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Commencement 2004
The president of the United States dropped by (but couldn’t stay), Willie Mays tossed his mortarboard into the crowd, and a Yale veteran took his final bow.
July/August 2004
The array of talent gathered at Yale’s 303rd commencement on May 24 was a field day for people who collect autographs—not to mention those who enjoy grousing about celebrity culture taking over commencement. The big news beforehand was about who wasn’t going to be there: President George W. Bush decided not to see his daughter Barbara graduate. But celebrity watchers could still add some sightings to their life lists. First Lady Laura Bush did come—unexpectedly. Writer Tom Wolfe '57PhD turned up to receive an honorary degree. (“Perhaps the only time we’ll see you dressed in blue,” President Levin quipped about Wolfe’s academic robe.) The crowd’s favorite, though, was baseball great Willie Mays, one of the heroes of Levin’s San Francisco boyhood. When Mays’s name was called as an honorary degree recipient, the giant video screens played a clip of his famous catch in the 1954 World Series. And when Mays had been invested with his honor, he threw his cap into the crowd—just like he used to do at Giants games.
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President Bush spared attendees the security hassles of a presidential visit. |
Although Alphonse Fletcher’s name is not exactly a household word, it was on a lot of lips that weekend. Fletcher, a Wall Street money manager who earned a Master of Environmental Mangement degree from the environment school this year, announced that he would give a total of $50 million to a number of institutions—including his new alma mater—to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Fletcher was one of 3,124 people earning degrees this year, including 1,806 from Yale’s 11 graduate and professional schools.
President Bush didn’t come to the public events (reportedly to spare attendees the security hassles of a presidential visit), but he did fly in for a private dinner with Mrs. Bush, their daughter, and friends on Sunday evening at the Prospect Street house of Yale College dean Richard Brodhead. (The visit did not go unnoticed: about 75 people gathered outside the house to protest Bush’s policies.)
But regardless of all the notables, the people of Yale will most likely remember the 303rd as the farewell of the popular Dean Brodhead, who is leaving to become president of Duke University. Below is his baccalaureate address, the departing oration of one of Yale’s finest orators.
Life after Yale
The Baccalaureate Address
July/August 2004
by Richard H. Brodhead '68, '72PhD
President Levin and I entered upon our current positions on the same day eleven years ago. At our ten previous baccalaureates, I, an English professor, have read literary passages to graduates as they go forward. For those same ten years, Richard Levin, a professor of economics, has felt the gnawing pangs of passage envy, aching to escape the rigors of the dismal science for the pleasures of literature. This year, in an academic transvestitism seldom before witnessed, I have magnanimously allowed President Levin to wear the glory robes of poetry. Encourage the boy: didn’t he do well?
Actually, what I just said was false. Here is the truth. I myself will be going out with the Class of 2004. I too came to Yale College expecting to spend four years; but through a decimal point placement error only recently detected, I instead spent 40. In recognition of my belated departure, President Levin has invited me to give the speech that he usually gives at the baccalaureate. That is real magnanimity, and I thank him most sincerely. Is there life after Yale? I admit that it’s a novel concept. But as with the traces of water recently found on Mars, the signs are newly encouraging.
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I note that you are dressed in black. Why the gloom? |
Friends of '04, I note that you are dressed in black. Why the gloom? I suppose I know. You are dressed in mourning for the fact that your revels are all ended, and the life and friendships formed here about to dissolve. Four years ago, when we last gathered in this room, your college years seemed to stretch infinitely far before you. Well, infinity does not last as long as it used to, for here you are already, with only few grains remaining to pass through the hourglass before your college life is done.
Or might I guess that for some, your suits of woe bespeak a deeper gloom? At a freshman assembly some years back, I had the experience, like a bad dentist, of jabbing a nerve straight on. On that occasion I told of students who had confided that they thought they has been admitted to Yale by mistake. As I said this, at least 800 freshmen gasped as if I had divined their inmost secret. It’s thrilling for a speaker to wield such power—so with a sadism unbecoming to a dean, the dentist will venture another probe.
As for the robes of gloom: could it be that one or more of you have arrived at the end of your ride here with your future plans still a perfect blank? Might there be some who have plans but know deep down that what you’ve signed up for is a perfect figleaf, marginally covering and only temporarily postponing exposure of your scandalous nakedness of real life plans? Haunted by this uncertainty, might there be one or more of you who have had twinges of feeling that—as the Yale Precision Marching Band chants to opposing goalies in Ingalls Rink—It’s All Your Fault: all Yale’s fault for having failed to provide you with a single marketable skill? If students in the room have not yet felt this, there may be some in the upper balconies who have, or will. Some while back I met a woman in Southern California (I name no names) who revealed that she had not one but two Yalie sons who had come back home after graduation to a new life, not quite what she expected, of getting up late, eating bizarre amounts of cereal, and watching reruns on TV; and who, when pressed about what they might want to go out and do, glared the unspoken words: Don’t Go There.
If anyone in this room resonates to this description, I have a message for you: it’s going to be all right. Is it any wonder if the end of college should produce a pause before you find the onward way? For the great majority of you, the end of college marks the end of a far longer stretch (for some it began in the days after birth) in which your life has been defined by the fact that you were in school. Since kindergarten or preschool, school was where you spent the day. School was the answer to the question what you were doing with your life. (Remember the convenience of this? Question: what are you doing with your life? Answer: I’m still in school.) A succession of schools set you your annual tasks and challenges. And school said what came next—more school, of course: after fifth grade, sixth; after high school, college.
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Another name for life unstructured in advance is freedom. |
Now, for the first time, you are about to step out of that structured life into the abyss of the undetermined. No wonder if it’s disorienting—what else would it be? But another name for life unstructured in advance is freedom, and other words for the life lived in that territory are independence, maturity, and adulthood. Welcome to them. Will it be beyond your power to orient yourself in that world, find your way in it and make something good of it? In bad moments it may seem so; but think back to your arrival here. When you came ashore at your last terra incognita, you may have felt at a loss, but then something kicked in—some mix of courage, spirit, curiosity, and desire—that helped you go forward to meet this unknown place, engage its challenges, and make it your own.
Do I doubt that the same thing will happen again when you leave here? I do not; you’ve done little these last four years to make me think of you as helpless or resourceless. I saw the mother from California recently, and when I asked about her sons, I learned not only that they had gone on to absorbing and fulfilling things but that she had no recollection of their homebound or deadbeat stage. The early modern philosopher Bacon wrote: “they are ill discoverers who think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.” So with you: the solid land of a good life is out there for you, however little you can discern its shape or shores. Courage: the strengths that brought you this far will bring you to it yet. And when you find it, you’ll learn that you’ve carried all kinds of valuable things forward from this place, however little they may be visible as assets now.
In recent years there has been much discussion in this country about the need to identify goals and measure outcomes in education. I do not wholly disagree with this mode of thinking as it applies to elementary education. In our world, the cost of allowing young kids to move forward without having mastered fundamental skills is simply too high. But I am much more skeptical about outcomes-based theories as they apply to the kind of education you have received. What we have put you through here has involved some element of marking things to be learned, making you learn them, then measuring to see if you did in fact learn them. But that did not yield what was most worth getting here.
One limit of the outcomes concept of education is that it treats acquisitions as fixed t hat can prove in fact quite transient. Every one of you has mastered complex subject fields sufficiently to display that knowledge on cue on a final exam only to have it begin seeping from your brain soon thereafter. By a conservative estimate, the things members of the Class of 2004 collectively learned in Yale courses that you have already forgotten is probably equal to the sum of human knowledge gained since the early Renaissance. Parents shocked at this statement are welcome to come onstage, where I will subject you to a public quiz on Ohm’s law, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, the workings of the passive subjunctive future tense, or other outcomes you once reached to great applause before relapsing into the contented ignorance of today.
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Yale requires that you use its challenges and resources to build the more capable you. |
Such inevitable forgetting is not a scandal in education because the original act of learning taught something more deeply valuable and left a deeper trace: trained deep habits of mind that survive the specific content that was originally attached to them and can then be put to a different use. When the Duke of Wellington said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, he did not mean, I think, that organized sport consciously or purposely taught the arts of war. He meant that deep skills learned at hazard in one world, that of play—skills like physical courage, working together in teams, coordinating strategies over space and time in a way that requires continual improvisation and revision in face of changing circumstances—these skills turned out, in ways wholly unforeseeable at the time of their acquisition, to serve a second function, equipping a later self to act in a context radically different from the one where the skills were learned.
In an office I was given the use of at Duke a few weeks ago someone had posted this saying from Ruskin: “The highest reward of a person’s toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes through it.” That comes closer to my own philosophy of education, since to my mind, the real outcome to aspire to is the building of the self—a process that does not lend itself to authoritative measure because it is never over and because its ways are oblique. Whatever we pretended course by course and week by week, what Yale really required was that you use its challenges and resources to develop your latent powers and build the more capable you. If you can’t yet say what you learned here is good for, that’s because you are not yet in the place where it will show its value and help. The fruits of the deeper education only reveal themselves in time, as a life’s and history’s emerging challenges—like the Napoleonic Wars unforeseen in the youth of Wellington—call forth their stores of strength.
Could I be more specific about the equipment I see you carrying forward, possibly unbeknownst to yourselves? Men and women of the Class of 2004, you have done a lot of homework. There are 1300 of you and you each took 36 courses running for 12 and one half weeks. Equipped with these facts, I tried to estimate how many books you have collectively read, papers and lab reports you have written, and problem sets you have worked, but my brain got tired before I got the answer. I congratulate you on your colossal diligence, but now that it’s behind you, it might be safe to reveal a secret. The point of all that homework was not for you to complete it, but rather, through this exercise, to develop powers that can only show their value when the days of assigned work are past.
In my life I’ve met people who seemed absolutely to have stopped thinking at a certain poin t, and to be living on a stock of frozen opinions as limited and antiquated as their aging wardrobes. I cannot promise that this will not happen to you, but I pray that it won’t, and if you escape this fate, the work you did here will have helped protect you against it. With luck, years of artificial school exercises will have developed an instinctive drive to keep identifying and assimilating new sources of information and subjecting them to analysis and synthesis—dispositions now sufficiently rooted in your nature that they can carry on without external or institutional support. So internalized, the habits that made you a good student in early life can begin to make you something more interesting and more important: an ongoing student of your world and a constructive contributor to its needs.
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At Yale, academic education never takes place by itself. |
At Yale academic education never takes place by itself, however, but in energizing interaction with a certain social environment. We’ve provided you with a thousand classmates, like you in skill and thoughtfulness but bizarrely various in their origins, outlooks, commitments, and beliefs, to live with in intimate community and daily exchange. It’s my profound hope that the form of sociability you have become accustomed to these last four years will prove habit-forming as well, and that you will seek and recreate this sociability on your own when an institution ceases to provide it for you.
As you know, the Brown v. Board of Education decision ending court-legitimated school segregation was handed down 50 years ago this week. But for all the changes it has made, this country is far from having solved the problems of social separation and inequality. It will be for your generation to make progress on these fronts, unless, which God forbid, you fail to make that progress. The role of the well educated here is not altogether reassuring, since as much as any group, the well educated have tended to live and work in enclaves with those who are comparably privileged. Hard to see how that isolation will be of much help with problems of which, nevertheless, all will suffer the consequences. But perhaps the battle for an inclusive society of equal rights and mutual respect will turn out to have been won—or if not won, in some measure advanced—on the intramural playing fields of Yale or in the rooms of Vanderbilt or Bingham or the dining halls of Silliman or TD, scenes of interactions and understandings won across social divides. I have always regarded the intellectual cost of separationism to be as great in its way as its social cost. In this country, those who have stopped thinking are typically those who have stopped interacting with people who might make them think—people, namely, who do not already think more or less the same as they do. With luck you will seek the educating differences others shun, without necessarily remembering where you formed that taste.
Last let me say a word about the idea of service. A lovable feature of this school is its culture of other-directedness, the generosity with which you regard your gifts as existing not for yourself alone, but also for the good of others. I’ve seen you, unknown to your teachers and for no conceivable credit, working with neighborhood kids in sports camps, or giving music or health lessons or making science cool in local schools; I know of your efforts in this and other countries on behalf of the sick, the poor, the uneducated, and the displaced; I know what you have done within these walls to make this community’s life more interesting and more rewarding. When college’s somewhat artificial world of organized activity dissolves behind you, as it will, I trust it will leave a seed in place for future growth, the habit of using your intelligence to enrich the lives of others. Numbers of you will go to work in teaching, in community health, in environmental causes, and in government service, and I praise you, but those are not the only ways this start could be extended. The world needs every known profession (well, almost every); and in every profession there is a way of practicing that is small-minded and self-serving and another that serves the larger good. Whatever you do, I look to you to make that difference: the best legacy you could take from Yale.
Men and women of the Class of 2004, you leave here for the valley of uncertainty also known as life. If that brings anxiety, it also brings opportunity, the chance to make a life—and you will. A poet in your class whose words I prophesy you will soon be hearing—David Gorin, Trumbull '04—has written these lines, spoken as to a graduating senior by a soon-to-be-former beloved named Ivy:
I confess, I’ve grown attached to you—
But now we both have other walls to climb.
Growing is something you’ll be doing
As long as you live, and you should learn
to do it elsewhere than the paradise
I made for you, imperfect as it was.
He’s right. You came here, you saw, and you overcame. You grew into this place, you grew up here, and you grew strong here. Now it’s time to break its bounds to win room to grow some more. If Yale wanted anything for you, it was to nourish and confirm your will to grow, growth that will continue though we must leave, now, to allow it to continue.
Do you understand me? I think you do. All right then: let’s get out of here.  |
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