Graduate Ceremony Remarks by Interim President Arthur Levine
Transcript
Okay, that was all right. There was nothing to write home about, but it was all right. Congratulations to the Class of 2025 master’s and doctoral students. Earning a graduate degree is generally a team activity involving an assortment of people: parents, relatives, spouses, partners, children, friends, professors, and staff. Let's give the people who made this day possible a big round of applause.
[Crowd applauds]
For some of you, the journey has been swift — a year or two. For others, it's taken more than a decade and required patience, support, and sacrifice from partners, children, or parents. I thank you.
I'm going to ask for a favor from all of you. This isn't a solemn occasion. We're really celebrating today! I'm going to sit down now and you keep yelling. What I'm going to suggest is, when your graduate comes up, scream, applaud. Show how much it matters. And for children—give your dad or mom a big hug. Okay? Let's go on.
Many of you wrote dissertations or theses. They totaled 18,658 pages — roughly the paper equivalent of 245-foot prime trees. Now, I want you to know this: I read them all, every one of them. And a little later, I'm going to recite my favorite passages from each, okay?
So look, commencements are bittersweet occasions. For graduates and their families, they're times of joy, justified pride, celebrations of joint accomplishments. They are also times of contemplation. Some hard decisions have to be made about the future. There are also times of doubt, when colleagues and friends go off in different directions.
But for presidents, commencements are usually times in which too much is said about too little for too long. So I'm going to be merciful today. Two, three hours, and I'm out of here. Hey, it takes a long time to recite these dissertation passages. I'm only going to talk for a short time, but I promise it'll seem much longer.
I want to talk to the graduates today about your hopes, your fears, your promise. I want to talk about what happens tomorrow morning. Many of our nations are being transformed from national analog industrial economies to global digital knowledge economies. We're living through a period of profound, swift, unceasing, accelerating, and unprecedented economic, demographic, technological, global, and now political change. We're all experiencing a kaleidoscopic array of changes.
Yours is a generation living simultaneously in two worlds — one that's fading away, the world in which most of your parents and professors grew up; and another that's being born, the world in which you're going to live your lives. Our hopes, our dreams are with you. We need you to repair this world. We need you to build a new world, and we need you to make it better than the world is today. That's the mission of this university.
So this afternoon, we've come together not only to applaud your achievements, but to celebrate that you now have the skills, the knowledge, and the values to achieve this. It's reassuring to know that the world is in your hands, that tomorrow is in your hands. I can't think of a better group to take on that responsibility.
So I want to wish you three blessings to enable you to accomplish this.
The first is hope. I'm not talking about Pollyannaish or rosy-eyed hope, but the hope necessary to live every day of your life and to hold tight to your dreams.
You know, I met a student a few years ago and I asked her, "What are you majoring in?" And she said, "Business." And I said, "How do you like it?" She said, "I hate it." I said, "What would you rather be majoring in?" She said, "Dance." And I said, "Why don't you major in dance? Or transfer to Brandeis so we can take 35 majors and 13 minors."
She looked at me sort of with pity in her eyes and talked to me like she talked to her young, dumb brother. And what she said to me was, "Money is nice. Poor is not nice. And I want nice." Then she walked away.
I had no answer for her that day. Later, I realized she could have done all kinds of things in dance—even if she couldn't have been a dancer. She could have managed a dance troupe, been a dance critic, sold dance equipment, and so, so much more. And when I tell you today — your dreams are too precious to give away for a bag of beans.
The second is responsibility. You are the most fortunate people in the world. With good fortune comes responsibility. You owe something to others. I was talking to this recent college graduate who was taking a year off before applying to grad school. I asked her about her plans. She said she wanted to be a U.S. senator, CEO of a Fortune 500 company, and work for nuclear arms control. I thought, that's pretty impressive.
And I said, "So what do you need from school to accomplish this?" And she said, "A killer instinct." So I did what academics do whenever we don't like the answer we got. I said, "Can you please define that?" She said, "You know, the ability to step on people, walk over them, get what I want, push them out of the way." And I said, "Oh, okay." [Nodding]
I asked her about altruism, and I again defined that for her. She said that wasn't her game plan. I said, "What about nuclear arms control?" She said, "You don't get it. If there's nuclear war, I don't get to be CEO of a multinational corporation, do I?"
She may well achieve all of her wishes, but I can't think of a student that higher education failed worse. I wish you all the ability to be able to look yourself in the mirror and be proud of what you see every day for the rest of your lives.
My third wish is a sense of efficacy — a belief that you can make a difference. I was invited to talk at a college, and they put together top students who they were grooming for the most prestigious graduate fellowships. They asked me to talk to them about leadership. Maybe there were 30 people in the room, and I'm busy talking about leadership. I noticed people are counting the light bulbs. A lot of people are on their phones. I said, "You know, I don't think this is going very well." And they agreed.
We traded hypotheses about what was wrong. One guy in the room got up and said, "Look, this leadership stuff is— " (I need to clean this up) "— bunk. We couldn't make a difference if we wanted to."
I believed this to be a teachable moment. I am an academic. So what I wanted most in the world was to humiliate that student. I asked, "How many of you believe that?" All but three hands went up.
The fact of the matter is that every one of you is going to make a difference. Everybody won't get to be president of their country. That's good for you, and that's good for us. But each of you are going to touch dozens of lives in far more fundamental ways—as colleagues, as family, friends, neighbors — and for ill or for good, you're going to make a difference in every one of those lives, whether you want to or not.
In the course of your lives, you're the top of the heap. You're going to do important work. You're going to receive rewards for your achievements. The generation that follows you will be awed by your accomplishments.
So if you've decided on a career in teaching and research, don't do it for the prestige. Don't do it for the lifestyle. Tomorrow requires scholars, educators, researchers committed to discovering truth in a time in which it's being trampled upon — and telling the world about the truths you discover, regardless of the obstacles. You can make a difference.
If you're going into the professions — business, social policy, psychology, the arts, health — don't do it for the money, particularly if you're going into the arts, okay? Tomorrow is going to require leaders and followers who care deeply about our shared agenda together.
I'm going to ask you to embrace Horace Mann's admonition: Be ashamed to die before winning a victory for humanity. You can make a difference. I don't care if you want to be the butcher, the baker, or the candlestick maker. You can make a difference. Making a difference is your birthright. No one can take that away from you. Don't give it away.
Tomorrow morning is going to require hope, responsibility, and a sense of efficacy. And I'm begging you — I beg you — please be the people who will make that commitment. Because no one else can.
Thank you all, and congratulations.