What the New Grads Are Hearing

At college commencements, babies, trumpets, politics as usual

This spring, as usual, assorted elders have been capped, gowned and summoned to daises across the U.S. to try to say something wise, important or at least heartfelt to the year's 1.3 million new college graduates. Their collective mood was somber, reflecting anxiety over the arms race, education and the Government's new budget. Some speakers used the campus rostrum for political oratory. One university, Fairleigh Dickinson in Rutherford, N.J., chose not to have a speaker. Instead the students called in Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, creator of bebop, and let him play his songs Ow and Groovin' High. The campus visit briefly unsettled Gillespie. Afterward the jazzman recalled with a chuckle: "I looked at my program and read, 'Commencement address: Dizzy Gillespie.' I was terrified. Everybody knows a jazz trumpeter's instrument doesn 't wake up until 10 at night." In short, as usual, through the gloom there came notes of hope, idealism and humor as well. A commencement sampler:

Former Vice President Walter F. Mondale at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass.: "At the United Nations, we have often stood alone--when the issue was too important morally for us to join the rest. Yet in May the United States again stood alone. We voted to oppose restraints on efforts to lead women in developing countries away from healthy breast-feeding to dependence on milk substitutes that, improperly used, risk infection and stunted growth... Some Administration spokesmen now say that there is a difference between right-wing authoritarianism and left-wing totalitarianism, and that we must tolerate the terror of the one, but must condemn that of the other.

[But] torture is torture, and terror is terror.

And whether it occurs in Cuba, Russia, Viet Nam, Argentina, Chile or El Salvador, we in America should oppose it, condemn it, and do our best to stop it."

Vice President George Bush at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville: "Few American foreign policy issues have been treated to as much rhetorical heat as human rights. Our Administration is pledged to human rights. Some feel we must shout from the rooftops and humiliate countries in order to effect change. We don't agree. But the debate is not enhanced by name-calling or moralizing or questioning our motives. Results are what count, not rhetorical confrontation."

Cartoonist Garry Trudeau at Colby College in Waterville, Me.: "You live in a deeply cynical world where generosity is in short supply, a world where taking a stand has come to mean finding the nearest trap door for escape.

There is something disturbing in our society when men wish not to be esteemed, but to be envied."

Thomas J. Watson, longtime chairman of IBM and ex-U.S. Ambassador to the U.S.S.R., at Harvard University: "By overwhelming odds, the result of any use of nuclear weapons would not be victory.

It would be all-out war and total destruction. We confront the illusion of softheadedness: that anyone who favors an end to the arms race must be soft on U.S. defense or even soft on Communism. The illusion of softheadedness is thermonuclear McCarthyism because the search for a way out of this morass -- the search for an avenue of negotiation and survival instead of confrontation and weaponry -- has a long and honorable heritage. The reality is that thermonuclear war in any form is suicide. Our imperative is to change our course -- to take the only road which offers a viable hope for the future:

not a road to unilateral action of any kind, but a road toward the joint continuation of the SALT process, a road to a series of mutually verifiable treaties."

Financier Felix G. Rohatyn at the Hofstra University School of Business in Hempstead, N.Y.: "A conservative laissez-faire philosophy is the normal reaction to the failed performance of liberalism at home and the eroding power and prestige of the United States abroad. The discrediting of liberalism, at least partly deserved, is a danger to our society. Yet liberalism will not become a needed counterweight to current trends until it comes back to the real world, the world of jobs and growth, of urban blight and energy independence, of the realistic need for American power; until it returns to the notion that democracy requires equality of opportunity, but not an egalitarianism resolutely blind to the question of merit. Gay rights and national health insurance may be important to some. But they are not the country's first priority. It is liberalism's fascination with secondary issues that has created the reaction which now sees the Moral Majority intimidating politicians and advertisers, and the Congress trying to determine the beginning of life."

Opera Star and Impresario Beverly Sills at Barnard College in New York City: "Women are told today they can have it all--career, marriage, children.

You need a total commitment to make it work. Take a close look at your child. He doesn't want you to be bright, talented, chic or smart--any of those things. He just wants you to love him. He will be the one who pays the price for your wanting to have it all. Think carefully about having that baby. Not to have it would be a great loss. To have it too late greatly increases the health hazards for you and the child. To have it without a commitment to it would be a great tragedy. There are two keys: one, believe in yourself; two, love. You must ooze it from every pore.

Love your work, your husband and your child, not just to hear his needs but to feel his needs. For your husband you must reserve that 30th hour of the day when he has you all alone to himself. If you wonder when you'll get time to rest, well, you can sleep in your old age if you live that long. You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try."

Former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman at Simmons College in Boston: "Women with a college degree are expected on the whole to earn no more than a man with only a high school diploma.

To the graduates here I ask: Are the four years you've spent here to count for nothing just because you're a woman? Of course it is unjust."

John B. Slaughter, director of the National Science Foundation, at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles: "A recent survey by the National Science Foundation found that 86% of adults believe scientific discoveries are largely responsible for our standard of living in the U.S., and 81% believe new discoveries will make our lives healthier and more comfortable. However, 86% feel that most citizens are not sufficiently informed to help set goals for scientific research, and 85% believe that most citizens are not sufficiently informed to choose which technologies to develop. I am troubled by this public reluctance to participate in scientific debate. The most precious resource of a free society is the full participation of citizens. Yet here we have a major area of our national life that is regarded as off limits to most of the public."

Critic Alfred Kazin at the Graduate School of the City University of New York: "What has happened to the American mind these days? You have only to look at the marquees featuring one horror film after another, one more domestic drama, to wonder why a European film like The Last Metro, an Australian film like Breaker Morant, is so rare among us. There is not a single stage production on Broadway just now that bears in the slightest on our public condition. The favorite subjects on the book market are terrorism, how to slim down, and how to make a fortune in real estate."

Sci-Fi Author Ray Bradbury at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont. Calif.:

"The American people are a remarkable people. I think we're far more remarkable than we give ourselves credit for.

We've been so busy damning ourselves for years. We've done it all, and yet we don't take credit for it. Everyone in the world is dressed like us. We're the center of the universe. If we opened the floodgates tomorrow, the whole world would pour in here. I'm always talking about the invisible revolutions--the things we've done that we don't take credit for.

Last year we took in about a million people from other nations. Now if we're as bad as we say we are, why are they coming here? To be corrupted, to be dumb, to be horrible, to be brutes--the way we describe ourselves to ourselves? No, they're coming here because we're excellent, because we offer freedom, because we offer opportunities."

Senator Edward M. Kennedy at the Boston campus of the University of Massachusetts:

"Your generation is a different one, but I do not believe that you are indifferent.

You may not make your contribution by marching, but there is so much that you can do in so many ways.

Most of you have had your struggle too.

Over 80% of you had jobs of 20 hours a week or more while you were attending the university. Some of you worked full time and studied part time for six or seven years to achieve this undergraduate degree. The average age of students here is 26. There are some who suggest that anyone who loses a student loan can make up the difference by taking a job.

Let me say to those who offer that suggestion that virtually all the students with a federal loan at this school are already working--and working hard--to pay for their education."

Donald F. McHenry, former U.S.

Ambassador to the United Nations, at the University of Missouri at Columbia: "A recent study reveals that your knowledge is significantly short when it comes to the world in which you live. A part of the responsibility for this is the responsibility of our educational institutions. But the responsibility is also yours--yours for ignoring the inadequate diet of information served by the media, yours for pursuing narrow career goals, and yours for your failure to see, or be interested in, how your career goals relate to the world around you. You live in a time when knowledge of world affairs is no longer simply nice to have or a luxury. It is essential to our wellbeing. Long-term strategy requires a political consensus. Without consensus we are vulnerable to uninformed simplistic appeals, heavy on jingoism and misguided patriotism."

Charles Malik, former Lebanese Ambassador to the U.S., at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Ill.: "They tell you there is steady progress in history; they tell you modern man is better and happier than any man in the past; they tell you we are more advanced, spiritually, morally, intellectually than all the ages of the past. This is all false. In the more important things in life, history does not disclose steady progress. There are a few shining peaks of the spirit with many intervening sloughs and valleys.

Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Chrysostom, Aquinas, Shakespeare, Goethe, Dostoyevsky--we have nobody comparable to these men in our age. You can live ten lives on them, and the remarkable thing is that they are more relevant to the present than any man in the present. Progress! Fiddlesticks! Who has progressed from the Psalms, or from Isaiah or Jeremiah, or from the New Testament? ...

Ages are to be compared not by numbers but by the best in them. And the best souls in our age pale before the best souls in the past. The decay of respect for the past, the decay of respect for authority, the decay of the notion of the classics --these are the banes of the age."

A. Bartlett Giamatti, president of Yale, at Atlanta University in Atlanta, Ga.: "America cannot allow itself to transform the public schools into warehouses for the angry.

Let us remember that the partnership of parents and neighbors, civic leaders and politicians must agree that the schools are the most important single asset the community holds in common. Let us assert that the duty of that partnership is to decide that the first priority for public money is the school system. And let us insist that schools have a role and obligation in the treasured common life beyond just schooling. When we have reassembled a vision of the purpose of school and of the means of education, then we can pass to the rebuilding of what is both a system and a process of civility.

To paper over the cracks in schools with scarce dollars with no idea of the point to it all would be stupendous folly. That would be to accept the lie that we are a people without purpose and that excellence and equality cannot still be the unlimited aspiration of all our people."

Cornell University President Frank H.T. Rhodes at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.: "The chief function of the commencement speaker is to be brief.

Lord Canning was once asked by a preacher how he enjoyed his sermon.

Canning replied, 'You were brief.' 'Ah,' said the preacher, 'I always like to avoid being tedious.' Canning replied, 'You were also tedious.' So there is no absolute guarantee of success."

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