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“An Honorable Theatre of Action:” Using A Yale Education in the 21st Century
In his Baccalaureate Address, Yale’s 21st President called for “lives enriched by a commitment to service.”
Summer 1993
by Howard K. Lamar
Members of the Class of 1993, parents, relatives, distinguished guests, faculty and friends:
Giving a
baccalaureate address is perhaps the most daunting task university presidents
face in their careers, for they are supposed to tell the graduating seniors to
go out and save the world by living a life of selfless service, by running
business and industry honestly and efficiently, and by making large gifts to
alumni funds. And now, at Yale at least, we have the additional challenge of
having two Yale graduates in the White House as possible role models. Do I now
urge you to go out and be at least some kind of president? All I can say is
that if I could finally do it at 69, you all have a much better fighting chance
whether it be as presidents of political, educational, or business
institutions. But even that incentive to ambition is as old as the nation
itself. Washington did it with a cherry tree legend, Lincoln by his image as
rail-splitter, Jackson by being so tough he was called “Old Hickory.” If trees
could help elect those three think of the opportunities today! In this age of
environmental self-consciousness, you might get to the White House via
Environmental Studies or the Forestry School.
But all this
kidding aside, a baccalaureate address has to be a serious message to those who
are about to commence a life in the “real world.” And a random survey of Yale
commencement speeches and personal remarks of graduates reconfirms its serious
purpose. When Ezra Stiles, for example, graduated from Yale and was named a
tutor in the College, he drew up a moral and ethical code of conduct that he
could follow when placed in, as he put it, “an honorable theater of action.” It
read as follows:
1. In every
action and station of life, act with judgment, prudence, calmness, and good
humor of mind.
2. Endeavor to
make the business of your life your pleasure, as well as your employment. Labor
ipse voluptas.
3. Be
contented with whatever condition and circumstances Providence shall allot
you in the world; and therein endeavor, some way or other, to be usefulto your fellowmen.
4. Persuade
yourself that to live according to the dictates of Reason and Religion is the
finest, and indeed the only way, to live happily in the world, and to lay the foundation of happiness in the other.
5. Extirpate
all vicious inclinations; cultivate and improve the mind with useful
knowledge, and inure it to virtuous habits; think, live, and act rationally here,
that you may be progressively preparing for heaven. Nulla dies sine linea.
In 1921,
nearly a hundred and fifty years later, President James Rowland Angell was more
concerned with process: that is, how can universities educate men and women to
be both respectful of the past and hopeful for the future. As he observed:
“Today as
always after a period of upheaval in men’s methods of thought and conduct”—he
was referring to World War I—“the university has as it most compelling problem
the preservation of those elements in the old whose value has been proved while
seeking out and testing that which is significant in the new. Respectful of the
great traditions of the past, we must nevertheless recognize the peculiar
exigencies of the present, and the radiant promise of the future. The
university is essentially a living thing. Like other organisms, it must grow by
casting off that which is no longer of value and by taking on that which is … Somewhere
between motionless stagnation and incessant flux lies the region of healthful
development.”
In his
remarks, President Angell spoke of “a radiant future.” But as constant polls in
the past presidential election indicated, Americans do not face the future
today with a great deal of hope—indeed, foreboding is often the dominant mood
with a flat economy, unemployment, urban problems that lead to anger,
frustration, despair and violence, fear for the environment, war and conflict
all over the world, worry over health care and AIDS, and
self-doubts about ourselves and our proper role as citizens, and concern over
gridlock in government. That foreboding was reiterated in the 25th Class
Reunion Book for the graduates of 1968, the year when, as Donald Kimelman
observed: “A survey at the end of the book (found) the Class of ’68
well-satisfied with career, families and the overall quality of our lives. A
stunningly high percentage are either married or remarried. But when we look
forward, the unease comes through. We generally don’t think the next generation
will be better equipped and educated to handle the nation’s problems. And, by a
narrow margin, we disagree with the notion that ‘our world will be a better
place for our children.’”
Given these
insights, this time must the baccalaureate be a jeremiad instead of a song to
hail a bright future? Somehow we have become overwhelmed by the immediacy of
the present. And I asked myself, how can a Yale College education help overcome
the pessimism the Class of 1968 voiced and move us instead toward a better
world?
And so, as a
change in strategy in baccalaureate addresses, I decided to start with what you
yourselves felt by asking some 15 graduating seniors what they thought of their
Yale experience and how they expected to use their College education in the
real world. In a sense, I asked those students to provide answers similar to
young Ezra Stiles’s two centuries ago. I can say without blushing that the
responses I received were not only reassuring, they provided me with the
themes of this address, and they reflect, I believe, the sentiments of most of
you.
As Karen
Alexander, an English major, a Yale Daily News editor, and a
freshman counselor said: “The most important thing you can learn in college is
what you are bad at as well as what you are good at. An important thing I have
learned is that Yale, in the best sense, is a four-year intellectual shopping
period, where I have learned what I like and where I have learned how to make
choices and critical decisions. I wish it had been a longer trip.”
Peter Beinart,
a history and political science major, freshman counselor, columnist for The
Yale Herald, and Rhodes Scholar, said the following: “One thing I
have felt since I got here, being around people who have such a variety of
interests and who can articulate them so eloquently, is that the process of
self-actualization can actually be quite interesting. I have thought a great
deal about who I am, what I care about, and what I am not. There are so many
talented people here committed to so many things that you have to make
ever-finer gradations as to what you want to be committed to, as to what you
are, what you can become. The one thing I have learned here—something that
makes Yale so exciting—is taking joy in other people’s achievements. It is hard
in general for all of us to do that. Yale has helped me to recognize that you
can enjoy things others can do but you cannot, without envying them.
“Yale has also
helped me realize how parochial the environment I come from is—I come from
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Yale has introduced me to the United States. I
plan to take that awareness with me to Oxford next year, to introduce them to
this country as well.”
It is
especially nice to have Mr. Beinart reaffirm our long-standing knowledge that
Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a parochial environment.
In a similar
vein, Scott Baird, secretary of the Senior Class and a freshman counselor,
observed: “It would be enjoyable and beneficial, I think, to be in this
environment for another two years. One of the things about the future that
frightens me is that I may not be able to find this sort of open, engaging,
and supportive environment out there in the ‘real world.’ But maybe I’ve
learned to create such environments for myself as well.”
These themes
of self-discovery run throughout the fifteen statements. But there is a futures
theme as well. As Julia Gore, an ethnic freshman counselor and volunteer at
Yale–New Haven Hospital, remarked: “Seeing people here actually doing what they
had hoped to do is wonderful, and meeting alumni who have done what they have
wanted to do, with satisfaction and pleasure, reinforces my sense of
possibility for the future for all of us at Yale.”
Similarly, So
Young Park, an English major and a poet who will be studying literature at
Columbia next year, commented: “During these four years I have become the
person I will probably be for the rest of my life. I have learned, importantly,
what my potential is, and that in itself is a satisfying accomplishment. My
friends and professors have helped me to develop my passion—poetry—and to
pursue it with enthusiasm, with genuine openness about its importance in my
life, with supportive encouragement. That is something I will always treasure
about Yale: intellectual passions are supported and encouraged here without the
need to explain them. They are accepted and nurtured, as part of a resonant
community filled with intellectual and academic and personal passion. What a
remarkable gift.”
The theme of
doing something “out there” comes through even more in Milton Hubbard’s
observations. “I am sorry that it’s over,” he said, “but I take comfort in the
fact that I have learned a great deal here: about myself, about others, and
about electrical engineering. The engineering curriculum here is difficult, but
it is a quality engineering education. I am taking that education next year to
work on creating a new information network for scientists at Merck
Pharmaceuticals.”
Janie
Jaramillo, an English major active in MeCHA and in Mexican-American cultural
groups who plans to teach high school in Texas next year, affirmed the same
theme: “I came to Yale from Brownsville, a small, very conservative town
in southern Texas, and what I found at Yale was a revelation, especially for me
as a Chicana. There were so many different kinds of people here, so many
different and divergent points of views, such a range of interests and
commitments, and experiences. As a result I’ve learned to think in different
ways, broader ways, all for the better. I hope to bring at least part of my new
and exciting world to my students next year.”
Stephen
Ribisi, a biology major and freshman counselor active in Pathways Peer
Counseling and in Walden Student-to-Student Counseling, continues that theme:
“One thing which has been tremendously important is my work as a peer
counselor. It has provided a chance to call on personal reserves, particularly
Pathways, which has enabled me to give something back to the community.
“But this is
not a perfect place. Yale can be intellectually unforgiving, and socially
difficult. Each of us graduating today has felt that and has sometimes wanted
not to forgive Yale either. But like all of us here, I find comfort in knowing
that the support network here is so good. I will miss it.”
As has always
been obvious, students at Yale learn outside the classroom as well as inside.
As Valerie Williams, a psychology major and a mainstay of the Afro-American
Cultural Center during her entire undergraduate career, observed: “The
experience at the Cultural Center has been a large part of my happiness here,
and I can’t say how important I believe all the Centers are—not only for people
of color but for the strength and diversity and dynamics of the whole.”
ll these may
sound like the testimonials that our Dean of Admissions and our fund-raisers
and development officers would hope students would make. But
self-congratulation is not the point I wish to make or even the theme of
self-discovery. The crucial theme running through all the testimonies is the
opportunity for freedom of choice and of expression, a theme Carrie Boren told
me she believes is the foundation of her own Yale College experience and that
of so many of you here this morning.
In the past
four years we have had many powerful rebellions in the name of freedom
throughout the world—in Russia and Eastern Europe, in changes in South
Africa, in the tragic attempt at change in China, and elsewhere. But just as
often those democratic impulses, with their goal of freedom, have been met by
counterrevolution, by political fragmentation, by examples of ethnic cleansing
in the former Yugoslavia that have horrified the world, and by the numbing
madness of small war upon the heels of small war that fester across the planet.
These events bring home the trenchant adage of Edmund Burke that “all that is
necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to
do nothing.” It should be a given as you march onto the “honorable theater of
action” that you be active citizens in the cause of justice and freedom.
I dwell on the
topic of freedom in part because we are supposedly celebrating two major
anniversaries to honor democracy and therefore freedom this year. According to
the classicists, 2,500 years ago this year democracy was born in Athens when
the political leader Cleisthenes in 507 or 508 B.C. enacted reforms that
allowed for a first democratic government. This is also the 250th anniversary
of Thomas Jefferson’s birth, another proponent of freedom and democracy despite
the fundamental contradiction that he owned slaves. Nevertheless, Jefferson was
eloquent about democracy, writing in 1785: “The happiness of governments like
ours, wherein the people are truly the mainspring, is that they are never to be
despaired of.” We are still some distance from Jefferson’s ideal democracy,
but, like him, we should never stop trying, and never give in to despair. The
American tradition of freedom of expression, the more recent toleration of
diversity, and the right to decide who you are, which some of you say you
experienced at Yale, deserve to be carried by you into your careers and into
the whole of America.
In 1787 Thomas
Jefferson, who was good at giving good advice and knew it, advised his nephew
Peter Carr to “fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every
fact, every opinion.… you must lay aside all prejudice on both sides, and
neither believe nor reject a thing because any other persons, or description of
persons, have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given
you by heaven, and you are answerable not for the rightness but the uprightness
of the decision.” Jefferson ended his Dutch-uncle homily to his nephew by
saying that if you find yourself in a radical position, stand there and defend
it.
I also find in
your statements a concern that would please every president and faculty member
from Abraham Pierson onward—namely, that of service to society. In the
statements of your fifteen classmates I noted that four of you were freshman
counselors, others were hospital volunteers, four intend to teach or do
community work in Israel, Hungary, Korea, or Texas. (By that I do not mean to
say that Texas is a foreign country! But if you come to that radical position,
stand and defend it.) One of you also plans to work for Habitat for Humanity,
one of you plans to work for Teach for America in the urban schools of Los
Angeles, and at least five will do work in science labs or graduate schools.
Mark Kaduboski, a history major, treasurer of the Senior Class, and cox for
heavyweight crew, said: “It’s great that Yale is in New Haven. This city
provides so many opportunities to develop perspective, to become engaged in
work and aspirations beyond ourselves and our immediate academic interests and
concerns. New Haven has given me a new look on things, a new appreciation for
what we can and should do together in service to our community.” He speaks for
some 2,000 Yale College and Graduate School students who do volunteer work in
New Haven. I hope that you will take this tradition of service into your
professional and civic lives where you settle and live.
But there is
still another theme in the senior statements that I suspect the seniors
themselves did not see. It is that, conscious or not, all of you have been
engaged in some form of teaching and sharing. Whether as freshman counselors,
or teaching in Hungary or Seoul or south Texas or East L.A., or working with
infants and toddlers in the Yale–New Haven Hospital, you have been teaching.
And more of you plan to attend graduate school, leading perhaps to a teaching
career. A delightful expression of this intent was by Kate Baicker, an
economics major, former president of the Yale College Council, and intramural
athlete, who said: “While here, I have grown enchanted with the idea of a
university—not just Yale, but all universities. I plan to be in academia for
the rest of my life. That is not something I planned before coming to Yale but
something that developed here. I am going to Harvard next year, to study
economics, with an eye on an academic career. My goal is to drift back and
forth between academia and policy-making in government, to be one of those
academics who is called upon to create economic policy and then return to
teaching and research. Like Jim Tobin—though I can’t compare myself to him just
yet.”
This leads me
to the crux of my remarks here today. It is simply that you must continue to
share what you have learned, in whatever way you can, as a parallel task to
that of your professional career. The main challenge is to set your sights not
just on your career but on the future of generations younger than you. By so
doing, you will better the prospects for a future America about which we
collectively now seem so gloomy or ambivalent and concerning which my colleague
Paul Kennedy seems so pessimistic. By so doing, you may well guarantee that the
next generation indeed will have the opportunities you have had, because of
your own parents’ overwhelming concern for your future. Indeed, this hall is
filled today with parents and grandparents and devoted relatives and friends
who have tried to guarantee your futures. Emulate them in your own lives and
careers.
And finally I
ask you as a part of that teaching and learning task, to concern yourselves
with education itself, whether at the kindergarten, public school, or
post-graduate level. We are going through a bad period in the educational world
just now. As with the issue of health care, we are having a crisis of
confidence about an educational system of which we were once so proud. We
debate about public versus private schools, political correctness in teaching,
about why Johnny can’t read or add or subtract, about the decline of
traditional learning, the failure to train adequately in the sciences, and the
failure—in James Laney’s words—to educate the heart by teaching wisdom and
virtue along with skills and expertise. It will surely stand as one of the
bitter ironies of our time that we entered an age of science and technology at
a moment when our students were faltering, indeed, failing in those very fields.
I ask you to
put your considerable talents and insights to work on behalf of a new role for
colleges and universities in the 21st century, to assist us by deciding how to
respond to various pressing issues, among them the outrageous cost of modern
education, the exploration of how to help society prepare for an age of high
technology, and the development of policies that assist us in solving
environmental, urban, and health problems. I ask you ever to entertain the idea
that what you have learned you must question and even scrap tomorrow, but with
the hope that you, in Jefferson’s words, have so fixed reason on her seat that
we can adjust and survive.
Although at
the beginning of my remarks it did not sound as if I would end on an optimistic
note, I now wish to do so, partly because I see in you high promise as caring
citizens and leaders, with an aptitude for continual learning. I see in your
engagement in such a process the way through which you will avoid being
overwhelmed by the immediacy of the present I mentioned earlier, avoid the
particularity that chisels away haphazardly at the edges of lives, and
construct a more holistic view of ourselves and of ourselves in the world. It
is through such understanding that we can all more firmly and more contentedly
make our contributions as individuals, as members of families, and as citizens
committed to securing the public good.
Similarly, I
see in universities a willingness to adjust and try new things, especially with
a new generation of leaders at the Ivy schools, at Duke, Chicago, Stanford, and
at scores of outstanding public universities. I note with pleasure that my
successor, Richard Levin, is the same age as most leaders of the American
revolution. I note in passing that while universities always seem in crisis or
on the brink of dissolution, somehow they have survived as an institution for
800 years, longer than any government or any business. Let us use this curious,
ever changing, but resilient institution of which you are becoming a part as an
instrument to deal with the 21st century.
Ladies and
Gentlemen of the Class of 1993:
I wish you the
good fortune of perpetual learning, continued self-discovery, lives enriched by
a commitment to service. Use what you have learned at Yale to chart a course in
your lives, and selflessly and purposefully and enthusiastically help others to
chart their courses as well. Your Yale education will be an agent of stability
as well as of transformation, enabling you to find perspectives in the past and
to affirm the present, to free your imaginations, to transcend the immediate,
to empower your commitment to the possible. I wish you satisfaction and joy in
that noble and exhilarating endeavor.  |
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