Commencement, May 8, 2005

Remarks

Chairman Bates and members of the Board of Trustees, distinguished guests and faculty, parents, family members, and friends of our graduating seniors, and most important of all, degree recipients and soon-to-be former students:

Commencement ceremonies are one of those rare occasions in life when we are required by tradition to take the time to reflect on our lives, on where we came from, on who we are, and on where we are going. On such occasions, it is fitting that we contemplate as a community those strands in our collective life that in their intertwining weave a fabric of common experience and remembrances that will forever bind us to each other. I want to use my brief remarks today to you, the Class of 2005, to contemplate those factors in your lives that make you as a group unique and that distinguish you from the classes that have gone before and those that come after.

There are some obvious outward signs that you as an age-cohort are very, very different, especially from people in my age-cohort. You are, for example, members of the IPod generation. You have literally at your fingertips a musical archive the likes of which it would have cost a small fortune to buy on vinyl long-playing records back in 1983 or 84, when most of you were born, but for which, if I am not mistaken, you probably paid next to nothing, if anything at all. Things change.

You are also the cell phone generation. Alumni who graduated only a few years ago comment to me, when they come back to campus, that the most distinctive change that they see here is that students walk around deep in conversation over their cellular telephones. And you use those cell phones to send text messages to each other, across the country, across the classroom. In so doing, you and your generation have developed your own highly compact codes to accommodate the constraints of typing on a cell-phone keypad. You have, for instance, introduced into the language a new, easy to type, three-letter greeting for our age, S-N-U, “snu,” as in “What’s new with you?” And you have shortened the already truncated phrase of assent “OK” down simply to “K.” You are without question the best informed, most plugged-in, linguistically most efficient student generation that ever lived.

These are only some of the outward signs that set you apart. There are many others, I assure you. Beyond such material signs, though, I would suggest that there are other shared elements that you will in the course of time come to view as definitive in shaping your consciousness as the Class of 2005. I predict that there have been in your shared time here on Palatine Hill several signal events that will enliven your table conversation as you reconvene years hence to reminisce at alumni barbecues and receptions. More importantly, these events will contribute over time to the process of defining you as individuals of shared values and in so doing will help shape your attitudes toward your work, your ambitions, your evolving beliefs, and your relationships with new friends, colleagues, and acquaintances after you leave Lewis & Clark, that is, after today.

The defining moment of your freshman year, of course, was the World Trade Center catastrophe of September 11, 2001. You all know where you were when you first heard of that tragedy, as do all of us in attendance here today. You had been in college scarcely two weeks when the two hijacked airliners crashed into the twin towers and so weakened them that within minutes they collapsed in rubble to the ground. The people you were with at the moment are etched into your memory, as are the events of the next few days, as you tried to come to terms with the monumentality of that event. Whatever you, the Class of 2005, had been before that day you could never be again. In that moment, the summer-camp atmosphere of Orientation Week gave way to a somber mood, as you came collectively to understand the world in more profound ways, to grasp the tremendous power that a fervent passion, in this case, the passion of hatred, can have in changing lives and in altering the course of history.

Since that day, there have been other events that have further defined your cohort as being singular. You are, for better or worse, the first student generation in over thirty years in our country that has been at college during a prolonged period of national war. First came the invasion of Afghanistan, as the United States pursued the perpetrators of 9/11 into the heartland of the Taliban. Two years later, the Americans again launched an invasion, this time of Iraq to effect the overthrow of the repressive regime of Saddam Hussein. The verdict is still out on the benefits and costs of these military incursions, and as is the way with historians, there will be in the years and decades to come a series of revisionist assessments as to the wisdom or folly of American foreign policy during the early years of the twenty-first century.

What I would remind you of today, Class of 2005, is that among your own numbers, among your high school friends, among your relatives, perhaps even your parents or your brothers and sisters, are those who feel called to fight in America’s wars. There are likewise those who feel an equal passion to oppose American intervention abroad as self-serving and short-sighted. Whether you favor your country’s participation in these conflicts or not, yours is a generation that, even as I speak, is storing up experiences and gaining a legacy that comes only to a generation whose youthful years coincide with time of war. Emergent democracies and restored hope for the future; grim body counts and relentless suicide bombers. Pro and con, these are the stuff of your coming of age.

On a positive note and closer to home, you have lived through times here at Lewis & Clark that at this moment in your lives are no doubt far more vivid for you than those abroad in the larger world. Those of you who played sports here, those who performed in musical productions, those who acted in theater performances, those who debated and served in student government: you have all undergone, each in your own way, a transformative experience that has made you a different person and that has bound you into the polity of our community in special ways. Your participation has also shaped that polity, enriched it, and left it forever changed from what it was when you arrived here four years ago.

You have lived through much else besides. Unlike most students at most colleges, you have had the remarkable experience of having to cope with three presidents in quick succession during your college years. In your own way, you experienced that brief shudder in the self-confidence of this splendid institution that accompanied the departure of President Mooney two years ago. You also experienced the swift reassurance that came with Paul Bragdon moving into the Frank Manor House as interim president, and you have now endured the green inexperience of Hochstettler’s first year on the job. Indeed, you have set for me a standard for all senior classes to come. By challenging me, by collaborating with me, you have left your lasting imprint on my own term in office and to that extent, your presence on campus will endure in subtle ways that none of us can at present possibly foresee.

One last mechanism that I want to mention that binds you together is the one that is the most obvious one of all. You have all learned together. You have come to Lewis & Clark and have gained a first-class education from your professors but also, as we all know quite well, from each other. What you may not yet fully comprehend, though, is that the education that you have received here is, I am sad to relate, already doomed to obsolescence. The knowledge base from which you have been taught will sooner or later be transformed and perhaps superseded in every discipline by new information and new discoveries resulting from ever new research methods. That you have gone to school in this place and at this time brands you as part of a knowledge-base cohort peculiar to the first decade of the twenty-first century, just as surely as I am branded for having typed my college papers on a manual portable typewriter. What you share in common, however, and what is in the long run more valuable by far than the factual basis of your education is the thinking and reasoning tools, the communication tools that will enable to keep on learning throughout your lives. You may not fully grasp the truth of that statement now, but in the course of time, you capacity for original thought will be the most lasting legacy of your years at Lewis & Clark, I promise you.

In closing, I can not fail to mention one other element that binds you as a class, and that is the element of tragedy and loss. Shared loss is one of the most intense bonds that people have in common with each other. In this regard, the last year has been especially hard, with the death last May of a beloved Professor of Chemistry and Chair of the Environmental Studies Program Evan Williams and then in December of our incomparable Director of Ethnic Services Ray Warren. Both losses remain hard for us to bear. I speak in particular, though, of the passing of your classmate Cody Dieruf. Cody, outstanding student and beacon of optimism to everyone she encountered, would be here today to receive her degree had not the ravages of cystic fibrosis taken her from us a scant ten days ago. Her not being here today is acknowledged by many of you who wear purple ribbons in her memory, and each armband represents an enduring commitment not only to Cody herself but to each other and to the indomitable spirit that burned in her until the very moment of her death. Your shared memory of her as your classmate is one tender bond that will, I am certain, tether you together and comfort you for many a year yet to come.

So I urge you, the Class of 2005, to relish your being together in these last moments of your time at Lewis & Clark. But know that your common experiences, your shared joys and sorrows, will remain as a common thread through your lives as you move out into the world beyond Lewis & Clark. Know that there is a cadre of classmates who stand by you in spirit and in fact as you go forth, and that behind you stands your College, as full of hope for your future as you are, and brimming with confidence in your ability to succeed at whatever task you choose as your life’s work. I thank you for your attention.

Charge to the Class of 2005

Members of the Class of 2005!

My last responsibility to you as the President of Lewis & Clark during your college years is to give you a charge as you venture out into the world of business, graduate education, and public service.

The times into which you were born are probably no more perilous or more prone to extremes than other times in human history. True, rogue nations today with the annihilative power of atomic weapons threaten us with destructive force in degrees of ferocity unknown to other ages. True, the degree of environmental degradation going on in the world today exceeds in scale the worst excesses of any generation that has preceded us. And it is true that garden variety terrorists with nothing more than several bags of fertilizer or a box cutter can paralyze whole nations and divert untold resources from useful purposes to the end of providing basic security for our homeland and for the homelands of other peoples around the world. Nevertheless, I would assert that it is not the magnitude of the perils that surround us that makes our age different. What makes living in our times more difficult as people of learning is that we are ever so much more aware in our generation of the evils that surround us than were our forebears in any age before the information revolution. In that knowledge lies the challenge to act.

The task of educated people in such a world, your task in this world, is to cherish truth and to grow in wisdom. Beyond that, your task as educated people in the world is to be open to new ideas and to fresh ways of knowing. Beyond even that, however, your task in the world is to ensure that the open exchange of ideas flourishes and that opportunities multiply for differences to be aired and for truth to be harrowed and sharpened through investigation, dialog, and debate.

There are, as you well know, many wrong-headed ideas abroad in the world that try our patience if not our very souls. Those rogue nations demand our attention, as do the powers that reap gain through irreversible environmental depredation, and as do terrorists for whom the ends justify the most horrific of means. The ultimate answer to wrong-headedness, though, is reason. Speaking to us from an age only slightly less brutal than our own, Thomas Jefferson reminds us that: “Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” My charge to you is to strive in all your endeavors, and in whatever quarter of the world you find yourself to be reasonable, curious, and compassionate human beings and to work to ensure that others too might embrace reason as a basis for discourse and for living. In this angry age, you will have no greater challenge and certainly no greater challenge in your life will be more worthwhile in its fulfilling.

I bid you farewell and Godspeed!