Commencement Address - May 16, 2009
-- As Prepared for Delivery --
Fellow seniors, Drew class of 2009, this is your day. It is your day of celebration but it is also your day of departure, and so it is a moment of both joy and sadness. For me, who came in with you—and I must have done something wrong, because I don’t get to graduate--, you are a special class, all mine, and I am going to miss you. Together, we saw a boiler burst in your first year, we argued over who should provide soap in the showers, we watched Tolley get transformed from a set worthy of a horror movie to a showcase, we saw the first new residence hall rise in 35 years, we initiated a new major in Environmental Studies and a new minor in Public Health, and we participated in making Drew a truly diverse student community. I’m a parent as well as a president-- my daughter was a freshman when I was a freshman prezbob--and she is graduating next week. I know intimately that this day marks a moment for your parents as well. We feel our age, and we feel our lighter wallets, but we also feel rejuvenated by your achievements.
For you, with exciting plans ahead, the moment is happier still, but it is also more fraught. Most of you won’t be able to call yourselves students after today, and so you will need to go back to the workshop of the self to find a new name and, in a sense, a new identity. How terrifying and yet how exciting! As you are stripped of your Drew identity, on what can you rely?
You cannot count on the world to answer, for the world’s only constant is surprise. No one really predicted this economy a year ago, and no one predicted we would elect our first African American president. Bad or good, the world requires you to be ready for anything.
And you are, and that is what cheers me up about losing you today. I get my inspiration from Kindle, that new gadget that lets you carry a whole huge library in a slim handheld device. If you do three things, you can carry around your portable Drew, your Kindrew, and you won’t lose us and we won’t lose you.
First, refuse dogmatism, refuse rushing to the safety of judgements and take the risk of keeping your mind open, of looking at every issue from every possible perspective, including especially those inimical to your own first thought. Keep yourself available to the new idea, embrace difference, don’t do a talk-radio shortcut but earn your way to a conclusion by considering all sides of a question, for that is at the very heart of a Drew education. It is the hope of the world, the only hope, and you carry it with you.
But second, having thought from every angle and then reached conclusion, don’t let the crowd bully you away from it. Someone said that a superstar always does what others want, but a hero always does what is right. Drew teaches character and conviction as well as openness, and every time you maintain the right when it isn’t easy, you activate that Kindrew you carry into the world.
Third, Drew and do. Having studied the liberal arts, be the liberal arts. I take my inspiration from two public figures, one from each party just to keep everyone happy. The republican is my great predecessor Tom Kean, who is back with us today. A policy wonk who is also an opera and theater lover, he embodies the range of interests we associate with a Drew education. Learning policy, he then enacted his learning as governor. Loving the arts, he made Drew a citadel for them.
My second inspiration is our fresh new president. A Drew education breaks the barriers of the disciplines, and Barack Obama is a self-proclaimed learner of all things. Drew wants you to take your learning to the streets, and this president was a liberal arts major who became a community organizer. Drew wants to embody the new America that is multi-everything-- multi-religious, multi-ethnic, multi-racial--and of course our new president personifies that.
Drew and Do may be the most important of the three requirements if you are to take Drew with you. This institution began as a seminary, educating ministers. Today, as we bring our three schools together in this ceremony, we want all of our graduates to be ministers in a larger sense, serving others, going beyond our tiny individual selves, 60 or 70 inches in the immensity of space, 70 or 80 years in the eternity of time, to enlarge ourselves to the history and destiny of humankind. When we do that, we dwarf giants.
And that is how you not only don’t leave Drew behind but carry it with you. There’s one other thing about Barack Obama. He was born on an island and travelled to the mainland. Our campus is in some ways an island, a retreat from the noise of overbusy lives that enables the quieted mind to stretch as far as it can go. But in pastoral poetry, the poet departs to a rural retreat to repair brain and soul, but then always returns, renewed and renewing, to the city of social urgencies. Throughout your Drew education and now permanently, Drew graduates, Drew ministers, we ask you to do the same, to take from this island of learning the tools required to repair our mainland world, to travel back and forth between reflection and action. Do that, and you never really leave Drew; it and we will be with you every day of your risky, splendid lives. You have your Kindrew, you are Drew, you are equipped. On behalf of your mentors, this is my greeting and my challenge to you, to go forth and imprint Drew values upon the world just as each one of you has forever imprinted yourself upon our university, Class of 2009, oh-oh-nine that is so fine, my own, my favorite class, go forth and imprint Drew values upon the world.
