second, I am impressed by the ephemeral and even trivial nature of most of these matters.
"After that, I am blocked. To correct my incompetence and ignorance, it would be necessary to do a very great deal of work. But I am not motivated to do that work by the nature of the matters to be decided."
Later in his letter, Bateson mused, "I keep wondering what perhaps St. Augustine might say if he sat in on a meeting of the board.
"As I see it, a great deal of university effort is a building of sand. I call it ephemeral. We teach them this and that. We try to have them discover things for themselves or discover wisdom in debate. But in the end, 90 percent or even 98 percent disappear into fields which are not vitally important--fields where our former students cannot remember what it was all about. What was it they saw under the microscope? What was it that Sophocles or Shakespeare said? They will go into various sorts of activities which will perpetuate our way of life and, on the whole, aggravate its pathologies, its greed, its hatred of nature and its hatred of intellect.
"Industry, politics, technology, the professions and the armed services (even the teaching profession) are all very well in their way, and it is right that we should contribute to their recruitment. But none of these are sharply vital to our ongoing civilized existence. If their recruitment were increased or decreased by, say, ten percent, it wouldn't matter much. Even without the aid of doctors, we could manage to get sick, get well and even die."
Instead, Bateson believed, the regents should encourage the university to concentrate on its best students, those who who might contribute to the world's "small stock of Eternal Verities."
But the regents were not inclined to discuss such matters, and little was said about "Eternal Verities" during the three years Bateson remained on the board before his death in 1980.
--W.T.