Welcome, everyone, welcome to the One Hundred Thirty-First Commencement in the proud history of Carleton College. Welcome Carleton faculty, staff, students, Trustees, family members, and – this most of all – welcome to the Class of 2005.
We will pause again in the course of the hours ahead to congratulate all in the Class of 2005, a class which personifies those Carleton qualities of intellectual curiosity and an engagement with life and learning which are this College’s most distinctive and defining traits, and a class whose diversity, from this county and from across the globe, is, I am proud to say, without parallel in Carleton history. Even so, I wish still to begin with a hearty congratulation to all of you and to your families: Congratulations to all assembled here this morning.
If you, members of the Class of 2005, owe more than can readily be said to the Carleton faculty and staff, you owe as well a debt beyond repaying to your families. Hence, let me ask everyone in the Class of 2005 please to rise, face your families, and give to them the ovation they deserve.
With all of you, I dearly wish we were gathered beneath the oaks and maples on the east side of the Bald Spot, but that was not to be. Not long ago, we heard again and again that Minnesota needed rain, and needed lots of rain. That we received. For that rain, we give thanks even as we acknowledge as acknowledge we must that all that rain has moved us to the Recreation Center today. The Class of 2005 accomplished much never dared before. Among your accomplishments is that today of inaugurating the Recreation Center for one of its intended uses, the rain site for Commencement. Other graduating classes, in years ahead, will hold Commencement exercises here when it is wise; but no other class will the first so to do.
For sixteen years now, and ever since I ceased to be a full-time professor and assumed a position like that I am privileged to hold today, as I have greeted graduating Seniors in opening Commencement exercises, I have routinely asked graduates to recall their initial days at their college – at once to remind all of how impossibly swiftly four years can pass, and also to recall how much graduating seniors have changed and grown because of the faculty and staff with whom they have learned. I ask you, too, to recall your first days at Carleton for just these reasons, but today I ask you to remember those days for another reason as well.
For many of you, your first full week at Carleton was the week of Monday, September 10, 2001, and you began Carleton classes the following day. And this means that if none of us can or will forget Tuesday, September 11, 2001, your memories of that day’s tragic events are forever mingled with your initial sense of college and of Carleton. I learned first of what was that day transpiring when our son called from New York and said something like the following: “Dad, I know you don’t like television, but you’d best turn it on now.” And at the college I was then leading we gathered first around television sets around campus and then together in the chapel. We concentrated first, and for long days, on shared sadness and sympathy, and only later on attempts to understand more fully what had happened and why.
I know that you engaged in similar rituals here at Carleton. I also know that one’s initial days at college are uniquely challenging, as one embarks upon one of those rare moments of beginning anew and of defining one’s best self in a new setting. Whatever the routine challenges of beginning one’s college career, those challenges were multiplied and sharpened for you because of September 11. You met and surpassed those challenges, challenges which for none of you can have been easy, and it is right, I think, that we recognize that you, members of the Carleton Class of 2005, faced uncertainty and challenge as have few before you because of September 11.
And I want to remind you that others went through rather different dramas and challenges that same week. During this past spring break, in March of this year, I was in Cairo, exploring how we might begin to offer Arabic at Carleton, and I met in Cairo with a Carleton graduate living in Cairo. The week of September 10, 2001, she, a Muslim and an Egyptian-American, was in this country, and she had a very tough time of it. It was not she who had cost the lives of thousands in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania, but she often felt that those around her were convinced that her religion and her background were centrally responsible. They were not; this she knew and knows, and we would that all the world knew the same.
For all who suffered, directly or indirectly, for the irretrievable change that September 11 made for your Carleton careers and for lives across the globe, we know that our task is at once to remember and to move on. We know that either moving on absent memory or remembering absent moving on would be wrong.
And so, we move on, on to Commencement Exercises for the Class of 2005. When I was where you, members of the Class of 2005, have just been, when I was an undergraduate, I met once with a treasured teacher and advisor, and I met with him to complain. The complaint went something like this: I’ve been doing pretty much the same thing for a number of years now, researching and writing lots and lots of papers, and I’m wondering if I should rather be doing something different, because this stuff I’ve been working at has become something of a habit.
“Ah, Robert,” my advisor replied, “So working on all these research papers has become something of a habit. There is such a thing as a good habit.”
Well, he, my advisor, was right about this, as he was about so many other issues. There is such a thing as a good habit, and I want here to define for you another good habit, one those in Class of 2005 have mastered admirably. Let me get to this good habit via several illustrations from the academic year past.
First, the Senior Art Show, this Spring Term. Again this year, as in years past, the Senior Art Show opened to standing-room only crowds, and I thought again this year that Carleton students support the arts and support their friends through attending the Senior Art show opening in numbers which obtain at other colleges and universities across the country only when students are standing in line for tickets to attend national championship athletic events. Enthusiastic support for athletic competition I wholly endorse, but at Carleton, we demonstrate similar enthusiasm and appreciation for the life of the mind and for art. As I have viewed the art produced by Senior across campus this spring, something striking I noted again this year, and this is how much the art many of you produced owes to your off-campus experiences. Living and studying beyond the campus, living and studying in settings across the globe and outside the routine comforts of homeland, has changed how you think and what you think and the art you shape, and that art, in turn, changes all of us. Your and our intellectual development are incomparably the different because of your time across the globe.
Illustration number two, this from the Fall Term. On September 25 of last year, just a mile from where we are this morning, a mile to the East and on a small prairie hill, many of us gathered together to dedicate the first college owned utility-scale wind turbine in the country. We dedicated the wind turbine, some of you may recall, on the first, last, and only completely windless morning in recent Minnesota history. I entered the control room and read the gauge indicating wind speed, and it read “zero.” I pushed a button so that the same gauge assessed the average wind speed over the previous four hours, and it again read “zero.” But it’s been turning out there ever since, and with every revolution Carleton’s wind turbine is at once providing something like the equivalent of half our electrical needs and also offering tangible and symbolic testimony to a greater goal, that of our leading the way toward clean and sustainable energy production, that of reminding us that the earth is the only home we’ll ever have and that we’d best take good care of our home. That beautiful piece of Scandinavian Sculpture on the Plains, as I’ve come to call our wind turbine, moved from a distant dream to a waking reality because of many here at Carleton, many on the staff and faculty, and many on our Board of Trustees. But, but the dream began and the dream was sustained by you, by Carleton students.
Further illustrations of the habit I have in mind arrived every term this year. On campus and across the globe, you Seniors have engaged this year and before in academic research, you have engaged in defining and solving real problems, and with the larger aim of making our world a better place. Your research, often supported by fellowships and internships, were in the interest of increased cultural under-standing, and in the interest of public service, of applied and theoretical research in the sciences and mathematics, of international community development, of preparation for graduate work. Members of the Class of 2005 have:
- explored the meaning of “being Chinese” in mainland and overseas Chinese communities;
- collected an endangered medicinal plant in China to discover which chemicals are medicinally active and how compound concentrations vary with respect to life stage in an effort to protect the species from over-harvesting;
- explored the impact that new laws forbidding the wearing of religious symbols in public schools have had on the situation of Muslims in France and how secularism affects dynamic tensions between integration and assimilation;
- participated in a “Research Experience for Undergraduates” program in mathematics to conduct research in probability, topology, geometry, dynamical systems, and mathematical programming;
- studied geothermal swimming pools and hot springs in Iceland to gain an understanding of how hot water provides places for people to socialize, stay healthy, and get warm during the cold of winter;
- interned at a non-profit NGO in Ecuador that was founded to fight poverty by providing homeless and working children with access to education, basic health services, and vocational skills;
- studied the concept of worker’s pride during the Luddite Rebellion in the Midlands of England by visiting various museums, working mills, and the towns of longstanding fiber arts tradition; and
- studied ecotourism in Australia for the purposes of understanding and developing ecotourism in Vietnam.
And this is but a beginning.
Further examples of the good habit you have practiced I have also in mind. Our Winter Term we opened just as newspapers around the world told of the untold devastation and death from an earthquake-produced tsunami, death and devastation throughout much of Southeast Asia and far beyond. Almost immediately, people here at Carleton began to organize both information sessions and relief efforts. Given the scale of the tragedy, our efforts were perhaps small; but your efforts were at once tangible and symbolic, and the symbolism was heard from afar. This Spring, national newspapers, and especially and to its credit, the New York Times, spoke repeatedly of the unspeakable tragedy unfolding in a place whose name was unknown before to many, in Darfur in western Sudan. And the same moving tale unfolded here at Carleton: it was again you, Carleton students, who reminded us repeatedly of the unimaginable scale of forced migration and suffering and death in Darfur.
Each of these narratives – and many more there are — speaks to the good habit I have in mind, and it is this: your habit of passionate and hungry engagement, your engagement with the life of the mind and with the wider globe. Throughout your years at Carleton, members of the Class of 2005, you have been engaged: engaged with one another in learning, to be sure, but more, engaged in learning with one another on the behalf of your sisters and brothers across the globe. This Carleton habit of engagement means that you have rarely viewed yourselves as the center or the goal of your lives’ efforts. You do as you have done because of your engagement with those beyond yourselves.
This is a good habit, and my central bidding to you today is that we are all of us in this together, and that you not neglect the good habit of an active and passionately curious engagement with others. It’s what defines Carleton. It is what has defined you throughout your time at Carleton. For this past and future engagement, congratulations to the Carleton Class of 2005, and thank you.