Commencement Remarks
May 28, 2006
by President Frances D. Fergusson
This is the hour when we welcome you into the special "company of educated men and women," the traditional salutation upon Commencement. It surely is a moment of beginnings. You came to us full of anticipation four years ago, some of you already set on a path that you've now realized at Vassar, others of you anticipating a quite different future from the one you've constructed here. I'm grateful that you decided in the spring of 2002 to lodge both your promise and your hopes in Vassar. I've loved knowing you and enjoying your verve, your intellects and your friendship.
What can I possibly tell you on this significant occasion, my last chance, about how to live a good and useful life in a troubled world, a world that is nevertheless also full of potential, excitement and joy? I don't think that any of us older folk have gotten it exactly right in our post-college years, although there have been times – years, even – when the whole picture seemed pretty good. Lives fully lived, however, are rarely lives that can be planned or predicted, or lives that settle into any pattern.
Too often, as you grow older, you will be tempted to define yourself as the curator of an established life, the furnishings of which are firmly settled. Fixed patterns of life are easy to assume. As the years go by, you will acquire many friends, a much loved spouse or partner, perhaps children, a job with a career track and obligations, a home with a mortgage, and things: almost everything in that list is desirable and almost everything also pins you in place. With good fortune, that is a place you want to be, with satisfactions that bring you true joy.
But, in truth, many lives fully lived are not entirely comfortable or easy ones. Instead, those lives look frequently, skeptically, radically, at the world anew. Those lives seek to address the passions and needs of our times, often at personal sacrifice, but with the immense satisfaction that comes with deep engagement in causes that matter.
In future years, remember this commencement morning's keen sense of potential and your excitement about a world that is wide open to you, with a broad range of possibilities of how you might shape your lives – or how your lives may help to shape the world. Be ready to break the bonds of predictability, to range outward, to embrace a cause, to take some chances, as you re-envision, throughout your lives, who you are.
Oftentimes, the outer world dictates such re-envisionings. The world post 9/11 is in many ways the same world we had before: terrorism and ethnic genocide were horrifyingly present in Bosnia and Kosovo immediately before our American moment and, of course, they have reappeared with depressing regularity throughout history, continuing today in the horrors of Darfur. But 9/11 made us, as Americans, notice. American life and American democracy have been substantially – and not positively – altered as a result. And many of us have seen the need to be heard and to act, to protect the values we cherish.
Abraham Lincoln understood how events move people into new ways of thought and action. He said, "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present... As our case is new, we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves." It is indeed all too easy to circumscribe our lives, to live comfortably and predictably, to be enthralled by the patterns of living we have created. But there is jeopardy to both body and soul in that course of non-action. Albert Einstein once said "The world is a dangerous place to live – not because of the people who are evil but because of the people who don't do anything about it." We have, as moral citizens, a responsibility to understand and to engage the issues of the day, to seek not just our potential in our private lives, but also to seek and nurture the larger potential of the world and of humankind. If we fail to act, then indeed the world becomes, or remains, a dangerous place – and we have failed to live in full commitment to our times.
Although we can never succeed in resolving all the hatred and evil in the world, we are able, individually, to make some headway, to know that what we do matters and helps. Our Commencement speaker today embodies the truth of that belief.
If we disenthrall ourselves from established patterns of thought and action, we may find ourselves boldly and directly confronting evil. We may commit to ameliorating social or economic inequalities. We may nurture and protect our environment. We may work to further the highest aspirations of people in the workplace, in learning, in culture or in the arts. We may, in short, improve our commonweal and, in so doing, improve our own lives.
Your education at Vassar has been a very special one that prepares you admirably for this life-long task. You have been educated in the questing and moral disciplines of the liberal arts, an education that in many totalitarian societies of the right and of the left would have been impossible. Why impossible? Because there is a fear in totalitarian societies of those who are educated in the fullness of the liberal arts and sciences. You are the people who do not accept the status quo, who are uncomfortable with received authority, who question traditional stances and approaches, who look for the deeper essence of every issue. As I said at my inauguration in 1986,
A critical element of Vassar's revolutionary character is our commitment from the start to freedom of intellectual discourse ... The search for unfettered truth has been at the core of education since Plato. But, as Plato knew, knowledge and wisdom are not always comfortably assimilated by those who have lived in worlds constructed under limiting assumptions. Today, in many quarters, truth has been narrowly conceived, rigidly tied to ideologies, and unbending in the face of competing truths ... A narrow version of truth is maintained by the exclusion of intellectual freedom and inquiry. The exorcism of alternate views of truth is the fundamental instrument of oppression ... A liberal arts education is an education in new alternatives, intelligent discourse, and tolerance. It must be, ultimately, an education towards the engagement and the commitment of the mind."
And, I would add today, of the commitment of the self. As you, the members of the Vassar Class of 2006, envision your future lives, I hope that you will want to engage with our greater society and commit your minds and actions to an interplay with our greater world. Live as fully as you can; be a part of the change that can happen when principled people live motivated lives. Understand that comfort is a false goal in a world that needs to be comforted and re-imagined. Do not make the world a more dangerous place because of your personal isolationism and failure to act in the face of distress or evil. Instead, live a life of passion: a passion for people, for the good of humanity, for all that you hold dear. Today is just the start of 610 lives fully lived, lives of consequence. The world is, indeed, full of potential for all of us on this beautiful Vassar day.
Thank you and congratulations.