On behalf of our University I have the honor and sincere pleasure to welcome you as members of our American Summer School. I won’t deny, however, that our joy is intermingled with a certain amount of anxiety. You see, this is the first undertaking of this sort in the history of our University, and we have ventured to invite you during a period of reconstruction, at a time when we are struggling hard to recover from the serious blows we had to suffer during the war and the five years of German occupation.
As you know, our University was finally closed by the invaders, 1500 students and a great number of teachers were arrested by the Gestapo, and 700 of our active students were sent to prison camps in Germany.
A modern University is a big piece of machinery. It takes time to get things running again when all activities have been suspended for years, particularly so when, as in our case, the number of students after liberation has increased from the prewar level of about 4000 to more than 6000 students.
When we nevertheless have taken the risk of inviting you, the main reason has been our ardent desire to pay off a little of the great debt of gratitude we feel towards American colleges and students. In the emergency situation after the war no less than 500 of our students have been received at leading American institutions of learning. On behalf of the University I beg you to accept and convey to your home institutions the expression of our most sincere and lasting gratitude.
I would like also to take this opportunity to express our great appreciation for the capable work done by the many American professors and educators who formed the Executive Committee and the Advisory Council of the School.
We hope you will enjoy your sojourn in Norway and that this, our first Summer School, will prove a success. In the courses you are going to attend, you will get a rather comprehensive survey of Norwegian nature and Norwegian culture. There is just one thing I would like to tell you about Norway, as I generally do when foreigners are visiting us for the first time:
If you make a circle on the map with the entire length of Norway as radius and the southern point of our country as centre, you bisect Italy near Rome. And over this large territory you have to distribute about 3 million inhabitants, the population of Brooklyn. That is Norway.
From this you will realize that we have quite a few handicaps to overcome in a country where nature itself and the conditions of life comprise such a wide range of variation. Moreover, you are lucky in speaking a language that is understood everywhere. We Norwegians have not only to spend much of our time in learning foreign languages, but to this comes also the fact that the large majority of our cultural and intellectual achievements have to reach other countries in translations, that is, in an inferior form.
I mention these points in order to warn you against perfunctory comparisons between a small country like ours and your own great and mighty continent. But if you take up an unbiased attitude, I have no doubt it will be an experience of real value to have this opportunity of getting acquainted with a small country like ours, to learn how we have tried to solve our problems in order to create fair conditions for a free and happy human existence. Perhaps you may even find features which you consider new, valuable and worth while.
We live in serious times. If we look backwards one indisputable fact stands out: Science has made the world better to live in for man. But has it also made man himself better?
When I was young, like you today, my answer to this question would have been yes, without hesitation. But with the pathetic experience of my own generation in mind, I must confess that my optimistic view on this fundamental question is quite different today.
We have lived to see that what we call civilization is only a very thin crust covering tremendous layers of stupid and savage tendencies in human nature. The great, the overshadowing disappointment of our lifetime has been the realization that not only a few more or less pathological individuals, but also large masses, entire so-called cultured nations, when misled by false ideals and unscrupulous, criminal propaganda, may behave in an utterly mean and depraved way.
At the same time the position of science itself has changed. Scholars and scientists in my youth formed the only true internationale. Their only goal was to search for truth, bringing out the secrets of nature and applying them for the happiness of man. Now the situation is very different indeed. Not only have we lived to see the war itself is taking the form of applied science, with leading scientists in key positions in the actual warfare, but also when science in our own days attained its most astonishing achievement, the unbinding of atomic energy, this real triumph of the human mind has brought us far less hope than fear, fear of forces we feel that we human beings are as yet neither ripe enough nor civilized enough to deal with.
A tragic situation indeed!
Against this background the exchange of young students between two countries becomes a link in endeavors of wider scope. A good student is a man who respects reason, who endeavors to think aright. Over and over again man has been able to mobilize all his scientific and intellectual energies for purposes of destruction. If he would apply only a small portion of this tremendous effort to the application of reason, the outlook for the future of humanity would be far brighter.
There is no country in which we Norwegians feel more at home than in the United States. This is undoubtedly due to the fact there are so many striking parallels in our history, in our fight for freedom, in our conception of government. We Norwegians can find no better expression for our own intrinsic political viewpoints than those admirable lines of your own great Thomas Jefferson:
“I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome direction, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.”
This is a noble and inspiring task before every student here and everywhere.