2008 Honors Convocation Address
- April 24, 2008
- Eric R. Gilbertson, President
- Saginaw Valley State University
Very soon, and after what doubtless has seemed a very long time coming, many of you will graduate from this University, your University.
Institutions like your University owe many of their traditions to the Middle Ages but much of their intellectual heritage to the so-called "Enlightenment." To over-simplify, this Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century movement concluded that the human condition could be perfected - or at least improved - through the power of reason. And if you've passed through our General Education Program successfully, we hope that you're at least somewhat acquainted with names like Locke and Hume and others.
What you have been taught in the University - your "enlightenment" - is the art and the habit of healthy skepticism. Your thesis and your answers on examinations have forced you to question, to search and to research, and to challenge - even to challenge the wisdom of your esteemed professors and occasionally even the authority of your University's high offices. Good for you.
And so we try to think, in places like these universities - really hard, sometimes - and try our best to understand things. People didn't always try to think their way through the baffling mysteries of life; for most of human history they relied on myths or the propagators of superstition for answers or comfort. But now, we believe that we should try - at a minimum, try - to seek and to search and to understand.
Most of human progress has come through such seeking and searching and trying. That's primarily why our fragile species has come down from the trees and gone up to the Moon.
But with these understandings - and these vanities - have come "responsibilities." And so, at graduations across the land, various ceremonial voices like mine solemnly intone these or similar words: you're granted this or that degree "with all the rights and responsibilities pertaining thereto." The academic degrees we confer do carry with them certain rights - credentials that can lead to professional licenses or advanced study or even a decent shot at a lucrative job. But what, exactly, are all of the "responsibilities" that somehow attach to these honorifics?
At one especially pretentious university at each graduation the new graduates are welcomed to "the company of educated people." That's a little much; but the larger point is that we who have been privileged with educational opportunities are then obligated to act and behave with intellectual responsibility.
These are not responsibilities to take lightly - especially not in a democracy, and especially not in an election year.
* * *
Every four years we come upon a "leap year." This peculiarity is a consequence of the Universe's intractable unwillingness to conform to our 24- hour, 365-day calendar. Our planet's trip around the Sun just doesn't match up precisely with a neat and tidy number of 24-hour days, and so every four years we just have to add a day - call it February 29th - to fix this problem.
And in that same year we decide to elect a president of the United States - someone we are sometimes pleased to call "the leader of the Free World." That is a little much too, but it is certainly a serious office and our choice for it has serious implications.
We've already been at this process for some time now. And one pundit said that this may be the earliest time in history that we, as a Nation, have lost interest in an election. That's too bad - tragic, really.
We have a responsibility - there's that word again - to pay attention and, even more, to think clearly and help others to do so as well.
There is so much that is facile, disingenuous, even mendacious or nonsensical being said and sold and, tragically, even being bought and believed in this political season. Candidates for offices great and small promise to allay all of our problems and ameliorate our anxieties, strike down villains - real and imagined - and remove every annoyance from our lives. Never mind that the offices they seek may be powerless to do any of these things - note, even a president cannot unilaterally impose his or her notions of a health care system on the nation . . . or personally abrogate negotiated treaties . . . or peremptorily set favorable tax rates for each and every one of his or her supporters. But even though we know this, we pretend to believe this pandering and swoon over the candidates who seem most agreeable to our personal prejudices.
It has been said that Americans, in particular, are not stern lovers of truth, that we prefer simplistic and comforting fictions to hard but honest explanations of complex issues. It simply takes too long to explain, clearly and realistically, what a candidate for public office really can do, or might try to do, or possibly persuade others to do in this complicated democratic system of ours. And candidates who do try to give us serious and realistic answers are judged too boring or insufficiently inspiring to capture our imaginations - or our votes.
Sadly, the process has become almost infantilized. Yet perhaps at no time in human history has there been a greater need for educated people - grown up people - to ask tough questions, to demand intelligent answers, and to make good and informed and honest choices.
There are also reasons to worry that we are all, you and I, victims, and creators, of what a good friend of mine once called a "culture of pessimism." We watch late night cable shows that, however amusing, subtly teach that political leadership is only fodder for ridicule. And the corollary lesson from this is that nothing can be done, and therefore nothing matters. But such thinking is contagious, and eventually debilitating.
* * *
A skeptic is "one having a critical or doubting attitude." That's a good thing, to borrow a phrase from that deeply flawed cultural icon, Martha Stewart. T.H. Huxley once said that "skepticism is the highest of duties, blind faith the one unpardonable sin."
Skepticism is in the best intellectual traditions of our culture and our cultural institutions, including, we hope, this University. Accepted facts and ideas should be scrutinized and challenged. We should seek out bias, or self interest, or intellectual laxity. We should never merely accept status - and especially the status quo.
The world in general, and our State and Nation in particular, certainly need more skeptical thinkers and skeptical thinking - especially as the problems and possibilities before us become ever more complex; and ever more critical. And no one . . . no one . . . is saying that what we need are fewer well-educated people and less education today - and tomorrow.
But it may be, too, that sometimes we have taught you all too well, that skepticism taught too enthusiastically - and unquestioningly - can lapse into cynicism, which is really a perversion of skepticism, not its rational end.
A cynic is one who is "contemptuously distrustful of human nature and motives." That's not a good thing, really. It's too easy, too glib, too . . . well . . . cynical. And as George Meredith once wrote, cynicism is really only "intellectual dandyism" - attitude posing for thought.
Skepticism urges questioning- rational, even irreverent questioning. Cynicism smugly concludes answers without examination - and even worse, without hope.
Robert Frost also once wrote of a hopeless man, a cynic, and described him as having "nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope." When we are tempted with the seductively easy retreat to cynicism, remember all that has been accomplished by cynics. Nothing, really.
* * *
Then, there is idealism; its dictionary definition is "the ability or tendency to see things as they should be rather than as they are."
In 1919, Woodrow Wilson, waging a futile campaign for the League of Nations - an idea before its time - exclaimed that "[S]ometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is how I know I am an American."
There is so much wrong with our Nation and our culture today. There always has been. We are tragically violent and vulgar, we are frequently seen by others as brash and arrogant, we are too often unthinking and unforgiving. But we are also peculiarly idealistic. We always have been.
Consider the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address, King's dream and Langston Hughes' declaration, from the depths of despair in a segregated America, that "I, too, am America."
Consider Horace Mann's movement for the creation of public schools and Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" (which, by the way, created the very financial aid programs that have allowed many of us to be here today). Consider the Women's Suffrage movement and the Civil Rights movement and the Labor Movements of the last century.
Consider the sacrifices of troops on the Normandy beaches, and the resolve and the ideas and ideals that brought down the Berlin Wall, the passion of the environmental and anti-war movements throughout our history and the sacred freedoms that fostered and protected them.
Look around you, even here. Can you see or even think of anything good that was not first the product of someone's imagination and idealism - no school and no hospital, no food shelter and no church and no nature preserve, no work of art and no political or social cause, great or small.
And what you do next - with your talents and the gifts from your flawed but still quite wonderful University and Nation - will define your times as other idealists did theirs. Idealists aren't perfect, of course, and frail humans will always fall short of their ideals. But idealists have always seen hope where there was little cause, always cared when there was little hope. Idealism is an act of faith, and faith is a very fragile but a very powerful force.
* * *
A few weeks ago, one of the giants in our University's history passed from the scene. Leslie Whittaker came here more than 40 years ago with a small band of like-minded idealists who had the preposterous idea that they could create a university in this flat Valley. It was the Sixties, after all, and there were a lot of idealists running around then with a lot of preposterous ideas.
He came in April, 1966, and never looked back. He described himself and his colleagues in those early days as the "ultimate idealists" trying to build "the impossible dream." Not surprisingly, he said that he even assigned Don Quixote as required reading in his first humanities class here.
And he once wrote me that "I honestly think that even if I'd been offered a job at Harvard or Yale I would still come to Saginaw."
Leslie was an amiably quarrelsome fellow - you know, a quintessential professor. He kept expecting things, asking for things. But he never expected more from others than he did from himself; and he never requested things for himself, always for others, always to make things better for his students and his University.
He taught literature and drama - and he dramatized his teaching of literature . . . and whatever else he did too. Leslie was a character - in the best sense of that word - and he lived to see his work flourish into the University we enjoy today and to live on in the lives of students and colleagues who remember him fondly and gratefully.
Robert Frost also once wrote these lines: "I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world." Leslie, ever the skeptic and ever the idealist, quarreled with the world . . . but always so lovingly.
Not a bad way to live. . . or to be remembered.
* * *
Skepticism is most decidedly not the parent of cynicism, and certainly not the enemy of wonder . . . or of hope . . . or of faith.
Above all, we want you to become skeptical idealists - or maybe idealistic skeptics, you take your pick.
But while we hope that you have acquired the art and habit of skepticism, we hope too that you have come to understand the wonderful capacity for good that is also part of the human condition.
You have studied human achievement in the sciences and in the arts. You have read about and borne witness to historic examples of great integrity in perilous times and to acts of great and selfless courage. You have seen how time and again the power of compassion - call it "love" - has caused humans to rise above selfishness and hatred to altruism and kindness.
And so we should be skeptical and ask tough questions - of our political leaders and our teachers and especially of ourselves - about the great issues of war and peace, about justice and injustice, about wealth and poverty, about scientific understanding and wishful thinking, about beauty and about vulgarity, about what is profound and what is merely tripe.
We cannot be afraid of the answers. But at the same time we cannot lose our capacity to care . . . and to believe.
You will some day - some of you very soon - hear those customary words about all the rights and the responsibilities pertaining to the degrees you have earned. The rights are to declare yourself an educated person; the responsibilities are to behave as educated persons - to be skeptical idealists: questioning, thinking, demanding, and . . . yes . . . hoping and believing.
As you search out your place for inclusion in the human comedy, have your own lover's quarrel with the World. We can't wait to see how it goes . . . .
Thank you.