Vartan Gregorian Speaks at 168th Commencement

Lafayette awarded 579 degrees to 566 graduating seniors and honorary doctorates to four distinguished leaders, including Vartan Gregorian, president of Carnegie Corporation of New York, at the College’s 168th Commencement today.

Gregorian’s commencement address appears below. Click here to view Commencement Scrapbook.

Lafayette President Arthur J. Rothkopf ’55 awarded Gregorian the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. Rebecca S. Chopp, president of Colgate University, delivered an address at the morning’s baccalaureate service and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Divinity.

The Rev. Fred Davis Sr., pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church in Easton, received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters. Brent D. Glass ’69, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, received an honorary Doctor of Public Service.

Lauren Frese delivered farewell remarks for the class of 2003. She is the recipient of the George Wharton Pepper Prize, awarded to the senior who most closely represents the “Lafayette Ideal.” Frese, of Morris Plains, N.J., received a bachelor of arts (A.B.) degree, majoring in International Affairs.

The first student to receive his diploma was Alexandru Balan, who achieved the highest cumulative grade-point average in the Class of 2003. Balan, of Bucharest, Romania, received a bachelor of science (B.S.) degree in computer science and an A.B. in mathematics-economics.

Lauren Hubbard, chair of the Class of 2003 gift committee, presented the class gift. Hubbard, from Rochester, N.Y., received an A.B. with majors in history and art.

Rothkopf congratulated faculty recipients of annual Lafayette awards for distinguished teaching, research, and service and recognized four retiring faculty members who have been elected to emeritus status, Harold M. Hochman, William E. Simon Professor of Political Economy; Richard E. Sharpless, professor of history; Ralph L. Slaght, James Renwick Hogg Professor of Philosophy, and Barbara H. Young, instructor in the Department of Athletics and head coach of men’s and women’s varsity tennis.

Also remembered was James P. Crawford. A professor of mathematics at Lafayette since 1957, he had been the current Lafayette faculty member with the longest continuous service. Crawford died May 8. A service celebrating his life and career was held Thursday in Colton Chapel.

Two trustees elected to emeritus status, Laneta J. Dorflinger ’75 and Neil J. Gagnon, were recognized by Alan R. Griffith ’64, chair of the Board of Trustees.

Rothkopf conferred degrees upon the graduates and delivered farewell remarks. The diplomas were presented by Gladstone A. Hutchinson, dean of studies, and Slaght, acting clerk of the faculty.

B. Vincent Viscomi, Simon Cameron Long Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the senior member of the faculty, led the academic procession as Bearer of the Mace. James F. Krivoski, dean of students, marshaled the Class of 2003.

Provost June Schlueter marched at the head of the faculty. Trustee emeritus Edward A. Jesser Jr. ’39 led the trustees and the platform party.

Gary R. Miller, College chaplain, delivered the invocation, and Chopp gave the benediction. Nina Gilbert, Lafayette’s director of choral activities, led the singing of “America the Beautiful.” Members of the Lafayette Choir, led by Gilbert, led the singing of “The Alma Mater.”

168th Commencement
Address by Vartan Gregorian

President Arthur Rothkopf, Chairman Alan Griffith, Provost June Schlueter, wonderful faculty of Lafayette, soon-to-be-financially-liberated parents, wonderful families, guests, and most importantly, the great senior class of Lafayette: I would like to congratulate all of you.

I would like for one second only to be a parochial person and take a personal privilege, to especially salute Ezra Acopian, one of your seniors, whose grandfather, Mr. Sarkis Acopian, happened to come from the same city, Tabriz, Iran, where I was born. So, Ezra, congratulations!

I am deeply honored to be here today, as part of your celebration. At the same time, I have no illusion about my role. After all, hardly anyone remembers the speech at their own commencement or even who gave it, unless it was a celebrity like Jodie Foster, Bill Cosby, or Jay Leno. The reality is that young audiences are too emotional to cope with a compound sentence and too keyed-up to sleep as they probably did in the 18th century, when these orations were given in Latin and Classical Greek.

Looking back half a century, the Washington Post recently cited three unforgettable commencement speeches. One was given in 1947 by United States Secretary of State George Marshall, who announced the visionary plan to rebuild Europe – the Marshall Plan – after World War II. Another was given in 1963 by President John F. Kennedy, who announced a moratorium on nuclear weapons tests. Surprisingly, however, the third speech, in 1997, had no news value at all but featured the author Kurt Vonnegut’s byline and it satirized all commencement addresses that are encrusted with pious moral instruction.

You may even have read the Vonnegut speech, because it continues to be emailed around the world. It began with a famous line, “Ladies and gentlemen of the Class of ’97: wear sunscreen.” Other bits of advice included the injunction to floss, to sing, stretch, and don’t mess too much with your hair. My favorite line, however, was, “Remember compliments you receive, forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.”

The Vonnegut speech seemed to raise the bar on commencement addresses, but thankfully I can breathe easier today knowing well – as many of you do, I hope – that it was Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations, who actually spoke to the M.I.T. graduates in ’97. Kurt Vonnegut did not write the speech or have anything to do with it. The satire turned out to be an internet hoax perpetrated by someone who simply pasted the author’s name on top of a humor column that was actually written by Mary Schmich and published by the Chicago Tribune. In a subsequent article referring to the hoax, Schmich called cyberspace a “lawless swamp” and quoted Vonnegut as saying “it’s a spooky place.”

But here at Lafayette College, home of the liberal arts for 177 years, students know that such simple descriptions do not capture the complexities either of the internet or swamps, actual or virtual. Electronic, and organic, and even virtual swamps, after all, are highly complex systems, where everything is not always what it seems to be. The internet has the digital equivalent of alligators, carnivorous plants, and trees that are draped in moss and crawling with spiders, snakes, and lizards. Yet as visitors in this so-called electronic swamp we are continually learning about its many digital marvels, much as we are discovering that real swamps spawn medicinal plants, nurture wildlife, recharge groundwater aquifers, and clean polluted air and water.

As you have learned here at Lafayette, the entire universe somehow resembles an unruly, swampy, interconnected system of subsystems and subsubsubsubsystems. This is why I’m here today, to pay tribute first of all to your wonderful faculty, then to pay tribute to you and your growth as educated and, hopefully, also as cultured citizens. For you have spent the last four years learning how to analyze, synthesize, and systematize information and knowledge: to separate the chaff from the wheat, subjectivity from objectivity, fact from opinion, public interest from private interest, manipulation from influence, and spin from corruption in a world that grows in global complexity by the nanosecond.

In her book Cultivating Humanity, Martha Nussbaum writes that education is “liberal” in that it liberates the mind from the bondage of habit and custom, producing people who can function with sensitivity and alertness as citizens of the whole world. I also want to pay homage to your parents and families whose sacrifices have made your education possible, and especially your great professors and staff, who share today the limelight by making this day possible.

But before you categorize my assessment of your education as mere flattery and doze off, let me remind you about some of the valuable lessons you learned here at Lafayette.

As someone who strongly believes in education that prepares students for an interdependent, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, intercultural world, I was delighted to find out about some of the creative ways you and your faculty connect your studies to our interdependent world.

In a freshman seminar, for example, you may have examined the interdisciplinary links between cosmology and biology, or perhaps the multidisciplinary perspectives of social movements for peace, women’s rights, civil rights, and all sorts of national liberation movements. As a sophomore you studied linkages between science, technology, and ethical values. Going by this year’s offerings that I have read, your courses may have dealt with issues related to oil, or politics and the environment, or perhaps you examined the ethical and legal challenges associated with the discovery of the human genome. If you took Professor Laura Walls’ course on overlapping cultures of science and literature, your first assignment was writing an essay about the theoretical and practical connections between every course on your schedule that term.

Professor Dan Bauer’s year-long Technology Clinic also sounds very interesting. If you were on a multidisciplinary team of students and faculty who serve as consultants to companies, institutions, or communities, you may have helped plan the restoration of Bachmann Publick House, the 18th-century landmark in Easton that once served as a tavern, hotel, and courthouse. Or you might have worked on plans for high-tech tours that will introduce visitors to the sounds, smells, and sights of the building in Colonial days.

More than half of your class also put its education in service to the community as well as your own development. I have heard that you’ve tutored children in schools and inmates in prison as well as volunteered as emergency medical technicians. Your community service may have even focused your coursework on a community or college challenge. I know that some of you applied your study of statistics to the design of a public-opinion survey, which will be used as one way to assess annual progress in the college’s new strategic plan. (That plan, as I understand it, includes a commitment to strengthen individual disciplines while expanding interdisciplinary studies. Personally I think this is an excellent approach because an interdisciplinary program can only be as strong as its component disciplines.)

Many of you graduating today gravitated toward interdisciplinary or coordinated majors, including one that deals with psychology, biology, and epistemology and others that span economics, business, and law. You even had the opportunity to design your own interdisciplinary major or take your bachelor of arts in one of the sciences or engineering, a very strong choice in today’s world that needs generalists, but also needs specialists. Those of you who earned a bachelor of science may also have created an interdisciplinary major or minored in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. I need not remind you that liberal arts includes sciences, humanities, social sciences, and the arts.

What is the lasting value of such an education? I would like to share three quotations with you. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that the things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education. Put another way, B.F. Skinner said that education is what survives after what has been learned has been forgotten. On the same point, allow me to quote one of your own classmates, Dan Swarr. He writes, “I would say I am walking away from Lafayette with at least two major benefits that do not depend on factual information, the stuff you always forget. The first is the problem-solving ability that I gained as a math and physics major. I plan to be a physician, and the problem-solving ability is certainly an important thing for a doctor to have. The second thing,” he says, “I really think I have gained during the past four years is a general understanding of society, its problems, and the lives of underprivileged members of our community, mainly through my extracurricular experiences and community service work. In particular, I think, these experiences have sparked my interest in a number of topics ranging from sociology to criminology to international affairs, that while I have not explored them in formal coursework I am now exploring on my own.”

Generally speaking, I believe that the survivable core of a liberal arts education is the ability to give perspective on the nature and texture of your own lives. It provides you with standards with which to measure human achievement and to recognize and respect the moral courage required to endure human anxiety and human suffering. It enhances your power of rational analysis, intellectual precision, and independent judgment. In particular, liberal education encourages mental adaptability, a characteristic which is sorely needed in this era of rapid change that, unfortunately, also tends to drift toward homogeneity, mediocrity, and leveling.

For if ever the world cried for the breadth of youth and length of perspective, surely it is now, when the entire world is wrapped in confusion and turmoil. And if ever there was a danger of being misled by so-called experts whose narrow expertise often makes them insensitive to the needs of others, there is such a danger now. What I mean is that of course we need experts and specialists in all fields, but for greater understanding we also need generalists, trained in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. The challenge is to provide synthesis, systemic perspectives, and common vocabulary for communication among generalists and specialists. Otherwise we will have generalists who know what needs to be fixed but have no clue how to fix it and we’ll have specialized fixers who do not know what should be fixed or why.

We live in one world, one humanity, but have not really adjusted to what that means in terms of our moral, social, and historical obligations. I believe it is the responsibility of the people in every generation, including yours, to leave the world a better place than they found it. Alexis de Tocqueville, one of my heroes, who wrote about American democracy, alludes to America’s talent for self-renewal. He wisely observed that in America each generation is a new people, so you as new Americans are going to be new people, because you are going to be our leaders in the next generation.

I have complete confidence in you, that you are “new people” in the so-called Millennial Generation. You are on the leading edge of this giant generation which sociologists say is less narcissistic than the Baby Boomers, less jaded than Generation X, and is best compared with America’s so-called Greatest Generation, that of your grandparents. They famously worked their way out of the Depression, fought for democracy in two world wars, rebuilt Europe, pioneered the Peace Corps, and sent astronauts to the moon.

Individually and collectively you are at a unique moment in history. Your generation is considered America’s most wanted, planned for, protected, well-adjusted, and happiest generation alive today, which also explains why you are called the Sunshine Generation (whether you like it or not).

You are the most racially and ethnically diverse generation in our history. Gender issues are less fractious today. It has been said that for you, feminism is less a cause than a given. In one survey conducted when you were in high school, millennials attributed society’s major problems to selfishness, lack of respect for the law, corrupt politicians, lack of parental discipline, too much emphasis on rights rather than responsibilities, too much emphasis on money and materialism, and too little emphasis on morality.

These are very mature views, fortunately, for high school students. Interestingly, three out of four millennials share their parents values, but insist that they will be more effective in applying them. So far you have developed an enviable reputation, having outperformed all prior generations in the altruism department through your community service and public service. In a book about millennials, Neil Howe and William Strauss concluded that no other adult peer group possesses anything close to their upbeat, high-achieving, civic-minded reputation.

Lafayette graduates, you are clearly well-prepared, so it is up to you to decide whether your life will be a dot, a letter, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a page, chapter, book, or blank page. (I hope you’re not going to be a blank page.) When I was at Brown University I welcomed each new class of students by citing Richard Sheridan, whose 18th-century play The Critic has one of my favorite lines about the paucity of individual thinkers. He wrote, “The number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves is very small indeed.” I urged each class of students to undergo this necessary fatigue and to resist pressures to conform from teachers, peers, or those who with simplistic political or religious catechism promise to provide instant solutions, instant happiness, and an end to all complex problems.

I told my students that their own thoughts, convictions, beliefs, ideas, and principles – their identities and their characters – are their most precious possessions. Change them if you must, I said, but do not abdicate your intellectual prerogatives, your independent thoughts, and your free will. And please, please do not become victims of cynicism and nihilism, nor passive adherents of so-called political correctness, for it trivializes, marginalizes, and ignores our society’s real issues and challenges, such as poverty, racism, sexism, discrimination, and injustice. The use of the right lingo and jargon is not a substitute for thorough analysis, sound public policy, and passionate commitment to action and social change.

Your independent thoughts, about the liberal arts, for example, may be tested as you launch your career. As liberal artists, you have almost certainly questioned the relevance of your Lafayette education, which provides classical liberal arts graduates with no technical skills, sometimes, and no guarantee that you will get the best jobs. But the education that you have received here is not only for one job, it’s for a lifetime. Those who say that the college that devotes itself totally to liberal arts is just kidding itself, I disagree with them. The college that today provides adaptability, versatility, interconnectedness is the college that will survive.

Many of you will have five, six, seven jobs – and don’t confuse job and career. New York waiters know the difference between job and career. The job is to serve at the tables. The career is to be a dancer, actress, scientist. Most people confuse the two. A job is not a career. Sometimes, maybe, but not always. And also don’t confuse leisure and free time. The only country that says, I have some free time to kill is the United States. You don’t kill free time. Leisure is a freeing, liberating opportunity for introspection and analysis.

A last point: do not worry about your future. There’s a famous quotation that says: don’t worry about the future, it will take care of itself. Don’t worry like a professor I was interviewing in economics who was asking at age 25, What are the retirement benefits when I retire from college? I said, I can’t tell you what will happen 45 years from now, but if you want opportunity to knock, get doors. If you don’t have doors, you’ll never hear knocks. And liberal arts education has given you, all of you, many doors at which to listen.

Graduates with a liberal arts education are a higher priority for employers this year, that’s the good news, as Professor Gardner has mentioned — Phil Gardner of the Collegiate Employment Research Institute Michigan State — so don’t worry about liberal-arts educated people. Worry about those who have not received a liberal education, because technical education has to be readjusted. What does not change is your mind. Investing in the mind is the only thing that does not have a depreciation allowance. Everything else, beauty, vigor, youth, possessions, will come and go. The things that will remain with you are your mind, your ability, and especially your great versatility.

In describing the most qualified candidates, Gardner could have been thinking about Lafayette’s class of 2003. Linda Arra, your director of career services, proudly says, “Our students have a lot of opportunities to demonstrate leadership and the skills needed in the workplace, and the vast majority of them have taken advantage of these opportunities.” One of these opportunities at Lafayette is working closely with faculty on research. You have impressive descriptions of your research. Sarah Gately presented her research on volcanoes at two meetings of the Geological Society of America. Erica Neri studied the complex auditory systems of diamondback snakes. Josh Grubman used his honors thesis to develop a computer program for predicting the sales price of residential real estate. And Dan Swarr’s research into nuclear magnetic resonance may one day help when he becomes a physician.

You are all off to a great start. Don’t be too impatient with yourselves. Roald Hoffmann, the 1981 Nobel laureate in chemistry, offered this good advice to young people: “The world will wait for you to choose a profession.” Don’t let the future constrain you. Don’t allow the future to scare you. You will determine the future. And I know you will.

You’re going out as a healthy, vigorous, wonderful class to change America for the better. I’d like to salute you. I’m very proud of you as Americans, and you are going to be our future guidelines. Whether you like it or not, you are in a leadership role. Your consciences will not permit you to squander it, because your parents and your school have invested lots of love, lots of energy, lots of resources to see you succeed and prevail.

God bless you. Congratulations. You’re wonderful, Lafayette students.