Brodhead to Graduates: Embrace a Life of 'Continual Growth'

Duke President Richard H. Brodhead delivered the following “President’s Charge” at the Baccalaureate Service for degree candidates May 13 and 14 in Duke Chapel as part of the university’s 2005 commencement activities

Saturday, May 14, 2005

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Durham, N.C. -- Men and women of the class of 2005, the end is near. If this were a basketball game and you were the opposition, we would have reached the point when rude Duke fans would chant “Warm Up The Bus.” If I were not your best friend and well-wisher, I might even stretch forth my hand, waggle my fingers, and launch a cry of “See Ya!” Before we get serious, I just want to say that I take it amiss that you should be leaving so soon. That’s not very nice! I just got here, and already you are planning to take off. If, upon fuller consideration, you decide that you’d rather stick around, do let me know. It may not be too late: your diplomas are not yet signed.

Class of 2005, I have been thinking of you these last weeks as you finished your final papers, climbed the chapel tower, attended endless barbecues, and began your farewells. I have been thinking about what you are going on to, and how your time here will serve you when you get there. Since my field is American literature, this naturally led me to a classic work of American autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, published posthumously in 1917 but written one hundred years ago this year. The grandson of President John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of President John Adams, Henry Adams was marked by birth for high success. But then, as he tells it, something happened: the world changed. Born in the shadow of the Boston statehouse in 1838, Adams came to consciousness in a 19th century world still strongly linked to the 18th and 17th centuries, the world of the American Revolution and the Pilgrim fathers. But born together with him were technological developments that, though the scope of their effects was not at first apparent, would rupture the continuity of history and produce a different, modern world: the railroad lines new in his childhood; the new transatlantic steamships that would replace sailing ships and cut the length of ocean travel; and the new telecom system of the 1840s, the telegraph, the world’s first source of instant messages.

In early life, Adams received the premier schooling his world had on offer. But by his later reckoning, this education perfectly failed to grasp the new world of collapsed distances and national and global connections where his lot would be cast. In consequence, the aging Adams wearily laments, the education he received was exactly not the education he needed, leaving him “condemned to failure more or less complete in the life awaiting him.”

For all its intelligence, this book makes gloomy reading, and seeing you in its light could induce the question whether, fifty years from now, you might not have a similar tale to tell. When were you born: 1983? 1984? When did you come here: 2001? Then it would be easy to compose your biography as a story of rupturing historical transformations. Two or three weeks after you got here, an event occurred after which (we were quickly assured) nothing would ever be the same: 9/11, and our fall from innocence to experience of the fact of global insecurity. One message of Tom Friedman’s new book The World is Flat is that the post-9/11 fixation on terror and the Middle East may have obscured a far more fundamental historical change: the contemporary creation of the linked world where any point on the globe can be reached instantaneously from any other via fiber-optic cable, and where any job can be broken into component parts and distributed to any site, however remote.

Add to this the hundreds of millions in once-backward countries who will soon be joining this new global order through education and internet connection, and it would be easy to generate an almost apocalyptic case of heebie-jeebies about this weekend’s proud event. For as we acclaim your success in college, might it not be that you too have learned what worked in the recent past, not what will be needed in the quickly arriving future? In that case (I now switch on Adams’s sepulchral tones), what will become of you, poor children of the twentieth century, when you wake up to find yourselves required to play the game of the twenty-first? I pause for effect.

But though it’s not hard to conjure up a vision of your pending anachronism and future ineptitude, there’s something a little unimaginative about this gloomy account. Is the world changing more rapidly than ever? I’d be a fool to deny it; but the world has always been changing, and the notion that things were relatively stable until just now has always proved an ahistorical illusion. If we project you forward twenty, thirty, or forty years, it’s certain that you will be playing on a field that has been reconstituted not once but many times, in ways no one now is gifted to see. That’s just a given, not necessarily either a tragedy or an opportunity. As for that, time will tell.

In any case, it’s an even greater error to think that anyone’s formal education could possess lasting adequacy for the life of their times. There are childhood vaccines that give permanent immunity, and James Bond is always equipped at the start with just the set of magical tools or toys needed to face that film’s preposterous predicaments; but neither of these is a very good model for education. Your Duke days could never teach you how to cope with every challenge the future will throw at you -- if that’s what you think you got here, you are in for a big surprise. But it could give something far more valuable: could lay the foundations for deep habits of character and mind that will keep developing as you engage your world, such that when you face new circumstances, a growingly capable you will be there to meet them.

It’s my great hope that your Duke years have confirmed in you an unbreakable habit of curiosity. In your classes you’ve learned habits of high performance, of doing what is expected of you and doing it well, and these will certainly take you far. But I’m trusting that your schoolwork also occasionally triggered something deeper and finer, a sheer will to understand, that pressed you on past the point of the passing grade: kept you noticing relevant facts, drawing out their implications, testing your theories against available evidence, and revising them when they proved inadequate. If that power has been born and strengthened in you, then as you leave the artificial world of schoolwork, you’ll possess the real source of education: the linked habits of attention, mental integration, articulation, and imagination that will help you keep taking in what emerges around you, deciphering its meanings and challenges and opportunities as it evolves.

Together with curiosity, I’m betting that you are carrying forth another relevant life-skill, though you may scarcely have been conscious that you have been perfecting it. There’s an air I’ve noticed among Dukies -- not a swagger exactly, but an air of confidence, of cheerful, natural self-engagement. In its evolved form, this too can be a profoundly enabling resource. Place Henry Adams in your mind next to some of his 19th century contemporaries -- put him next to W.E.B. DuBois, who studied at the same university as Adams but became his generation’s most effective addresser of the problem of race; put him next to Jane Addams, who had the same partly disabling upper-class upbringing but found a path to constructive action by embracing the new facts of her time (Addams pioneered in bringing education to new American immigrant communities); even put Henry Adams next to a world-beating entrepreneur like James B. Duke, who exploited the global linkages and shrunken distances of his time to create a string of world markets. Pick any such pair and my point is made. Before the same historical situation, one person sits puzzled and disabled by all the impossibility that surrounds him, while another, not necessarily smarter in an intellectual sense, finds a way to engage that situation, to bring his or her distinctive powers to bear, and so to create possibilities that were not apparent til this force of character was added to the equation. As between the passive-depressive and the active-constructive, I know which kind of life I want for you, and I am not pessimistic. When I have seen you engaging yourselves in campus debates, in sports, or in any of the hundred organized activities you have created, I’ve seen this elemental courage in early but authentic forms.

Your chances in any foreseeable future would be grim indeed if you didn’t bring intelligence and personal creativity to the bargain. With those added, who can say what you can’t do? Every future looked bleak til some person found a way to make something of it. But for your maximum success, I look for you to take something more from Duke than curiosity and courage, valuable though they are. When I look at Dukies, I’m continually struck by the spirit of other-directedness in your campus friendships and involvements in the Durham community. As the college world dissolves, it matters that this has become a part of who you now are. Our world still favors the rhetoric of individual achievement, but we’ve long known that men and women can achieve results by working together that no one of them could have reached on her own. You’ll live to see forms of collaboration that can’t be imagined now. I trust that you will play a constructive part in these interactions, possibly even pioneer them as new means for human problem-solving. Further, whatever the future world holds, it’s a shrewd guess that the sum of human need will not diminish, and that the growing prosperity enjoyed by some will continue to be shadowed by the profoundly unequal opportunities available to others. In this world, it is going to matter whether you aim for a narrow personal success or one that creates a larger human benefit.

I’ll end by telling you a secret. You are very old. Compared to the you who arrived here four years ago, you have put away childish things (well, some of them) and become strikingly more mature, not an aged child but a plausible adult. But as everyone even a little older can tell you, you’re just reaching the interesting part of your life. Should you be melancholy as your college life dies around you? It’s natural -- but the day will come when you have as little thought of clinging to college days as you do now of returning to sixth grade. Why is this? Because you will have grown beyond them: because the path of personal development that brought you from there to here will carry you forward to a more realized life. Will you meet hard things in the future, things the you of today is ill equipped to handle? I’m betting you will; as they say, that’s life. But you’ll be adequate to what life brings if you pursue the career this place trained you for: the career of education, a life of continual growth.

Women and men of the Duke class of 2005, I see you moving off into the future full of shining promise, promise you will fulfill if you nurture the best things you take from here. Do that and I will speak a line from an American author of a different stripe. Emerson said to the young Walt Whitman what I say to you this day: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” Go well.