With these words I inaugurate the Class of 2012. But the truth is, we don’t think of you as a class but as 400 unique individuals.
Our job is to help you to locate what is most remarkable in yourself, to take your thought further than you ever thought it could go, and to apply it to improve the human condition. This place is gonna knock your socks off if you let it. To make that happen, I want to ask you to perform just three feats: flying, stretching, and shrinking.
First, about flying. Convocation and this entire day constitute a generational moment, where parents launch their children into a world of independent being. It’s a little bit wrenching for us oldsters—if you are the last of the kids to leave the nest, we tend to purchase a new puppy or kitty—or in the absurd case of one pair of parents I know, a pet turtle. But we were once you, were once being launched ourselves. And so as I was greeting students and parents this morning, I thought of my own father.
Specifically, I recalled a summer evening between my sophomore and junior years. I had been reading a novel by Henry James in my bedroom and came downstairs to announce to my father and mother that I had just decided to become a literature professor rather than a lawyer. “I have a vision,” Dad said, “a very literary vision. It is a vision of dollar bills flying away from you like birds.”
Now my daughter is a college senior and last year she told me she would major in American Studies. “Sarah,” I said, “I have a vision.”
But she said to me what I said to my father and what I would say to you. She said, this is what I love. And the truth is that no one I’ve ever known has gone wrong following what thrills them. The people who go wrong, at high and low incomes alike, are those who don’t follow a dream. The dollar bills may not fly from them, but they themselves never fly either. They trudge.
Drew is a flight school. Liberal education does not mean the opposite of “conservative.” The term “Artes Liberales” in Cicero means literally an education befitting a free person—free to fly. To put it less grandly, a friend told me his five year-old son said to him this summer, “Dad, is life about finding things out?” It is and we do that at Drew.
I challenge you, then, not only to fly but also to stretch. Stretch beyond the academic interests you bring with you and take a course in something that’s always seemed interesting but scary. A liberal arts education shows you that there are whole worlds of wonder—a world of lyric poetry and of astrophysics, a world of baseball statistics and piano tuning, and public policy and art history and on and on. You can’t get to each of these wonderworlds, but exploring some now will make you ready to explore others later. But that’s only one kind of stretching.
Stretch beyond the social interests you have had and join one of our nearly 100 clubs or go to an event or do something that doesn’t come naturally but that might give you a new interest.
Stretch beyond the opinions you bring with you. Perhaps the most profound demand of a liberal arts education is to see things from a perspective different from, even opposed to, your own—to look from all vantage points not to rest in ambiguity but to come to a conclusion through the fullness of thought rather than the shortcuts of talk radio.
Stretch beyond making discoveries, thrilling as that is, and apply your learning to urgent social challenges. That’s Drew’s calling card. We want you to take your classroom learning to the streets and to bring back what you learn by life experiences into the classroom.
Most of all, stretch beyond the kind of people you already know to make friends very different from yourselves. The best thing about college is the friends you make, and many will last a lifetime. This is one of the most diverse college campuses in America, and we are proud of that, but it won’t matter much if you don’t take advantage of it and embrace difference. My best friend for forty years and I came from totally different backgrounds and agree about absolutely nothing, and we are friends not in spite of but because of those differences.
So that’s flying and stretching. Now, about shrinking, this one is for the parents. Rather than stretching, your job is the opposite, a la that character in the Austin Powers movies, Mini-Me. You need to get small. Getting smaller in our kids’ lives is a real challenge, and a profound form of love.
In 90 minutes your vehicle grows smaller and smaller as you drive off. You have brought your children this far and now you must let go. But take comfort, for you will not be gone at all. Your spirit will be informing your child’s achievements at every turn. You have been their most important educators, we college mentors just take it further. Even so, come six tonight, and with all my gratitude, go away. Give these great young people the room they need to stretch and the space they require to fly.
And then students, you will be mine, all mine—except not really. You each belong most to yourself; and in fact it is not as if Drew is a hardened, fully formed place that merely enfolds you. Drew already changed 400 times today when each of you arrived. As a student-centered university, Drew takes its shape and character most from the character of each and all of you.
We looked closely and hard at each of you before issuing you an invitation to join this amazing community. If I may paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr on the 45th anniversary of his most famous speech, we were taken by the content of your character and the reach of your potential. We believe in you. Now it is up to you to believe in yourself. Welcome to your full humanity. Welcome to Drew.
