Parting Words, Mostly Somber

At commencement, prophets of doom, profits and Toyotas

For the past several weeks, to the sound of brass choirs and symphonic processionals, commencement speakers have taken their places behind campus daises across the country to offer such parting wisdom as they possessed. For the nation's 1.3 million college graduates, the advice from their distinguished elders tended to be far more somber than lighthearted. The dominant topics were the nuclear arms race, the decline of Western values, the nation's economic troubles and the dangerous tensions abroad. Polish Solidarity Leader Lech Walesa was awarded honorary degrees in absentia at Providence College in Rhode Island, Mac Murray College in Jacksonville, Ill., and Springfield College in Massachusetts. Said Monsignor George G. Higgins at Providence College commencement ceremonies: "You [Walesa] are an electrician whose light cannot be obscured by the darkness of despotism. You are a free man whose spirit cannot be confined."

A commencement sampler: Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind.: "The U.S. has a special role to play in this dangerously disturbed and divided world, a role based on power and the responsible use of power--superpower, to be more precise, and the super responsibilities that go with it. The burden that this places upon Americans is enormous, and it is not surprising that you have known moments of self-doubt and withdrawal. The health and vitality of our system and way of life are, ultimately, in your hands."

University of Notre Dame President the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh at Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia: "The nuclear threat is indeed the greatest moral problem of all times. For Theodore Hesburgh the years of the nuclear age, we humans have been painting ourselves into a corner. As Albert Einstein said, 'The splitting of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.' Perhaps the worst attitude is to say that nothing can be done about it, that tensions between nations cannot be relieved, that the ultimate destiny of all that is good and true and beautiful in this world is to be doomed to utter extinction in our times, that we are indeed without hope. Do not believe it. Do not surrender hope. What one generation builds another can dismantle "

Political Cartoonist Garry Trudeau at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va.: "It is no wonder that you've given up on the culture. With no credible ego models, what's left but to Garry Trudeau flock to your bookstores and buy handbooks on living preppies, dead cats, inert cubes, living cats and dead preppies--the subjects of the five bestselling titles on American campuses last year? These are books for minds at rest. They are also the books favored by the rest of the nation, which suggests that the post-Viet Nam fatigue syndrome has us all in its grip. Your values and interests are no worse or better than those that are filtering down from the larger society that nurtured you. If you have not given your elders any clear sense of who you are, perhaps it is because you are just like your elders. Your priorities do not turn out to be all that different from those of your parents."

North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms at Grove City College in Grove City, Pa.: "We live in a time when the characteristic values of the West are collapsing, disintegrating, decomposing. This is hardly surprising be cause these values have fallen victims to neglect and indifference on the part of those who have most benefited from them, and of assault and battery on the part of those who should be their staunchest defenders. That is why I presume to ask you on this very special day to consider the proposition that we become part of what we condone. In this regard, much of what passes for education in our time is not education at all but indoctrination, and the aim of it is to reconcile the individual with the destruction or repudiation of the moral and ethical patrimony that has sustained the West for thousands of years."

Yale University President A. Bartlett Giamatti at Yale University in New Haven, Conn.: "In urging you beyond ideology, I offer the view of one person, one who is clearly middleaged, middleclass, middle of the road--a view of one not given to extremes but to the middle. My middle view is the view of the centrist. I do not simply urge a long night of watching against the ideologue's delusive plausibility. I urge the positive, balanced, continuous operation of the mind and spirit that surges to do the work of civilization from the center without simplistic zealotry."

Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm of New York at Spelman College in Atlanta: "I know only too well how that double burden [of being a black and a woman] can clip the wings of a soaring spirit. For far too many females, home is still--as George Bernard Shaw noted--'the girl's prison and the woman's workhouse'; and far too often, the office or factory is no better for those women who work outside the home. To your special burdens of race and gender are also added the serious problems facing our entire nation. For far too many blacks, this country is still a land of mirage where shimmering lakes of equality and opportunity turn out to be dry, bitter sands of discrimination."

George A. Keyworth II, director of the Federal Office of Science and Technology Policy, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.: "Let's not cast around for villains and come up with the Arabs for raising the price of their oil or the Japanese for stealing our technology. Our lost momentum in the world's marketplaces is largely our own fault. Back when we were basking in the dreams of an economic never-never land, Nos. 2 and 3 and on down the line were gearing up for just what we've always said American society thrived on--competition. We thought they could never catch up, but they tried harder, and here we are--to paraphrase an old American slogan, a Sony in every house and two Toyotas in every garage."

James Fallows, Washington editor of the Atlantic, at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland: "We are on the verge of embracing a second-language culture. I am referring of course to Spanish that endures beyond a first generation to a second and third. For an individual, mastery of many languages is one of the sweetest rewards of scholarship. But for a society, separate linguistics seem almost always to drive a wedge between groups of people. We can cite Switzerland, perhaps, as a nation that has managed to contain these linguistic tensions. But almost every other example, from Quebec to the Basque country, from India to the land of Flemings and Walloons, points the other way. It would be a tragedy to add our nation to that list."

Catholic Archbishop John R. Roach of Minnesota at the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul: "It is essential that we initiate an explicit, public, systematic dialogue about the relationship of religious communities and the political process in the U.S. Whether we like it or not, a whole range of public policy issues are permeated at their very heart and core by moral or religious themes. From the debate on abortion to decisions about nuclear armaments, from care of the terminally ill to the fairness of budget cuts, the direction our society takes must include an assessment of how moral and religious convictions relate to the technical dimensions of policy. And so long as we are true to our competence, so long as we are true to our responsibility, then I would submit that we as church have an important and essential role to play in that public debate."

Mexican Author and Diplomat Carlos Fuentes at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn.: "Nationalism represents a profound value for Latin Americans simply because of the fact that our nationhood is still in question. In New York, Paris or London, no one loses sleep asking themselves whether the nation exists. In Latin America you can wake up and find that the nation s no longer there, usurped by a military junta, a multinational corporation or an American ambassador surrounded by a jevy of technical advisers. That the junta in Buenos Aires, acting under the impression that it had been given the green light by the [Reagan Administration] in exchange for mercenary services in the destabilization of Nicaragua, should have so perverted the sense of nationalism in Latin America is a sorry fact."

The Rev. Jesse Jackson at Clark College in Atlanta: "Our race is threatened within the country, within the law. We have the right to vote without the right of our vote to count. Today we have equal protection under the law, but we do not have equal protection within the law. Thus we do not have our share of power and our share of decision-making authority. Today at-large elections, annexations and gerrymandering deny the impact of our vote. And thus there are 600,000 elected officials in America today and fewer than 6,000 are black--or less than 1%."

Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Catholic missionary and recipient of the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize, at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.: "You are being sent to proclaim [the] good news of love, of peace, of joy. And we have never needed this proclamation more than today--the whole world. And yet the young ones are hungry for God. I'm sure deep down in your hearts you have that hunger for God. Do not be afraid. He loves you. You are precious to him ... 'I called you by your name. You are mine. Water cannot drown you. Fire will not burn you. I will give up nations for you. You are precious to me. I love you.' This is the talk God speaks."

Author and Educator Norman Cousins at the Tulane School of Medicine in New Orleans: "Many patients have a growing sense of impersonalization and fragmentation. They go to their doctors' offices seeking refuge from their fears and loneliness and do not adjust easily to new encounters, either with those who preside over separate domains in medical science or with highly sophisticated marvels of diagnostic technology. The conclusion is clear: doctors who spend more time with their patients may have to spend less money on malpractice insurance policies."

University of Chicago President Hanna H. Gray at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.: "I think today's students are less given than were students ten or 15 years ago to believing that change can come about or freedom through singular and absolute acts of transformation. They are more inclined to see many individual and even modest acts and institutions as sources of change. They see a world of constraint rather than of growth, of trade-offs rather than of clear choices. Today's students are not, in my view, hostile to the ideals of liberal education, but they are not always given much encouragement by their circumstances or by the larger society to take liberal education and its goals as seriously as we all should."

Former U.S. Solicitor General and Watergate Prosecutor Archibald Cox at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.: "Some may think it odd to describe the immediate future as bright and exciting. Even a sanguine disposition might characterize the present in Charles Dickens' ambivalent words: 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.' Granting all this and more, granting--nay, emphasizing--that a11 times are a mixed bag, still I would emphasize the best of times. Let me put it to you directly as a colleague put it to me when I asked him what I should say in a commencement address. He replied, 'Can you think of a better time to be alive?' Can you?"

Cornell University President Frank H.T. Rhodes at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.: "Creative leadership is essential if we are to break out of the corrosive melancholy that seems to have afflicted us of late. I'm aware, of course, that leaders are out of fashion today. They are either incompetent or too smart. The few who aren't too weak are too strong. We have a national attitude of ambivalence and skepticism. We're for a sense of purpose, but against any particular direction. I like John Gardner's story of the wife who read the fortune-telling card her husband got from a penny weighing machine. 'You are a leader,' she read, 'with a magnetic personality and strong character--intelligent, witty and attractive to the opposite sex.' Then she turned the card over and added, 'It has your weight wrong too.' " qed

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