Commencement, May 8, 2005

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!