President's
Charge to the Senior Class
127th Commencement Exercises
Wellesley College
June 3, 2005
“You shall above
all things be glad and young.
For if you’re young, whatever life you wear
“it will become
you; and if you are glad
whatever’s living will yourself become.”
So begins a poem by e.e. cummings, a brief meditation on life
and love, knowledge and mystery. It ends in this couplet:
“I’d rather
learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.”
Every spring, when the
birds outside my window commence their singing lessons earlier
and earlier -- and louder and louder, so
it seems -- I finally abandon all hope of more sleep, and I begin
to ruminate on what to say to the graduating senior class in the
last remaining moments I will have with them – have with
you.
It’s
then that I begin to imagine this charged and emotional moment,
your final
official encounter, as students, with this place
where the birds sing so loudly and the stars dance so brightly
(not to mention the antics of the squirrels, jumping out of the
trash cans, the swans, the hawks and the geese). And I begin to
think of all the ways in which each one of you has infused this
college with your own special spirit and inscribed on it your own
particular story.
In those early
morning hours, I wonder what it is that I want to say to you,
or what
it is that you want (or need) to hear from
me, or, in the end, what it is that wants and needs to be said,
quite apart from our desires or will – yours or mine. I have
felt this year the pull of your desire, of me, to be cheerful and
optimistic; against the push of mine, of you, to be realistic and
resilient.
As I’ve lived into that question during the month or two
leading up to graduation, I find myself holding in my mind and
heart this senior class – this Class of 2005 -- this unique
amalgam of 553 ambitious and complicated Wellesley women, this
four-year loom of time on which we’ve woven our fabric of
shared experience together.
You’ve been a remarkable class by all accounts. So I approach
this moment with ambivalence: I hate to see you go truly as I exult
with you in your accomplishments and anticipate with you the mysteries
of that living life that will “become you” as you become
you in the living out of your days through the decades ahead. And
I ardently hope that each of you will find frequent occasion for
gladness in the rhythms and the rewards of your unfolding lives.
The particular
arc you have traveled here is yours alone. You arrived full of
promise
(as entering classes do). But before you
had time to put down roots, establish reliable friendships, or
really even learn your way around the campus, you were dealt the
crushing blow of the events of September 11, world-historic events
that swept us all up in a swirl of fear and grief and anger and
desolation. And we sat together on this very green on the evening
of that day. We’ll never forget that moment.
It was out
of that crucible that your college career was forged, a career
marked by more
than its share of turmoil and change – here
on campus and around the world. The lessons you’ve learned
are the essence of a liberal education, an education that makes
ethical demands that I hope you will never, ever forget.
Those ethical
demands define a human interaction – a type
of deliberative discourse – in which each of us enters with
a genuine desire to learn, assumes full responsibility for the
truth claims that we make, and engages in systematic self-critique, “arguing,” in
the words of political scientist Thomas Pangle,
“not for the sake of victory or display but with a thirst
to know that scorns vanity, pretension, and popularity [because
of our] … acutely-felt need to define and defend what we
believe to be admirable.”
I’ve
watched you work together, seniors, to bridge your differences
and find common
ground, surely the most important and
challenging task your generation will face. You have had your painful
conflicts, of course, and you will have them again, but you also
had stunning successes when you made deep connections and managed,
against powerful odds, to resolve the polarization that was swirling
everywhere around you.
You did this
by subordinating your passionate commitments to the larger goal
of enhancing civil
discourse. You listened to one another
with sincerity and humility – you opened yourselves to the
possibility that you could be wrong. You assumed responsibility
for the community that was providing you freedom by sacrificing
your individual freedom in pursuit of the common good.“Liberty
and duty, freedom and obligation. That’s the deal,” John
Gardner wrote. “You are free within a framework of obligations.” That
is the deal and it is the lesson of a liberal education – and
it is never easy, as you’ve learned. But it is “the music
of civilization,” as Bartlett Giamatti wrote, “the sound
of human beings shaping and sharing, mooring ideas to reality, making
the world, for all its pain, work.”
Nothing could be more important at this time in
history – when
so many of our fellow citizens are closing ranks to stifle dissent
and ward off imagined enemies within and without – nothing
could be more healing than this practice of honest critical reflection
that we’ve watched you develop and perfect as you’ve
been here.
You will go down in history as the senior class
that produced the revised honor code and brought it to a vote.
You advanced the
concept of honor; you argued it; you tested it out; and, in the
end, you recognized that it would be hollow if you weren’t
willing to make a public commitment to live by it. And you did.
As you go forward from here, you will make choices like that every
day. And among them will be how you choose to hear messages about
the future, sometimes troubling messages that are hard to hear.
This one, for example, from A Short History of Progress by historian
Richard Wright, on the subject of the environment:
“
Experts in a range of fields have begun to see the same closing
door of opportunity, begun to warn that these years may be the
last when civilization still has the wealth and political cohesion
to steer itself towards caution, conservation, and social justice. … Things
are moving so fast that inaction itself is one of the biggest
mistakes. The 10,000-year experiment of the settled life will
stand or fall by what we do, and don’t do, now. … Now
is our last chance to get the future right.”
Those are sobering words. You will decide where you will stand,
with whom you will join, to make the world safer in the future.
I’ve been asking seniors for months now how you’re
seeing the future. The answer generally comes back to me in some
variant of this: We don’t want to be pessimistic and depressed.
Please don’t inflict your generation’s doom and gloom
on ours. We’re seeing the world anew, we’re seeing
it fresh, through the lens of possibility. We see so many places
where we can be of help, places where our efforts – however
modest they may seem – will still matter a lot, where they
will make a real difference in the quality of life for someone
else.
You’ve made those commitments, and you’ve discovered
at Wellesley the impact you can have. You’ve changed this
college for the better, even as it has changed you. You’re
ready to embrace whatever lies ahead, and to mine your truth from
whatever lies within. You will find work that challenges and engages
you, of that I’m completely certain, work in the service
of causes larger than yourselves, work worthy of your best efforts,
deserving of your love, work that will “become you” and
align you with what is alive. Hold onto that dream, seniors. It’s
your generation now that has your turn to hold the world in trust.
And, so, I want to return to the polarities in
our poem, because I suspect – no, I know – that you will find a way to
resolve them too. Gladness succumbs to sadness in natural cycles
of darkness and light. You’ve learned about those. Through
the global crises that you’ve endured in your time here,
through our own local tempests, and the private burdens many of
you have so bravely carried, I’ve watched you enter the darkness,
face your demons and your fears, with real courage, and grow to
trust that, in due course, you’ll know how to find your own
sources of light. I’ve watched you do it.
Youth yields, finally, to the passage of time. It will be 2055
when many of you, I hope, will return to Wellesley for the 50th
reunion that the class of 1955 will celebrate next week, amazed
at how quickly the time has elapsed, still young in all but years.
As for the closing couplet, here’s my dream of what may
lie ahead, as you grow toward the light. When you have learned
from one bird how to sing, you’ll teach ten thousand stars
the songs you’ve sung.
Go in peace, my sister seniors, the great Class of 2005. Stay
together. Take good care of yourselves, and of each other. May
your lives be long and healthy. May they be filled with learning
and love. Congratulations.
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