But the uncanny likeness of this event to your freshman convocation reminds me that another big part of my life before you came was thinking how to make you realize the meaning of what lay ahead of you. I spent a ridiculous amount of time that summer brooding on my first address to a new Duke class. I wanted you to feel the force of two points. First, your entry into college marked one of the rare examples life would ever offer of an absolutely fresh start. “This is like the earliest days of creation,” I said. “You have not yet marred a single hour or messed up in a single way.” I also wanted to insist that Duke wasn’t some fixed or finished thing you had come to “fit into.” You would be making this place through the way you engaged it: More than you might realize, the Duke you inhabited would be a function of choices you made. So as you entered a new world, I urged you to mold it in the image of your own best hopes.

Invoking this wonderfully named concept, this alum told me that in retrospect, his most valuable education at Duke had come not (in his word) transactionally, by following fixed means toward predetermined ends, but through frolics and detours, by succumbing to fresh interests around him each day. I’m sure you know what he meant. Part of what you gained from Duke came from things we required of you, and part from goals you consciously devised. But an immense further part came through the chances that introduced you to friends you never knew the likes of, questions you had never been aware of, interests you had never felt the pull of.

At this point I could produce a litany of problems your generation is going to need to solve. Instead I will tell a little story. This February I went to Washington to speak with members of congress and cabinet secretaries about funding advanced research. Research in universities has produced almost all the discoveries that have driven new fields like information technology and biotechnology, with all they have meant for economic development and quality of life. If we expect to benefit from future cycles of discovery, then we need to make the research investment now. The president made this a high priority last year when he signed the America Competes Act, which passed both houses of Congress with wide bipartisan support. But then a problem arose. Because of budget stringencies, funds for this measure were not actually appropriated after the bill was approved.

It was interesting trooping around Capitol Hill hammering away at this inconsistency. But after lunch, I had an abrupt change of scene. I had learned that the Duke Club of Washington had completed a project in a local elementary school and I’d agreed to take part in the dedication. So off I rode far out into the District of Columbia to a big old-fashioned schoolhouse recently recreated as the Amos I campus of Community Academy, a K through 5 charter school within the public school system.   

This school had been transformed into a vibrant and bustling learning center and was crowned, to my eyes, by the new reading room Duke workers had created from an old supply closet. This place was great. What had been a dark and scary room was now bright, spacious, colorful, and inviting, stocked with books and strewn with beanbag chairs, with schoolkids sprawling in happy possession of the place. (One fifth grader informed me of his intention to come to Duke.)

When I saw this sight, I had several thoughts. First, in building the room, someone had recognized a fundamental human need. Not a single one of us would have gotten where we are had we not had access, in early life, to a space where reading and learning were warmly supported. In this room, a primal base of good beginnings had been supplied for kids not over-rich in opportunity or support.

Further, though the act was local, a larger issue was at stake. This is the 25^th anniversary of the “Nation at Risk” report, the report that gave currency to the notion that American public education has profound deficiencies and that failures in early schooling jeopardize both personal development and national competitiveness down the road. This is everyone’s problem. People with elite educations can often exempt their children from highly challenged public schools, but if large portions of the public aren’t equipped to live up to their potential, then we all will pay the price. But instead of whining that “The System is Broken” while doing nothing to fix it, here people were working to make a change.

How did they come to be doing this project? It wasn’t their job; they were not working under any obligation; they had not been specially trained in the work they were doing; they were not professional humanitarians or career school reformers. They were just some group of people who had an idea of a good thing they could do. The project involved a lawyer,  Duke’93, who had been a JAG officer in the Navy; an ’03 alum who had been Director of Community Involvement at the school (she was the point of contact); a Duke ’75 architect, parent of a graduating senior, who helped draw up the plans; a head of a construction company that specializes in monuments (he has worked on the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials), Duke ’74, who supplied the building knowhow; and others who contributed their other gifts. In short, this was a miscellaneous group doing all the different things people do in the world who came together as a self-motivated, self-mobilized team, for the good they could accomplish together.  

Is a school reading room the biggest difference you could aspire to make? We could all name Dukies who have had a broader transformative effect—I think of Paul Farmer, a world leader in addressing global health care inequalities (you read about him in your assigned freshman book), who sat where you are sitting in 1982; or Melinda Gates, co-director of the world’s largest philanthropic foundation and a major force in global health and public education reform, who attended her Duke baccalaureate in 1986. Maybe yours will be the name my successor will single out 25 years from now! Maybe you will be the one who figures out how to solve the global energy challenge, or how to assure clean water to people around the world. The fact that you don’t seem the type today proves absolutely nothing about what you might go on to do. The future is a story of mysterious unfoldings. Paul Farmer was not a celebrated doctor on the day of his baccalaureate but the former social chair of his Duke fraternity.

But on any day when you don’t see the possibility of big difference-making available to you, you might remember the Duke Club of Washington’s reading room as an image of something that is in your power. It will always be in your power to see the public good as something we’re all responsible for and can all have an effect on. (One moral of my story is that it’s not only “Washington” that can make things happen in Washington.) It will always be in your power to have an eye out for actual differences you can make in the place where you are, as Dukies spied a possible literacy center in a disused storeroom. It will always be in your power to spend some of your “dead” or “down” time in a more constructive way: our alums’ choice to give time to this project was the first condition for its eventual success. And it will always be in your power to multiply your force through collaboration: in sport and in earnest, you’ve shown amazing skill in functioning as a team. Through the years it will make a world of difference how you choose to use these powers, in terms of good things done or left undone.

Class of 2008, I have loved your company, and it grieves me to see you go. But I rejoice in what you are equipped to do thanks to your time at Duke. I once heard the founder of Engineers Without Borders, a group with a strong Duke presence and a brilliant promoter of the making of local difference, quote a line attributed to Einstein:  "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." We need you to forge the understandings that will lift your time past the world you inherit. You have the intelligence for it—if Duke students don’t, who does? So what you really need is the will, and the recognition that it is in your power. I said something to you four years ago that I’ll repeat with one variation as you go. Download these words into your iPod and let me croon them to you as you go to sleep. Men and women of the Class of 2008, you will love the world that comes after Duke—but you’ll love it more if you help make it the place you believe it should be.